Teaching Grammar: There Has to Be a Better Way (And There Is!

)
MAY 23, 2011
Editor's Note: Steve Peha is the President of Teaching That Makes Sense, an
education consultancy based in Carrboro, NC. He writes regularly on education
policy on The National Journal Education Experts Blog. His work has also been
featured in The Washington Post, DropoutNation, EdNews, and The Carborro Citizen.
He is the author of three books on teaching: Be a Writer, Be a Better Writer, and
Reading Allowed.

Grammar instruction is making a comeback but in all the wrong ways. The purpose of
learning grammar is to produce well-formed sentences. But mastering the Latinate
content of traditional grammar instruction has little to do with achieving this
goal.

To help kids master sentence structure, I describe sentences with simple English
words, not unfamiliar Latin words. I won't claim to have invented this approach; it
just made sense to me when I began dealing with grammar problems in the classroom
early in my career.

In my experience, this approach helps kids learn almost instantly how to write
well-formed sentences. And because it's so simple, I can start it with primary kids
and ELL students with limited English proficiency.

Every Writer Serves a Sentence

Take a look at this sentence:

On a bitter-cold winter morning, Malcolm Maxwell, a young man of simple means but
good intentions, left the quiet country town in which he'd been raised and set off
on the bold errand he'd been preparing for all his life.

Like all sentences, this one is made up of parts. In this system, there are four
kinds of sentence parts:

1. Main Parts These parts contain the main action of the sentence: "Malcolm
Maxwell,...left the quiet country town in which he'd been raised,...." (Notice that
I don't have to call this a "main clause" or refer to a "main verb".)

2. Lead-In Parts These parts lead into other parts, especially main parts: "On a
bitter-cold winter morning,...." (Notice that I don't have to worry about what
Latin grammatical function this "phrase" performs. Is it "adverbial", "adjectival",
"prepositional"? Who cares? Certainly not the kids!)

3. In-Between Parts These parts fall in between other parts. They feel like a
slight interruption: "...a young man of simple means but good intentions,...."
(Notice that I don't have to call this a "non-restrictive phrase or clause" or
worry about things like "direct or indirect objects"; I can also avoid
"subordination" here and when working with Lead-In Part as well.)

4. Add-On Parts These extra parts convey additional information about other
parts: "...and set off on the bold errand he'd been preparing for all his life."
(Notice that I don't have to worry about "compound, complex, and compound/complex
sentences", nor do I have to explain "appositive constructions.")

Using this system, I can describe our model sentence like this: Lead-In + Main +
In-Between + Main (continued) + Add-On.

New sentences can be created by combining different parts in different ways. To

make longer sentences, more parts can be added. But it's surprising how effective
we can be with just a few.
Six Simple Patterns
Here are six of the simpler patterns typical of those I use as models to help kids
construct their own:

1. Intro + Main As class began, Mr. Funston dreamed of a winter vacation.

2. Main + Add-On He stared blankly at the blank faces of his students, convinced
that he had nothing whatsoever to teach them.

3. Main + In-Between + Main The Lesser Antilles, he realized, would be the

perfect place for a warm winter hiatus.

4. Main + Add-On + Add-On He saw himself on the beach, baking in the midday sun,
enjoying tasty snacks and refreshing beverages.

5. Intro + In-Between + Main Ten minutes later, having dismissed his students
early to lunch, he surfed the Net for a cheap trip to the West Indies.

6. Main + In-Between + Add-On Mr. Funston leaned back in his big teacher chair,
forgetting about the twelve pounds he'd put on at Thanksgiving, and immediately
tumbled backward into the October bulletin board he'd neglected to take down.

It Works in Reading, Too

By analyzing and describing sentences kids read, and using those patterns as
additional models, students develop a robust repertoire of well-formed structures.
I also use the system to teach combining and inversions.

I'm amazed at how well kids communicate by mastering six simple two- and three-part
patterns like these. There are, of course, many more complicated structures I will
teach them. But if they can learn these six, they'll be on their way.

