Teaching Grammar

Throughout this week’s readings, I found myself agreeing almost completely with the idea of teaching grammar during the writing process. This probably comes from my own experiences with learning specific grammatical rules in middle and high school. When I was in seventh grade, I had an English teacher who taught using only worksheets. This teacher had us complete gigantic packets of worksheets in which we labeled pages after pages of pronouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc. Most of the class just mindlessly filled out the worksheets and never learned a single concept about the correct ways to use grammar. Later on in high school, I had a couple teachers that had us correct an error-filled sentence every day and one error-filled paragraph every week. While I think that this helped me learn some of the finer aspects of grammar, I remember becoming extremely frustrated with these exercises as they seemed very disconnected from what I was writing. I could pick out an error in the sentences that the teacher gave us, but I’m not sure I could find the same error in my own writing. 

Because of this, I definitely agree that grammar needs to be taught as an essential part of the writing process. If students are only taught how to correct single sentences on a worksheet, then they will only be able to see mistakes on a worksheet; they will never be able to make the connection and find errors in their own writing. To me, this is the ultimate example of being able to embed your teaching in a real-life situation. As teachers, we are always looking for ways to allow our students to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to the outside world. When students are out of the classroom, we will expect them to edit and use correct grammar in their writing. So why don’t we teach editing and grammar while writing? Why do some teachers insist on isolating grammar from writing to teach it and then later expect students to simply reapply it to their writing when outside of the classroom? It seems that this isolation causes a lot of unnecessary work for both students and teachers. If students are taught how to correctly use grammar while writing, using correct grammar will become more natural for students, and it will be easier for them to apply it to their writing outside of the classroom.

Here is my resource link for the week. It's a blog post that I found on The Write Source's website. I think it serves as a really good example of many of the points made in the readings about teaching grammar within the larger context of writing.