Dear Ron,
I would like to have the
references for the empirical research you mentioned. My email address is [log in to unmask].
Thank you,
Carolyn
Carolyn
Kinslow
Director, Center for Writers
Director of Composition
Cameron University
2800 West Gore
Lawton, OK 73505
(580) 581-5524
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Ronald Sheen
Sent: Saturday, August 11, 2007
6:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Supportive empirical
evidence was Silly, rewarding grammar period
In the clearly justified positive
comments on the new ways of teaching grammar, I'm surprised to see no mention
of there being any comparative studies demonstrating the greater effectiveness
of some innovation or other.
Before producing any books on new ways of
teaching grammar. I would suggest that innovations have to have been
demonstrated empirically as being the optimal teaching options.
There has been substantial research on
the fate of teaching innovations. The findings are not encouraging.
Most innovations have not produced the promised improvement. In fact, in
some cases, they have produced worse results than the approach they replaced.
(refs provided on request)
Though it is clearly desirable to trial
approaches which engage students' interest and involvement, one should not
confuse the latter with effectiveness in improving studens' production of more
accurate grammar.
Professor of Applied Linguistics,
(retired)
Department of Modern Languages,
Université du Québec à Trois Rivières,
Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2007 11:57 AM
Subject: Re: Silly, rewarding grammar period
In a message dated
9/9/2007 11:14:18 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [log in to unmask]
writes:
Could you explain how you are doing this?
I am going to be getting into sentence structure soon and thought I might try
your idea.
Thanks for the poster
idea!
The sentence part art
is from Harry Noden's book Image Grammar. If you don't have the book, I highly recommend it.
He has a number of "brush strokes" that he developed with his eighth
graders to improve writing. (I'm going back to it, as it was too advanced
for my sixth graders, and I'm now teaching older students.) It is chock
full of art that comes on a CD, plus he has a website with even more art.
His primary focus (I hope I'm remembering this right - I haven't pulled out my
copy for review for a while) is to encourage students to vary their sentence
structure. He shows great models to the students and then they try various
strategies.
One of my students'
favorites was noun absolutes. I'd put up a picture from the CD of cars at
the starting line of a race. The kids would write down all the noun absolutes
they could think of from the picture - "engines racing, the cars edged
towards the starting line" or "checkered flag waving, the
starter leans towards the track." They really enjoyed the crossover
between art and writing.
I'm going to take that
same idea and make it even more simple for my phobic kids (they wouldn't know a
noun absolute if one walked up and bit them, but they're game for anything
right now!) I'm going to use pictures to generate simple subjects and
predicates. They really don't know the difference. Then we'll expand each part
slowly and carefully with the parts of speech that they are learning now.
I have a number of
different ideas for this. I have some of those inspirational posters with
people doing various sports type activities (climbing glaciers, surfing, etc.)
that I thought I'd use to teach prepositional phrases; directional ones are
always easiest, and what guy wouldn't like to find 8 different prepositional
phrases in a football poster? I'll keep the group posted if anyone is
interested.
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