Amy Benjamin - Teaching Grammar: What Really Works

First published 2010 by Eye On Education

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benjamin, Amy

Teaching grammar : what really works / Amy Benjamin, Joan Berger.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59667-138-6

1. English languageGrammarStudy and teaching (Elementary)

I. Berger, Joan. II. Title.

LB1576.B438 2009

372.61dc22

2009043778

ISBN: 978-1-596-67138-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-317-92680-1 (ePub)

Vocabulary at the Center

Amy Benjamin and John T. Crow

Formative Assessment for English Language Arts:

A Guide for Middle and High School Teachers

Amy Benjamin

But Im Not A Reading Teacher:

Strategies for Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas

Amy Benjamin

Empowering Students to Write and Re-Write

Warren E. Combs

Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment

Harry Grover Tuttle

Motivating Every Student in Literacy
(Including the Highly Unmotivated!) Grades 3-6

Sandra K. Athans and Denise Ashe Devine

Literacy from A to Z:

Engaging Students in Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening

Barbara R. Blackburn

Writing put to the Test: Teaching for the High Stakes Essay

Amy Benjamin

Writing in the Content Areas, 2nd Edition

Amy Benjamin

English Teachers Guide to Performance Tasks and Rubrics: Middle School

Amy Benjamin

English Teachers Guide to Performance Tasks and Rubrics: High School

Amy Benjamin

Active Literacy Across the Curriculum

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

50 Ways to Improve Student Behavior:

Simple Solutions to Complex Challenges

Annette Breaux and Todd Whitaker

To Mitchell, my favorite student
(even if Im not his favorite teacher).

Amy Benjamin

To all my children, from whom I continue to learn.

Joan Berger

Amy Benjamin is a literacy consultant who works with educators across the United States and Canada. Her work is informed by more than thirty years of teaching experience at the middle and high school levels. She has been recognized for excellence in teaching by the New York State English Council, the State Education Department of New York, Tufts University, and Union College.

As a member of the professional development team for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and president of its Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar, Amy has had a major impact in transforming the paradigm of grammar instruction from fill-in-the-blank worksheets to the kind of active, authentic, discovery-based models presented in this book. This is Amys eleventh book for Eye on Education.

Joan Berger has developed unique approaches for teaching writing and grammar during her four decades working with high-school and middle-school students. A Golden Apple finalist, Joan has written articles for various National Council of Teachers of English journals, as well as NCTEs teacher sourcebook Professional Communities at Work: Grammar. Now a consultant who works with schools and school districts, Joan also speaks frequently at NCTE conferences about writing and grammar. At her workshops, Joan gives teachers fun, easy-to-use strategies that inspire their students to write effectively.

Many of the tools discussed and displayed in this book are also available on the Routledge website as Adobe Acrobat files. Permission has been granted to purchasers of this book to download these tools and print them.

You can access these downloads by visiting

www.routledge.com/9781596671386 and click on the Free Downloads tab.

Figure

We believe its possible to teach grammar using contemporary methods that result in durable learning. Such methods are engaging, lively, and social. They include teaching through visuals and hands-on manipulatives, rhythm, creative dramatics, inductive reasoning, problem-solving, wordplay, and pattern-finding. We present our ideas in this book as a way of seeing grammar with new eyes. We begin with a look at traditional ways of viewing grammar instructionor, as we believe, seeing grammar with old eyesand then look at some new possibilities.

What Do Teachers Say about Teaching Grammar?

We begin our workshops by asking teachers to share what comes to mind when they hear the words teaching grammar. What we hear is mostly negative.

We hear that teaching grammar is frustrating. It doesnt work. Students seem to need the same lessons over and over. Not only do they forget the grammar that they do learn in school, but they fail to put it to use to create better language, either in writing or in speech. Lets clarify right here that what we mean by better language is language that is well-suited to the audience and purpose. Assessments that measure whether students can pick out certain parts of speech or circle the correct choice of singular or plural verb in a premade sentence dont say much about what happens, grammatically speaking, in the real world of the students language. That real world consists of various audiences for various purposes, informal as well as formal, reflective of the ever-changing nature of all languages. When the grammar that comes from the grammar book differs from the grammar of real communication, practice in the former does not result in application to the latter. And scarce resources of classroom time get squandered in the effort.

We hear that grammar instruction cant be anything but drill, drill, drill. Its boring. We can liven it up with gimmicks like grammar bees, contests, rewards, and mnemonics, but in the end its about memorizing rules and deferring to the answer key. According to tradition, critical thinking does not play a part in grammar instruction. Teachers and the general public usually believe that answers to grammatical problems are, like math, either right or wrong in all circumstances.

We hear exasperated teachers complaining that the burden of teaching the basics of grammar shouldnt be at their level. Students should have been taught grammar in the lower grades. In educational circles, this is called the blame-down. We see it all the time in a spiral of expectations about what students should know and be able to do at given levels. The blame-down is unproductive thinking for teachers under any circumstances, but especially for grammar. Old-fashioned grammar instruction is not going to work very well for most students, no matter how often, or how loudly, it is taught. What teachers need to do, as we show in this book, is find a new way, not a way to introduce ineffective practices earlier.