Engaging Grammar

Amy Benjamin

Description

Teacher, researcher, and consultant Amy Benjamin challenges the idea of “skill and drill” grammar in the second edition of this lively, engaging, and immensely practical guide. 

Does grammar instruction have to elicit moans and groans from students and teachers alike? Only when it’s taught the old-fashioned way: as a series of rules to follow and errors to “fix” that have little or no connection to practical application or real-world writing.

Benjamin’s enlightened view of grammar is grounded in linguistics and teaches us how to make informed decisions about teaching grammar—how to move beyond fixing surface errors to teaching how grammar can be used as the building blocks of sentences to create meaning. By using sentence patterns, mapping, visuals, and manipulatives, Benjamin presents an approach to grammar instruction that is suitable for a variety of student populations.

Although she doesn’t advocate for teaching to the test, Benjamin acknowledges the pressures students face when taking high-stakes tests such as the SAT and ACT. Included is a chapter on how to improve students’ editing skills to help prepare them for the short-answer portion of these tests.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Subjects
• Teaching
• EDUCATION
• Lettres et linguistique
• Linguistics
• General officer
• Subject
• Punctuation
• Grammar
• General
• ELA

Informations

• Publié par: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Date de parution: 07 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780814100011
• Langue: English

Extrait

NCTE Editorial Board
Steven Bickmore Catherine Compton-Lilly Deborah Dean Antero Garcia Bruce McComiskey Jennifer Ochoa Staci M. Perryman-Clark Anne Elrod Whitney Vivian Yenika-Agbaw Kurt Austin, chair, ex offcio Emily Kirkpatrick, ex offcio

