Gretchen (and all),
"I know a few of the tricks or tags (some I learned from you at
Asilomar!), but I'm always interested in more. Please send me the
sources at your convenience. I'm sure my whole team will thank you!"
Some are in Rei Noguchi's "Grammar and the Teaching of Writing", a slim
NCTE book that would be a great resource for all your teachers. "Grammar
Alive" also has some. You can find part-of-speech tests on my website
that I referred Ed to in a recent post.
I think it's terrific that you want to teach kids to find "chunks" in
language. This is a top-down approach, and I think it is a very good
idea to work top-down at first, or at least combine top-down with
bottom-up (bottom-up approaches start witht the "atoms", such as
individual words, and work up to phrases and sentences). Best of all,
there are some great techniques students can use to find chunks, using
their subconscious knowledge of grammar. Once the chunks are found, you
can work with moving around those that can move, and talking about why
you'd want to have them in one place rather than another.
Here are few of the techniques -- those that my students find easiest:
1) Sentence fragments can be good! You can use the notion of fragments
as they naturally occur in speech to find chunks in a sentence. Suppose
one of your students writes:
My whole family has dinner at my grandmother's house every Sunday.
By formulating questions about the sentence, and allowing fragmentary
answers (which occur anyway in natural speech), you can locate chunks at
various levels of the sentence. The important nuance of the technique is
to _make sure that the answer is an exact copy of the relevant part of
the sentence_ -- nothing added, nothing taken out. You can make this "a
rule of the game".
Subject: Who has dinner at your grandmother's house every Sunday?
My whole family.
Predicate: What does your whole family do?
Have dinner at my grandmother's house every Sunday.
Internal phrases:
Where does your whole family have dinner every Sunday?
At my grandmother's house.
When does your whole family have dinner at your grandmother's house?
Every Sunday.
What does your whole family have at your grandmother's house every Sunday?
Dinner.
You could do this as a Jeopardy game, in which you give the fragmentarly
answers, and the students formulate the question, again following the
rule of leaving nothing out and adding nothing to the original wording.
This will seem tedious if you don't make into some kind of game.
Notice you can do this with little to no terminology; you can add
terminology as needed or as the curriculum calls for. You can also play
with different arrangments of the parts:
2) "Every Sunday, my whole family has dinner at my grandmother's house."
3) "My grandmother's house is where my whole family has dinner every
Sunday."
Then consider what sorts of texts or contexts would call for each
arrangment: 2, for example, would fit well into a paragraph in which
someone is describing the family routine over the course of the week.
One way to work with this is to have students produce a paragraph, then
you choose a sentence and play with it and discuss why the student's
original choice either fits or doesn't fit.
Another chunk-finding technique is the echo-question test. An echo
quesiton is used when someone doesn't hear one part of a sentence and
asks for repetition:
Your whole family has dinner WHERE every Sunday?
The answer, again a fragment, is a chunk:
At my grandmother's house.
Your whole family has dinner at your grandmother's house WHEN?
Every Sunday.
Your whole family DOES WHAT at your grandmother's house every Sunday?
Has dinner.
I tell the students to think of the wh-word ("when, what") as an eraser
-- which words of the original sentence get erased by the wh-word? This
helps them find the _whole_ phrase, rather than just saying "Sunday" or
"family". You can use actual erasers, or highlighting and replacing on a
computer screen, to demonstrate.
I can imagine this as a kind of call-and-response game, in which one
student says the sentence, and the rest of the class asks the
echo-questions in chorus, pretending to be dense or not listening, with
the speaker acting out frustration with each successive question, and
getting more emphatic with the answer. It could even be done to music or
rhythmic clapping.
It's a shame that your teachers don't understand that teaching grammar
can be fun. Mad-libs are great for teaching parts of speech (by putting
wrong ones in the slots, or by changinga word, say, from noun to verb by
putting it in different slots). I'm not a terribly imaginative teacher,
probably because this isn't demanded of college professors, who get to
be dry and boring (not that they should be). I believe that, generally,
teachers in primary and middle school are partly drawn to the job
because they like to do things that are fun. Their own grammar training
(or what they have heard about it if they haven't had it) has taught
them that it isn't supposed to be fun, or can't be fun. Certainly the
prissy wording of the standards makes it sound like some kind of
military drill.
Of course, one has to be comfortable with the content being taught to
have the confidence to use entertaining techniques to teach grammar, and
this is a real problem when teachers don't know much about language
structure. Kids are as naturally curious about language as they are
about everything else, and they love to play with language as much as
they love to play with everything else. The younger they get started,
the more likely it is that the curiosity and fun will stay with them
through school.
An excellent book with commentary on the loss of language fun in school
is David Crystal's "Language Play". It's written for nonspecialists, and
I think any teacher would find it a quick and easy read. Even just the
last part of the book, which deals with school.
A last comment -- if your teachers are in CA, how are they getting away
with not teaching grammar? How are their kids faring on the standardized
tests? Surely these tests target such things as capitalizing the first
word of a sentence. No wonder the government is interested in teacher
accountability.
And as to punctuation, I have to say I look at that a little differently
than standard grammar. Standard grammar is appropriate according to the
social context. Punctuation is an absolute that can only be ignored in
very intimate writings, such as text messaging or notes on the fridge. I
explain punctuation by saying it is like traffic law -- a certain set of
rules has been decided upon by people who went before us. They are the
widely accepted rules that our readers expect us to follow. They are as
important to guiding the reader's understanding of text meaning as
traffic rules are to keeping cars from continually crashing into one
another. Punctuation puts things in the written message that are done by
sound in the spoken message. Leaving out punctuation or using it wrong
is as bad as using a wrong word or leaving out a word.
***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~ E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
***************************************************
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