This simplified sentence structure system is the spoonful of sugar that makes the
medicine of traditional grammar go down. When students create and analyze well-
formed sentences, they have a meaningful context for the mastery of concepts that
might otherwise seem arcane.

This is only part of the sentence skills curriculum I teach. For a more complete
view, see some word choice lessons, here for sentence structure lessons, and
punctuation lessons. Since grammar is the study of sentence construction, focusing
on the sentence, in a way that doesn't depend on explicit grammatical knowledge, is
the key to teaching an otherwise difficult set of concepts successfully to groups
of diverse learners.

For a quick overview of major research studies going back to the 1930s on the
inefficacy of traditional decontextualized grammar instruction, consult Chapter Two
of Constance Weaver's "Teaching Grammar in Context".

� 1995-2011 by Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc. Used by permission. For more free
teaching materials, visit Teaching That Makes Sense.

STEVE PEHA'S PROFILE

Was this useful? SIGN IN TO VOTE! (1)
LEARN MORE ABOUT
Teacher Leadership
A teen boy in a graduation cap and gown sits on the front porch with his mom�both
are smiling.
What Do Parents Want From Schools?
Illustration of a hand holding up a sign with a red X in the middle
The �No� in �Innovate�
A group of teachers sit in a discussion circle while one stands pointing at a white
board.
Giving Your Teacher Team a Boost
Photo of a teacher�s hands as she works at a computer
Sharing Your Best Work With Other Teachers

Steve Peha

President of Teaching That Makes Sense, an education consultancy based in

RELATED TAGS:
Teacher Leadership
6-8 Middle School
9-12 High School
English Language Arts
Comments (14) SIGN IN OR REGISTER TO COMMENTFOLLOWSubscribe to comments via RSS
Show 10 More Comments
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET's picture
Posted 5/24/2011 11:52am
Bonnie Terry, M. Ed., BCET
Learning disabilities Specialist, Board Certified Educational Therapist
Have you tried The Sentence Zone game for teaching grammar? It teaches the 6 basic
sentences through game playing. All words are color-coded which makes it really
easy to play and retain the sentence types. e.g., You need a blue (noun - subject),
a red (verb - predicate), capital letter (begin sentences with capital letters),
and punctuation (end sentences with punctuation)and you have a sentence. Check out
the video here.http://bit.ly/7BRCee You can also play it for SAT prep.

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

Lynn Tarvin's picture
Posted 5/24/2011 4:11pm
Lynn Tarvin
High School Newcomer ESL from Independence, MO
My professor at MU, Dr. Rachel Pinnow, is having me study about Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL). SFL has been used successfully in GB and Australia to help
students learn sentence structure. Instead of the traditional structural
linguistics categories, functional linguistics looks at participants (what we would
subjects and objects), processes (what we would call verbs/verb phrases), and
circumstances (such as prepositional phrases, adverbs, etc.). I'm sure there may be
more specific details, but I know that these three categories have helped my
Newcomer ESL students to understand English sentence structure.

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

Steve Peha's picture
Posted 5/25/2011 7:04am
Steve Peha
President of Teaching That Makes Sense, an education consultancy based in
BLOGGER
Thanks for all the wonderful feedback.I really appreciate it.

Where I start with the teaching of grammar is the same place I start with the
teaching of anything. I always ask, What's the opportunity here?

Specifically, I'm looking for the learning opportunity in school that will lead to
the life opportunity for kids down the road.\

In this case, the learning opportunity is to help kids learn to write great
sentences, and the life opportunity is to be a good writer. Traditional Latin
grammar does not apply in either of these cases as it affects neither of these
opportunities.

Secondary learning opportunities in this context--ones that may or may not lead to
life opportunities--have to do with giving kids access to academic vocabulary for
tests and to culturally relevant vocabulary for "cocktail party" conversation.

Both of these things are important: one helps you in school, the other helps you
feel like you are part of the "club of traditionally educated people". Both of
these things matter, but they do not matter nearly as much as learning to write
well, and are therefore lesser opportunities than the ability write great
sentences.

