Brock Haussamen (2003) famously states in his book Grammar Alive! that the study of grammar is “the skunk at the garden party of the language arts” (p. x). And indeed, many students when confronted with grammatical things—with discussions of clauses and conjunctions and commas—do act quite a bit like a real skunk has waltzed into the classroom, treading as quietly as possible and actively wishing it away.
And yet of all the subjects in school, one would think that the study of grammar and language more broadly, which is something most people use and interact with all day every day, would be one of the most engaging. So why is it that discussions of grammar and language are so distasteful for so many and what can we do to make them better, to make them good for more students? Here are three practices from my new book Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students that can help, with three other practices coming next week:
KEY PRACTICE 1: TEACHING GRAMMAR AND LANGUAGE FOR TRANSFER
A 1963 National Council of Teachers of English report issued a striking claim: “The teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing” (Braddock et. al, pp. 37–38). This claim at first feels confounding. How can instruction about something have no or little meaningful effect on one’s ability to do it? And yet research in the nearly 60 years since has often supported this finding (Cleary, 2014).
When one digs into it, the problem seems to have something to do with transfer, which is the ability to transfer what one has learned to new situations or contexts.
Often students can do a grammar worksheet or sentence diagram just fine, but they then struggle to use that knowledge to improve their own writing and reading.
The book Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World by Julie Stern, Krista Ferraro, Kayla Duncan, and Trevor Aleo argues that if we want to better facilitate transfer, we have to be very thoughtful about how information is organized because careful organization helps the brain to understand how to store and use new information. To see a grammatical example of what this could look like, let’s take em dashes. The em dash is generally taught alongside other punctuation, but in my class I teach it instead alongside other tools for adding emphasis. This organization by what the em dash does, not what it is, better allows students to understand its use, which in turn allows them to better use it or unpack why authors are using it.
Before I organized grammar and language lessons into categories based on use, I almost never saw students use something like an em dash in their writing. But now, after they learn the particular, freewheeling way that em dashes allow a writer to add emphasis alongside other emphasizer tools, many of my students grow so excited to use them that I sometimes I have to remind them to use them judiciously—unless of course they are mimicking the dash-heavy styles of Emily Dickinson or W.E.B. Du Bois.
KEY PRACTICE 2: TEACH GRAMMAR AND LANGUAGE CONCEPTS IN AND WITH CONTEXT
In the 1990s, there was a pedagogical shift, led by Constance Weaver and many others, that sought to use fewer worksheets and sentence diagrams and do more grammatical instruction in the context of student writing itself. The reason for this was both to help with transfer and to help to give students a clearer answer to that perennially pressing grammar-instruction question: Given that they can conjugate verbs and use adjective clauses without even knowing what these things are, why is there the need to study grammar and language in the first place?
This move towards teaching grammar in the context of student writing was an important, enduring pedagogical shift, but it came with another problem: Many students, even when they are taught about appositives or colons in the context of their own writing, still question why they have to learn about them at all.
That is why we need to teach grammar and language in context in two ways: Yes, it should be taught in the context of student writing. But we also need to teach the wider context of why the topics covered are important in the first place. This means discussing subjects that have historically lived in college-level linguistics classes—things like the wild and often weird history of the English language, introducing debates concerning code-meshing versus code-switching; explaining what a convention is and where current conventions came from; and teaching them linguistic terminology like dialect, idiolect, and register.
I have found that this increased understanding of the wider context of grammar and language instruction often motivates students to invest in the content while also giving them a better sense of what to do with the lessons because they have a clearer image of the whole picture.
To go back to the example of the colon, this means that discussion of colons isn’t limited to what a colon is and its common conventions; instead, the discussion extends to its history, how tools for emphasis like the colon can be used to impress readers and help human writing stand out from generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) writing, and examination of the range of ways that authors covered in class use colons to better make their points.
KEY PRACTICE 3: MAKE GRAMMAR ABOUT TOOLS AND OPPORTUNITIES, NOT ERRORS
Teachers often tell students that they should learn about grammar and language so they can avoid errors. This rationale goes back to the earliest English grammar books, which focused largely on error reduction as a way to try to add legitimacy to a comparatively newer language than Latin, Greek, or Arabic. For 300 years, this justification has failed to inspire interest and engagement for many students though.
Further, from a linguistic perspective, it is also not accurate, or at least it’s an oversimplification. Every student who comes into our classes already follows internal grammatical rules and conventions. These rules—far from being random or incorrect—are a beautiful patchwork of the ways that their families, friends, neighbors, and neighborhoods communicate. And according to linguistic science (Baker-Bell, 2020; Kolln & Grey, 2016; Pinker, 1994; Young et al., 2014), the rules they follow are just as consistent and logical as any other set of rules that another follows. Many students, even without consciously understanding this, can feel upset when told that they (and by proxy those around them) are in error because it certainly doesn’t feel like an error to them.
Another issue with a focus on errors is that recent years have seen the rise of Gen AI and highly accurate proofreading programs. We now have a powerful digital grammarian sitting with us whenever we compose, and it is unlikely to let us do much splicing with our commas or transposing of a there with their.
A key when it comes to creating grammar and language instruction that does more to inspire interest, excitement, and joy for more students, while also doing more to affirm and celebrate their own language, is to make it less about errors and more about opportunities. This means learning capitalization conventions, not because you are wrong if your text messages don’t have capitals; instead, we learn them so we can use them for effect. If you are Beyonce dropping a new album, that means you can introduce it using all caps (as she did) because, well, you are Beyonce dropping a new album. If you are McDonald’s, you can use all lowercase in your long-running ad campaign “i’m lovin it” to draw attention to your informality. And if you are writing an essay for a standardized test, you can make sure to capitalize each of those proper nouns!
This approach welcomes in more students because, while we all come pre-programmed with a remarkable ability to communicate, learning about language can help us to communicate better, clearer, stronger, and in a voice that sounds even more like us.
References
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge.
Braddock, R., Schoer, L. A., & Lloyd-Jones, R. (1963). Research in written composition. National Council of Teachers of English.
Cleary, M. (2014, February 25).The wrong way to teach grammar. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/ archive/2014/02/the-wrong-way-to- teach-grammar/284014/
Haussamen, B. (2003). Grammar alive! A guide for teachers. National Council of Teachers of English.
Kolln, M., & Gray, L. (2016). Rhetorical grammar: Grammatical choices, rhetorical effects (8th ed.). Pearson.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Stern, J., Ferraro, K., Duncan, K., & Aleo, T. (2021). Learning that transfers: Designing curriculum for a changing world. Corwin.
Young, V. A., Barrett, R., Young-Rivera, Y., & Lovejoy, K. B. (2014). Other people’s English: Code-meshing, code-switching and African American literacy. Teachers College Press.