Staff Editor: Bonny Graham
Interior Design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf
Cover Design: Pat Mayer
Cover Image: iStock/Pobytov
NCTE Stock Number: 13660; eStock Number: 13677
ISBN 978-0-8141-1366-0; eISBN 978-0-8141-1367-7
© 2021 by the National Council of Teachers of English.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holder. Printed in the United States of America.
It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Benjamin, Amy, 1951- author.
Title: Engaging grammar : practical advice for real classrooms / Amy Benjamin.
Description: Second edition. | Champaign, Illinois : National Council of Teachers of English, [2021] Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Challenges the idea of ‘skill and drill’ grammar by introducing an approach to grammar instruction that is grounded in linguistics and moves beyond fixing surface errors to teaching how grammar can be used as the building blocks of sentences to create meaning”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020055995 (print) | LCCN 2020055996 (ebook) | ISBN 9780814113660 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780814113677 (adobe PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: English language—Grammar—Study and teaching (Secondary)
Classification: LCC LB1631 .B382 2021 (print) | LCCLB1631 (ebook) | DDC 428.0071/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055995
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055996
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
I                          Essential Understandings
CHAPTER 1       Introduction
CHAPTER 2       Changing How We Think about Grammar Instruction
CHAPTER 3       Elements of Linguistic Grammar
CHAPTER 4       Natural Expertise about Grammar
II                         Classroom Practice
CHAPTER 5       Usage and Mechanics in Formal and Informal English
CHAPTER 6       Grammar and Standardized Tests
CHAPTER 7       Rhetorical Grammar
CHAPTER 8       Scope and Sequence
TAXONOMY AND TERMINOLOGY
WORKS CITED
INDEX
AUTHOR
Acknowledgments
I thank Robert Clouse, former publisher-in-residence at NCTE, for offering me the opportunity to write this second edition, and for his and editor Bonny Graham's supportive comments and attention to detail. I would also like to thank the five reviewers for their thoughtful, detailed commentary. And my gratitude goes to Kerin Slattery, English language arts director for Levittown Public Schools, who gave me the privilege of working with her and her excellent staff at Division Avenue High School, General Douglas A. MacArthur High School, Wisdom Lane Middle School, and Jonas E. Salk Middle School. It was a great pleasure to work with these professionals, who showed a passion not only for teaching but also for learning about ways to engage grammar.
Preface to the Second Edition
T his book is meant to invigorate the way you teach grammar, to give you insights about its value to your students, and to make grammar instruction interesting for all involved. I hope to accomplish these goals by encouraging you to see that grammar instruction is closely related to language play and to the natural interest about language that humans have. I'd like to see you and your students take risks, ask questions of one another, wrestle with uncertainties, argue over changing rules, splash around in the fun of language. I'd like to see you blow the cobwebs off the chandelier of the dusty old grammar that was full of “Don't do this!” and “Never do that!” This book explains how you can teach grammar using rhythm and patterns of authentic literature, games, and conversation rather than through drill. You will learn how to teach grammar by analyzing and modeling well-written sentences created by both professionals and novices rather than finding and correcting errors in controlled sentences found in “exercises.” I will help you give students the tools and terminology they need to understand how language works. By doing so, we empower students with choices, choices that match the speaker/writer to the hearer/ reader and the purpose of the message.
You should use this book sequentially, moving from part to part as you teach throughout the course of one year. Each of the chapters takes you one level higher in your understanding of grammar and how to integrate it into the teaching you already do in literature and language. You need not reach for workbooks from which to assign practice exercises. All you will need is the fine literature you already teach and the rich speaking and writing opportunities you already offer. You will be integrating grammar into your existing reading and writing instruction.
The first thing you'll need to do is to realize the extraordinary amount you (and your students) already know about grammar. You (and they) already know this extraordinary amount not because you are an English teacher, or an elementary school teacher, but because you are a human being. Regardless of the particular native language we speak, we humans have a remarkable capacity to understand how words are put together to make sense. You already understand how word order affects meaning and how words change their forms to suit the sentences in which they find themselves. Right after you give yourself credit for being a natural expert in grammar, let your students know about their expertise—and please include our English language learners (ELLs) in that statement. Our ELLs come to us with natural expertise in their native languages, which they will apply as they transition into English. I say much more about teaching English grammar to ELLs throughout the book.
If there's one thing students come to us knowing a lot about, it's grammar, even though they aren't consciously aware of it. If there's one thing they have fun with and are interested in, it's language.
You may have a background in and experience with traditional grammar. If you don't, that's fine; I'll hold your hand. But if you do, you'll need to understand how the system of grammar that I'm talking about in this book differs a bit from a traditional system of describing English grammar—essentially, how linguistic grammar, the term I use throughout this book, differs from traditional grammar. Others use different terms, such as structural grammar, structural linguistics, phrase-structure grammar, cognitive grammar, modern grammar, or contextual grammar (I made that last one up, but I actually do like it). Linguistic grammarians study language as a changing, fluid social contract; their categories and definitions are flexible, and in some cases their designations are more refined than those of the traditionalists. Traditional grammarians believe firmly (too firmly) in the paradigm of eight parts of speech. They concentrate on formal rules and regulations of what they consider “Standard” English. As a result, many people are put off by the very idea of grammar instruction. It has the air of condescension, privilege born of social class, exclusivity, institutionalized snobbery. On the other hand, linguistic grammarians love language in all of its quirky manifestations and because of the wild and crazy things we can get it to do. I am a member of this club. I want to share my love for the varieties of the English language with teachers and students while at the same time teaching them the ways of the Standard English dialect.
Let me be clear: Standard English is a dialect—not an ideal form. It is the dialect that is expected in formal discourse, even as the rules of formal discourse change right before our eyes.
Standard English is the dialect associated with education, seriousness, professionalism, legal documents, and ritual. When laypeople and educators speak of “learning grammar,” it is Standard English to which they refer. Tests (such as the SAT) that seek to sort individuals into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” bins do their sorting in large part on the basis of whether the student demonstrates proficiency in Standard English. Our good intentions to teach students to function in Standard English should not attempt to steal away or beat down a student's own home dialect, any more than teaching someone to cook a Thanksgiving dinner would do so at the expense of that person's ability to prepare a delicious (and equally complex) meal for folks who don't celebrate Thanksgiving. In fact, just as we savor the cuisine o