Words, Grammar, and Vocabulary Quizzes

First off—here’s my resource link for the week: http://www.myfavoriteword.com/. This is a great place to share your favorite word and to look through what other people have submitted. What I really like about this site is that all entries are reviewed before they’re added to the list, so it’s not like a hundred people can write in with the same favorite word, and then all the formatting is the same so it’s more user-friendly. Also, submitters write a little bit about what they like and what it means, which is more interesting than just reading cool-sounding words. It would be great to share with this students—if nothing else, it reflects the teacher’s passion and enthusiasm for language (and shows that a bunch of other people have the same passion), which can’t hurt.

Secondly, wow—the Dornan chapter “Grammar, Correctness, and Style,” is about to overflow. As I was reading, I felt like every sentence was important and potentially useful, which is, admittedly, something I don’t often feel when reading. I think the authors have captured the importance of grammar in a really convincing way. I’ve always been a supporter of teaching about grammar, mostly because I enjoyed it when I was going through school myself, but I also do believe that knowing conventions actually can improve writing. A couple of big points stuck out to me in this particular reading:

Point #1: We’ve heard it a hundred times, but teachers need to constantly expose students to well-written literature and varied writing styles. According to this chapter, oral language is more complicated than written language only until 7^th grade, at which point the written language actually becomes more complex. I’ve never really thought about that explicitly, but it’s true—how often do I speak in complex sentences? Take a look at the second sentence of this entry, for example: “As I was reading, I felt like every sentence was important and potentially useful, which is, admittedly, something I don’t often feel when reading.” I feel like that’s my voice, but I don’t think I’d speak that thought aloud in the same way—it’d probably be something more like “When I was reading, it just felt like every sentence was important and useful and that’s not something I feel a lot when I read.” I used to think that a good tip for writing was to just write how you would speak. Maybe that’s a starting point, but now I’m convinced that writing isn’t just oral language written down. The point is, written language needs to be experienced and practiced and modeled if we expect student writing to improve. The other huge component, I think, is that teachers are explicit about what makes the well-written examples well-written. How does the use of commas help us read the sentence more fluidly? If students can identify what makes for strong writing, they’ll be able to practice translating those techniques into their own writing.

Point #2: “Good” English is appropriate English: for both the writer and the reader (p. 85). One of my biggest pet peeves in grammar lessons is when teachers say, “well, think about it—what sounds right?” It’s frustrating, because that works in some cases, but it’s completely useless to anyone who doesn’t speak Standard English all the time. When I teach grammar, I want to be clear to students that I’m teaching Standard English conventions, and there’s a time and a place to use them, depending on the audience and the content of your writing. Also, I think both this text and the Culham chapters did a nice job of reminding us that just because a technique works well for one kind of writing, that doesn’t mean it’s always beneficial. Yes, we like to push students to find unique, colorful adjectives, but that won’t always be the best way to dress up a sentence. We all know that, but the trick is to remember that we know that when we teach adjectives. I don’t think we have to worry about confusing students with “sometimes this is a good way to go, sometimes it isn’t”—that kind of ambiguity applies to so many other things in life that I think if we’re upfront about it, there will only be benefits.

I also really liked the “what should we teach and why” section of this chapter. I took advanced grammar in high school and liked it, but it really was pretty useless to learn and identify appositives, participial phrases, object of the gerund, etc. And diagramming sentences has always been beyond me… what do all those lines mean?? I guess it doesn’t hurt to learn things like that, but realistically, why bother spending time in the classroom on something that half the students will never retain, and the other half will never conquer in the first place? I really liked the lists they came up with about what’s important to teach—granted, I have no real experience in the classroom, but it seems like they got the essential pieces pretty much right on.

One final unrelated piece: In the “word choice” chapter, Culham went out of her way to tell us not to teach words or vocabulary by assigning a list or having students use a set of words in a paragraph. While my first instinct was to nod along and agree that those tasks never really did much for me as a student, I quickly remembered that during my student teaching I’ll be responsible for introducing a set of vocabulary words each Monday and testing them on Friday. So, um… what should I do??