Reframing Our Focus on Correcting the Language
By Jason DeHart
As I read some responses recently from some of my most advanced students, I came across this: “I don’t know. I guessed to be honest. I’m not that good at English.”
This is a moment of sighing and sending words of affirmation from a teacher who embraces creativity, voice, and ways of sharing stories. I immediately notice the consistent use of capitalization, along with the formation of sentences with punctuation. Sure, there is a comma missing, but commas can be confusing anyway. This use of the comma is a minor detail we can work on later.
Why is it that students who communicate complex ideas and share their thoughts in class with what seems to be relative comfort can still feel as though they are not “good at English?”
Maybe it is the mistaken belief that a perfect approach to grammar must be accomplished for a student to be “good” at the work of reading and composing. In this post, I describe and discuss my struggle and dialogue around this question, calling on my fifteen plus years of instruction.
Connections Across Language
As I often share with my students, I experienced multiple worksheets in my life as a middle school student. Even as a junior in high school, I was still unable to explain most of what I was already doing naturally in English. I was a strong writer but did not have the ability to parse what I was doing.
Noam Chomsky delineates the idea of prescriptive grammar – the way that language should be rendered – versus descriptive grammar. This second category is the one where expressions like “gonna” do count as words. These are, ultimately, questions of formality and using language in particular contexts, or code-switching. These are not ways of deciding who is accomplished at English and who is not.
Most people I know do not bother using “whom” or worrying about the placement of prepositions when they talk or most often even when they write.
It is only through the study of a second language that I was able to finally understand what prepositions did. It was not until I became an English teacher that I had a more complete understanding of gerunds, participles, and infinitives. Perhaps it is moving from being monolingual to multilingual in education that might ultimately help us center these nuances in grammatical terms.
Emphasis on Writing
Of course, I also question the need to name every part of a sentence anyway. Do I really need to remember all of the parts of speech, as well as all grammar rules, to engage in composing? Surely not.
Sometimes students are hesitant to write, and the work then becomes more about welcoming their voices and helping them feel comfortable enough to share, rather than worrying about the differences between the present and past progressive – or any number of concepts that we explore in English class.
My desire for grammar instruction is that we can notice and celebrate what writers are doing with grammar as they communicate meaning and emotion. Learning grammar through mentor texts can help students begin to see the connections with grammar and language. We can describe the differences in approaches, from formal to informal, all year long, but I find that connections happen more meaningfully when texts are part of this discussion, complete with a look at the authentic purposes of writers. I also love it when students begin to see themselves as writers.
Besides, as authors from Ernest Hemingway to Zora Neale Hurston have shown us for decades, writing an interesting sentence or a meaningful story sometimes comes from expressing the ways people talk and interact, unbound by grammar. I have been an avid reader since I was able to read and cannot recall a single time I have finished a book and thought, what magnificent use of reflexive and demonstrative pronouns.
Connections Across Math?
I know that some students more readily identify with math and its patterns than English and its grammar. Yet there is a logic to the English language that can be described and explored strategically.
It is a remarkable phenomenon that children can learn to speak without ever being consciously aware of the sophisticated grammar they are using. Indeed, adults too can live a perfectly satisfactory life without ever thinking about ideas such as parts of speech, subjects, predicates, or subordinate clauses. Both children and adults can easily recognize ungrammatical sentences, at least if the mistake is not too subtle, and to do this it is not necessary to be able to explain the rules that have been violated. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that one’s understanding of language is hugely enhanced by a knowledge of basic grammar. The same is true of mathematical language.” – from The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2009)
While it is true that English is complex, and while there are exceptions to seemingly every rule, there is still a reasonable order for an English sentence. This sense of order can help students see why words work the way they do, and how putting parts of language in close proximity can help avoid confusion (pronouns and antecedents, for example). A noun plus a verb plus a noun creates an essential English sentence. Unlike some other languages, this order does matter for native English speakers.
Celebrations of Texts
Let’s return to the concept of celebrating texts. These are ideas to build conversation around, with colleagues and with students. For readers who do not readily engage with the logical ordering of words – and the fun (yes, fun) that can be had in noticing patterns of how authors accomplish their craft – this work of building grammar can start at the sentence level.
Readers can take note of the varieties of sentences, talk about their impact on the narrative, and describe the feelings that these stylistic choices evoke. This is, after all, much more along the lines of why writers engage with crafting and storytelling than is their profound appreciation of grammar.
When grammar is working well, the ideas in a passage flow and the author inspires emotion – or even action. Here are some questions that teachers can adapt when working with students to appreciate language.
1. How do I know when I find a sentence that works well?
2. How can I apply the logic of the English language to larger ideas – like the shape of an entire story?
3. What are the changes in the rules when I am moving from fiction to nonfiction, and from prose to poetry? To what degree does genre or form dictate grammatical rules?
4. To what degree can we honor and celebrate language when it occurs naturally (i.e., the way that speakers actually talk), moving our work from prescribing language to describing it?
5. How can we help students think about communication as the ultimate goal for writing and sharing ideas?
Dr. Jason D. DeHart teaches English at Wilkes Central High School in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He taught English Language Arts to middle grades students in Cleveland, Tennessee for eight years, earned his doctorate, and served as an assistant professor of reading education at Appalachian State University before returning to his first love, the secondary classroom.
Jason’s work has appeared in Edutopia, SIGNAL Journal, English Journal, The Social Studies, and the NCTE Blog. See all of Jason’s MiddleWeb posts here – including a 3-part series with teacher and school librarian Jennifer Sniadecki on using picture books with middle level readers. His website Book Love: Dr. J. Reads offers book reviews and author interviews.