As such, I teach to the primary opportunity first, giving it more instruction time,
and to the secondary opportunities second, only as time allows.

I can and do teach traditional grammar terms through this method BUT ONLY AFTER
kids have mastered the true purpose of grammar.

The highly simplified and readily accessible approach here gets kids actually
mastering grammar right off the bat -- because the purpose of learning grammar is
to be able to create well-formed sentences, not to learn Latin vocabulary and
"rules" that aren't even rules at all but merely context-dependent guidelines.

I still teach the Latin vocabulary--after kids can write sentences--because it is

culturally relevant and because it is relevant to testing.

The simplified system just makes teaching the traditional system much easier
because once kids know that sentences are made up of parts, and how those parts can
be combined, all I need to teach them are some slightly different names for parts
they have a handy context to help them organize their new knowledge.

Out of the thousands of teachers I have worked with, I have found that most don't
know their grammar any better than most college-educated adults to, which is to say
that they have no functional understanding of it--they can't use it to improve
their writing.

I've been a professional writer for over 25 years. I've published literally
millions of words and grammar never enters into my work--except when I have to
publish on grammar for an academic context.

I've interviewed many professional writers and they admit the same thing. Even E.
B. White admitted to not knowing most of "the rules" when he had to edit the last
version of "The Elements of Style" after Will Strunk passed away.

With time so short in the traditional school day, and so much pressure on us to get
good results, we get better results when we think about what and how to teach
things.

When something like traditional grammar comes up as a requirement, we have to ask

ourselves two questions: What is the real purpose for acquiring this knowledge
beyond the limited academic context in which we work?

And, if the real-world value is very low, as it is in the case, we have to ask, How
can I teach this in a highly optimized way that minimizes the time it takes for
kids to achieve mastery--and to retain this knowledge beyond the limited scope of
my own instruction?

The problem with the "traditional grammar language first" approach is that kids
have no idea why they need it and no useful context in which to apply it. Many,
like me, just learn it and re-learn it year after year, right up to the end of high
school, and then, of course, they forget it.

Survey a few college-educated adults and you'll probably find as I have that most
don't actually know grammar very well, at least not well enough to use it to
improve their writing. They may remember simple things, live what a predicate or a
prepositional phrase is, but nothing useful beyond what we might call "game show"
or "cocktail party" knowledge. And now that William Safire has passed away, arm
chair grammarians don't even have a hero to help them sneer at the rest of us.

Teaching traditional grammar in the context of an easier, more accessible, and

actually useful approach means that kids learn traditional grammar faster and have
a better understanding of the reasons why knowing the vocabulary of grammar might
be important to them (for a test, for cultural literacy, for a deeper understanding
of language than a simple system can provide, to create more variations on basic
sentence patterns, etc.)

All things being equal, things that make sense are easier to learn than things that
don't. And my experience is that once grammar makes sense, it's a lot easier to
learn. Using a simplified, non-Latin approach integrated with kids' writing makes
sense--both to teachers and to kids.

But traditional study doesn't decontextualized grammar study doesn't make any sense
inherently because it is based on a foreign language (Latin) and because even if
one masters all the vocabulary, one may still not be able to write. There is
literally no way for me to apply the language and concepts of traditional grammar
in my daily life outside of formal grammar study. As such, the concepts aren't
reinforced in the real world.

Just look at how much DOL is taught in the US--millions of hours a year--and how
poorly our kids understand grammar.

If I can't write, what's my incentive to learn terms that aren't going to help me
learn to write any better? And if I have no real-life application for the terms,
the only way I can learn them is via rote memorization. This may get me by on a
class quiz or a state test, but it's not likely to stick with me beyond these
limited, and again useless, contexts. As such, the learning opportunity in school
is of limited value as a life opportunity beyond school.

We want children to learn language so they can use it well. Learning traditional
grammar does not affect the quality of language use. It just gives kids another
knowledge base to understand another historical tradition. In this sense, it may
have the same function as learning Western Civ. Still valuable, of course, but not
as valuable as something like learning to write.

