Blog 22: To grammar, or not to grammar

by: Kristyn Looper

The responses are due on Monday, Nov. 15th, 2010, at class time.
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Should we teach grammar, or shouldn’t we?”

Often presented with this apparent all-or- nothing choice, even the teachers
asking the question may not have clear
instructional goals for teaching grammar;
they may simply think they should teach it.
Sometimes they have other reasons,
though, for thinking they ought to teach
grammar: they find parents, the public,
and even the politicians clamoring for
grammar instruction in the hope that
teaching traditional grammar from handbooks
or CDs will somehow improve
students writing, or at least their ability to
avoid “errors.”
Most often it doesn’t.
Yes, some students learn the conventions of grammar,
usage, and punctuation from a handbook. Or
at least they appear to have learned these conventions
when doing and drill exercises on one concept
at a time, followed by related tests. But do
students remember and apply these conventions
in their own writing? Here, the payoff severely
declines.
The problems with this common view of “why
teach grammar” lie deeper than most people realize.
First, we must contend with an underlying,
implicit, and largely erroneous learning theory: if
teachers teach something well, students will learn
it and, what’s more, will apply it well. What we
now know from cognitive psychology is that students
need guidance in developing concepts, such
as the concepts of “sentence” and “not sentence.”
In addition, no matter how motivated the students
may be to apply such concepts—for example, to
avoid or eliminate run-ons and fragments in their
writing—they still often need help applying these
concepts in practical situations. Such help may be
needed even by the students who enjoy and take
pride in their schoolwork and who love analyzing
data.
Much of what we teach in the name of grammar
amounts to labeling parts of speech and their
functions or identifying kinds of sentences, yet students
need very little of this to learn the conventions
of written edited English. For most students,
teaching grammar as sentence analysis is another
reason why the grammar doesn’t transfer to student
writing.
It is convenient for us to be able to refer to
“nouns,” “verbs,” “subjects,” and “predicates”
when talking about things like subject-verb agreement.
However, a little grammar goes a long way
when it comes to helping students edit for the use
of standard conventions in their writing, and the
concepts can be taught as we discuss literature and
the students’ own writing.