Hi -

When you speak of whether one can engage in "teaching grammar using
sentence combining," that depends on what you mean by "teaching grammar."
Sentence combining is most useful for increasing students' fluency and
sentence length and complexity. It can be used to help students correct
their errors in usage, sentence structure, and punctuation, but there
hasn't been much work on that. If you're interested in either of these
approaches, I suggest that you acquire some sentence combining textbooks
and see what you can borrow that looks interesting.

If, however, you are interested in teaching "grammar as grammar" (not
grammar as style or grammar as correctness), sentence combining probably
won't be much help. It's true that early sentence combining experiments
used grammatical terminology, but once it was proved that you could use
sentence combining without the terminology, that was the end of that.

If you want a different approach to teaching "grammar as grammar," I
suggest that you try asking students to write sentences using the
grammatical concepts that you want to teach. In other words, students would
produce sentences rather than analyze the sentences written by others.

Start by having students write 3-word sentences like "A dog barked." Say
that you want a 3-word sentence with a noun and a verb and an article.
After they have written their sentences and a few students have read theirs
to the class (often a hilarious activity), explain that these are also
called a subject and predicate. Then ask for longer sentences, adding other
parts, and discussing how the added words are both parts of speech and
parts of sentences (or parts of parts of sentences, as the case may be).

I have had some luck with this approach, certainly more than I had with the
typical analytical method. Students seem more interested in their own
sentences than those written by others. Of course, ninth graders being
ninth graders, some students will write sentences of quesionable taste. Be
prepared.

Unfortunately, as you have probably already heard, nothing works very well
in the teaching of grammar. And if you're teaching grammar as a means of
helping students correct the errors in the writing, forget it. That
approach is a notorious failure.

Bill

>I am a student teacher from the Universtiy of Washington and am teaching a
>9th grade English class in the fall.  I have recently begun compiling
>ideas for lesson planning and was wondering if anyone out there has had
>any experience teaching grammar using sentence combining.  If so, was
>there anything that helped make this endeavor successful/unsuccessful?
>Do you have any alternative ideas that could help me to make grammar
>interesting for students?
>
>Thank You!  Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
>
>Hilliary


William J. McCleary
3247 Bronson Hill Road
Livonia, NY 14487
716-346-6859