However, if we have to teach it, and if we want kids to actually learn it, then we
need to think about the most efficient and effective ways to accomplish this. Since
the traditional language of grammar comes up only in contrived academic contexts,
(and game shows, cocktail parties, and William Saffire columns), having a real-life
application through which to teach it is the key to helping kids see the relevance
of learning it.

Understanding things that exist only in academic contexts is valuable--because so

much of our lives are spent in formal schooling. So we want kids to know this
stuff. The question is, do you they come to know it better by studying it in the
abstract, or do you they come to know it better by studying it in concert with
something useful they apply every day?
SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!
Todd Finley's picture
Posted 6/1/2011 1:43pm
Todd Finley
Blogger and Assistant Editor (Contractor)
BLOGGER
Steve,

Most literature on teaching grammar is ridiculously complex or reductive. Your

approach "makes sense" and is immediately applicable. Thank you also for the
treasury of resources that you make available (for free!) at www.ttms.org.

SIGN IN TO VOTE!
KC's picture
Posted 6/7/2011 8:30pm
KC
Teacher from Jersey
Thank you Steve! It is ironic how grammar instruction is making a comeback. My
school currently has grammar workbooks, but they are so dry. I do use the
SmartBoard to add a little spunk, but your suggestion seems so much more realistic.
You are right, we want them to understand sentence structure, and be able to write
a proper sentence. Great idea on teaching them using language they can relate to.

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

Amelia Kronser-Cole's picture
Posted 6/8/2011 11:04am
Amelia Kronser-Cole
This is such a wonderful and insightful article. I currently teach middle school
language arts and have always struggled in teaching grammar to my students (as
grammar is not my strong point and still causes me anxiety). Our department is
extremely divided when it comes to the issue of teaching grammar. Some educators
teach it daily using only the Latin names, some pepper it in during the year, and
others in our school refuse to teach it out of context. Needless to say, we have
yet to come up with a unified solution to this problem.

From experience, I can honestly say that when I was a student, words like "clause"
and "predicate" often brought up feelings of uncertainty. They were unfamiliar
words to me that I never used out of the classroom and were vague and confusing.
The grammar lessons did not even seem relevant to me until high school (more
specifically when I started learning French) and college when I started taking
grammar courses.

I believe that your method of teaching grammar will help students appreciate the
concept or idea of what I am trying to teach without adding the anxiety of the more
technical terms. We as educators sometimes need to see the bigger picture of what
we want our students to learn. Is it better to memorize a term and try to apply it
in writing, or to have the student draw on his own understanding and apply it more
meaningfully in his writing?

Thank you so much for your practical idea. Maybe this will give me more confidence
when I have to teach grammar lessons!

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

Leslie Braun's picture
Posted 6/8/2011 5:19pm
Leslie Braun
This post is so relative to me, today in particular! I just got back from a reading
and writing conference where I attended a session by Jeff Anderson that took a
unique spin on teaching grammar in the same way you described. I am an elementary
teacher so it was a little more simplistic, but the same basic model was there.
The school that I teach at has been using Daily Oral Language, for longer than most
can remember, as the primary source for grammar instruction. I have never felt that
it was a very effective way of teaching my students grammar, but it was something
that was expected. What good is teaching students correct sentence formation when
all the sentences they are encountering during instruction are grossly inaccurate?
The approach that Anderson uses is to expose the students to grammatically sound,
well-written sentences or passages form mentor texts. The students are allowed time
to explore the sentences and discuss everything they notice about its composition.
Daily Oral Language is taught in isolation, and the students don't understand how
to bring those skills into their writing. However, the approach described above
could be used as a writer's workshop lesson to develop a writer's craft through
imitation of good literature.
I can't wait to try this strategy with my students! Thanks for a great article to
reinforce what I just learned!

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

Steve Peha's picture
Posted 6/8/2011 7:04pm
Steve Peha
President of Teaching That Makes Sense, an education consultancy based in
BLOGGER
Thanks to all of you (and anyone I've forgotten) for your encouraging comments.
While I have been excited about this approach to teaching grammar for a long time,
I have rarely found so many compatriots.

