Sorry for the recent radio silence, Blogosphere, but there's been a lot going on lately and frankly I've been pretty exhausted.
Aside from a new job, one of the things on my plate right now is an online grammar class. It's part of a copy-editing certificate I'm doing through the University of California. Apart from improving my grammar and editing skills, I'm hoping that the certificate will eventually help me to get a job in publishing.
Now, we never actually learned grammar in the California school system. We learned that a noun was a person, place, or thing; a verb was an action word; and an adjective was a describing word. That was pretty much the extent of it. My grasp of English grammar was good, but almost entirely instinctual, gained from reading a ridiculous amount of books at a young age. In fact, it wasn't until my senior year in college that I took a grammar course and began to learn about parts of speech in any real detail.
My question is, why? Why on earth are children not taught grammar in school? Judging from what I see on a daily basis, kids today are in desperate need of grammar lessons. When there are high school graduates who don't know the difference between "to" and "too," who use "your" and "you're" interchangeably, who have no clue about punctuation or capitalization, then there's something wrong with the system.
Can anyone shed some light on this? Why is PE mandatory while grammar, apparently, isn't worth our time?
We were taught grammar, but not until 10th grade. The only people in our class that knew grammar before that point were the ones who had gone to Catholic school.
ReplyDeleteI love being a follower of your blog, you always have things that I actually feel like I can weigh in on.
ReplyDeleteI am a 6th grade English teacher in California, as Jesse knows. My take on grammar: I am not completely sold on teaching grammar explicitly. I'm not sure, especially at the 6th grade level, that having my students memorize a list of prepositions and then regurgitate them on a test, as some of my co-workers do, is the best use of my time.
HOWEVER, I completely agree with some focus on the big things. Homonyms like your/you're and to/too/two are huge with me. I mark them down 1 point for EACH time they get those wrong after a little time goes on in the year. In addition, every time I grade one of their papers, mark grammatical errors for them to fix, and then have them resubmit, I see that as part of their grammar instruction.
It is my belief, and some teaching scholars agree, some disagree, that students MOSTLY (not completely) learn their grammar the way you did. They read, they write, they get feedback, etc. The idea does hold some water since students are said to learn around 90% of their vocabulary each year from reading (though I believe some of that comes from other media sources now). Should SOME grammar be specifically taught, I say yes. At every level, but not all of it at once.
If I were going to set up this program, I would have VERY specific grammar skills taught for each year of English in school. It would be outlined clearly for every teacher so we would get through it all between 6th and 12th grade. But, they never listen to me anyway.
I think it's a good idea to teach kids grammar gradually. Some of the more complex stuff is too hard for young kids to grasp, but they can definitely start with the basics in elementary, and then build on that foundation more with each year. I think it's important to teach kids grammar rules rather than just have them memorize the correct phrasing of sentences. From learning the rules they will understand why certain ways of writing things are correct or not. Then they will be more likely to speak and write correctly. I know a 50-year old who routinely says things like "You could have went," and he can't seem to process that this is incorrect because he doesn't have a good understanding of verb tenses. I just think that being able to communicate intelligently in one's first language should be more of a priority in schools. Especially when I look back and remember all of the pointless busy work I did in school as a child. Get rid of that and throw in some grammar lessons.
ReplyDeleteAlso, learning English grammar makes it so much easier to learn a foreign language. I took German classes as part of my degree, and it was then that I was confronted with words like "predicate," "nominative," and "participle" for the first time. Learning these things in a language I didn't know was so much harder than learning them in English would have been!
Jeff, I like your idea for teaching grammar. They should put you in charge of that school.