I have tried various ways to incorporate
diagramming in my college grammar classes, always with mixed results. The most
serious difficulty I’ve noticed is a tendency for students to focus on,
or panic about, the diagrams as if they were the sole content of the course, a
problem Brown alluded to earlier. I’m tossing in some comments below;
apologies for the list format, but I can’t think of a more coherent way
to organize these:
- Almost all of my students are English majors. Many typically come
in with the firm notion that they are “bad at math and science,”
and to them, if it’s a diagram, it’s science. Students who
have a strong negative emotional reaction to diagrams aren’t going
to learn much from them, so the pedagogical issue for me, with those
students, is how to get them past their reactions (and, of course, get
myself past my reaction to their reactions – I’m a bit angry
at an educational system that gives students the idea that if they find a
domain of knowledge difficult, the best way to cope is to scream and run
from it).
- I’ve had some success with having students first fill out a
form with questions about a sentence (e.g. “What is the subject?) and then
turning that into a diagram. All I’m trying to do with that is make
sure they think about the diagram as an alternate way of presenting
information, and maintain focus on the information itself. This seems to
help some of the students, but some still panic.
- RK and Tree diagrams are each good for different things. Tree
diagrams more transparently indicate constituency – the way parts
make up bigger parts. RK diagrams more clearly indicate statements about
what the subject is, what the direct object is, etc. If you view Tree
diagrams as a pedagogical device, rather than as a notation for a specific
theory, though, you can incorporate information like “subject”
or “direct object” into the tree simply by labeling the nodes
(I’m making the comment about theory because in some of the theories
that use trees, it’s important *not*
to label the nodes like that). Students who have had no diagramming at all
find RK and Tree diagrams equally frightful, so it’s not like you’re
scaring them any more with a Tree diagram than you would with an RK one.
- Showing students multiple types of diagramming (during a part of
the class where you’re making it clear they won’t be tested on
their ability to use all those) helps them see diagrams as metaphors,
rather than as “correct technology.” You can make sentence
models with spray-painted tinker toys, for example (yes, I teach college –
but who doesn’t like tinker toys? I’ve seen something similar
with cardboard and colorful pipe cleaners).
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University