Like some of you mentioned, our world is inundated with Daily Oral Language. To
date, I have never found a teacher who has told me that it worked. Yet it is the
most widely used approach in the country.

Once, at an IRA convention back in the 1990s, I asked a DOL publisher why he
thought his product was good for kids.

I asked him, "Why do they call it "oral" language when it's done on the board or on
an overhead?" He shrugged.

I asked him, "Why are the patterns of errors random and not the same as the
patterns of errors in real language created by real kids?" Again, he shrugged.

Finally, I asked him, "Do you really recommend that teachers do this every day?"

To which he replied, "Oh, absolutely not. It's really only useful for prepping kids
for those bubble tests where they have to correct mistakes in incorrect sentences.
Two-to-four weeks is plenty."

So I pressed my luck, "So if it's not real language, and it's not done orally, and
you don't recommend it for daily use, why do you call it Daily Oral Language?"

"Because," he said, with no self-consciousness at all, "If we call it DOL, people

will buy it because they think they should use it every day. It makes people feel
good to be teaching grammar every day. And the more lessons they teach, the more
materials we can sell them."

I had just gotten out of the software business and gone into education because I
had grown uncomfortable with the lack of ethics in software publishing. But I
discovered that ethical considerations were just as compromised in educational
publishing.

A couple years later, I got a small group of elementary teachers to conduct an

experiment on DOL. For the first semester, they used it everyday as directed. For
the second semester, they didn't use it at all. But we gave kids the semester post-
tests in both cases.

In five of six classes, kids did better on the DOL post-tests after not having DOL
for five months than they did after having it every day for five months.

Several people in this comment stream have recommended some wonderful ways of
teaching kids the conventions of writing. I'm so glad to discover that there are so
many promising alternatives. The challenge, then, I think has more to do with
getting rid of DOL than with promoting any one other approach. Until DOL is gone,
most teachers simply won't have the time in their schedules to teach grammar any
other way.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

Wendy's picture
Posted 7/9/2011 1:05pm
Wendy
10th Grade English Teacher
"I currently teach middle school language arts and have always struggled in
teaching grammar to my students (as grammar is not my strong point and still causes
me anxiety). Our department is extremely divided when it comes to the issue of
teaching grammar. Some educators teach it daily using only the Latin names, some
pepper it in during the year, and others in our school refuse to teach it out of
context. Needless to say, we have yet to come up with a unified solution to this
problem." - Amelia.

I like what Amelia said here in regards to teaching grammar because this is the
exact same position I was in and I am sure that many other Language Arts teachers
are facing this very same problem. There is still no answer to the grammar problem,
and our schools need one.

One concern I would have if this approach was used for younger students is what
would happen when they reach middle school or high school and the teacher expects
them to know some grammar jargon and they have never been exposed to it before. Do
you need whole school buy in for this approach to work?

I would like to know if this approach is appropriate for students of all ages or is
it better to younger students who are just getting into grammar? I teach 10th grade
and many of them still have trouble forming varying sentence structures and are not
doing it correctly. Will this approach work at the high school level?

Thanks for the info!

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

mithun tanvir's picture
Posted 6/4/2013 5:17am
mithun tanvir
Motijheel Model High School
English is an International Language. We must have a good command over English.
Because English helps us to communicate all over the world. We can know more about
"English Language and Literature Resources" from http://englishtuto.com
Just visit and enrich your knowledge about latest English. Experience something new
& build a bright future. Learning is important for all. We should think that
Animals cannot acquire human language because of its complex structure and their
physical inadequacies. Human language is open-ended , extendable and modifiable
whereas the animal language is not. It should also be remembered that language is
meaningful. We easily can depend on http://englishtuto.com for developing our basic
about language.

SHOW MORESIGN IN TO VOTE!

Sign in to comment. Not a member? Register.
Sign in using social networks
Social by Gigya
Or sign in here:
Email address *