The teaching of grammar

 

In class we were assigned two reading assignments on was a blog post called “Does Bad ‘Grammar’ Instruction Make Writing Worse?” by Patricia Dunn and then the article “Teaching Grammar in the Context of Writing” written by Constance Weaver. In both thee blog post and the article the authors talk about what they feel about teaching grammar, and the do’s and don’ts of teaching grammar.

In Patricia Dunn’s post she focuses on how we should encourage students to be engaged and willing to write. To her grammar worksheets and drills that most teacher do now interfere with the willingness of students to write and care about their writing. Her blog was basically saying that grammar drills is a big not to do because it is doing the opposite of what teachers want and it’s causing students to hate writing and grammar.

I thought all the research that has been done relating to this topic is very interesting and educational. Constance Weaver gave so many helpful examples of what not to do in his article. It made me realize what ideas help the students and which ones do not help them. One of them that he said was to let students make mistakes. If we as teachers let students make mistakes but then help them to see the mistake it will make the students less nervous to branch out and try new writing techniques that they might not have thought about trying before. I agree with him when he starts talking about how worksheets that students have to do every day do not work. I remember doing them in High School and I still make some mistakes that the sheets were trying to fix. It just never clicked from a worksheet. But then making the mistake in my own writing and finding a way to fix it myself worked so much more.

I really liked reading things from other teachers who have seen it first-hand about what does and what doesn’t work. I also think that peer review is a good idea. Having another student show them something that doesn’t look write or a mistake that they made might be better than the teacher herself.