Close this window. An edited version of this article appeared in the issue of VOICES IN THE MIDDLE pictured here.

An Experiment in Teaching Grammar in Context by W. Scott Smoot published in the March 2001 issue of Voices in the Middle Imagine that the students in an English grammar class learn how clauses combine plus how a reporter subordinates one opinion to another in an "objective" article. These students recognize errors plus elegant style. They dissect complex sentences plus complex arguments. As a final plus, imagine that they do all this, not from a workbook, not from drill, but by engaging with meaningful texts drawn from their history class. I imagined all this. The class formerly called "Grammar" would be re-named "Grammar and Rhetoric." Instead of the grammar text and skill workbook, students would bring only a notebook and their history text to class. I would teach the required "little grammar" of sentence structure, parts of speech, and usage. At the same time, I would teach students to read what I call "big grammar": essay structure, points of an argument, and rhetorical devices. In my class, little grammar would be a tool for reading complicated sentences; big grammar, a way to appreciate essays by Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and other eye-witnesses to history. I enacted this program for seventh graders. Then I couldn't imagine what went wrong. A "Grammar in Context" Experiment Encouraged Non-standard English was no problem for my private school students who called it "common sense" that "We was going" and "I done it" are not correct answers on standardized tests. But, like the students of my public school colleagues, they got lost in sentences with dependent clauses. While they knew names for some of the parts of speech, and they had diagrammed simple sentences, their papers plodded on in bland simple or compound sentences and disjointed paragraphs. They might have the ability to label some things, but they certainly weren't using that labeling ability to enhance their writing ability. But this labeling ability seemed to be what many parents of our students want. When speaking to an audience of parents, the principal of our middle school has for years said, "We teach grammar the old-fashioned way. We begin in the sixth grade with parts of speech and sentence-diagramming, because we believe students need that structure." This is a strong selling-point for the school, especially in a suburban area valuing "basic skills" instruction. At the same time, the school diverges from traditional practices of teaching math, emphasizing problem-solving ahead of rote learning of procedures. So, when I proposed an approach to grammar that was analogous to the problem-solving emphasis in math classes, the principal and my colleagues in the English department expressed interest and support. The history teacher was delighted to hear that we would be looking at the rhetoric of primary sources to enrich her course. The principal gave me full rein to experiment, so long as my methods would get the same results as the traditional ones-in other words, as long as my students did as well on standardized tests as the other teachers' students. Achieving the same results didn't seem like a great hurdle. My colleagues' own comments indicated that, by traditional methods, some of their students simply do not catch on: "Some of my students don't 'get it' even after repeated drill and tutoring." "They do well with grammar exercises, but the knowledge doesn't transfer to their writing." "I know they studied [these concepts] last year. I observed the class, so I know they were taught well; but for many of them, it's as if they'd never heard it before." Given that my colleagues admitted limited success teaching the elements of little grammar, I was confident that in-context methods could get results at least as productive as the traditional methods. I had reason to hope that my students would fare even better on assessments of little grammar. "If you discover something for yourself, you'll remember it," I thought. Also, concepts would naturally re-surface all year long in readings, so students who didn't "get it" in September might grow into it later. My intuitions were supported by research. Working towards my master's degree, I studied Constance Weaver's Teaching Grammar in Context. Her early chapters cite research concluding that studying terms, rules, diagramming, or anything else apart from actual "manipulation of sentences" had "negligible effect" on students' writing. Later chapters offer an appealing alternative to a program of terms and drills starting from problems that arise in students' writing and proceeding with "mini-lessons" in usage and style. I searched for common ground between warring camps in the "grammar wars" represented in the November 1996 issue of English Journal. The issue was devoted to airing different voices in the debate. Reading articles by Weaver, Martha Kolln, Ed Vavra, and Brenda Arnett Petruzzella, I saw areas of agreement among them on which to build a peace plan. All agree that "grammar" in this debate means something between "proper usage" and "effective expression." All agree that instruction in usage one way or another can be helpful. All agree that instruction in one without the other is, in Vavra's analogy, like a cart without a horse to pull it. A grammar mistake is wrong, he observes, not just because the student broke a rule in a book, but because, as the student can be made to recognize, the error clouded the student's own intended meaning. Then, consulting the lead grammar teacher at my school, I prepared a set of just twelve short lessons. From my own experience both as student and as English teacher, I had concluded long ago that only a few terms are useful for discussing reading or writing: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, phrase, clause and subordinate clause. (A recent article reduces that list even more. See Schuster.) To that, I added practice in proper punctuation of quotations and clauses. With these lessons set out for the year, I was ready to begin. Grammar in Context: Early Successes The first lesson focused the class on verbs. I reasoned that the verb, its subject, and whatever follows (e.g., the direct object or complement) are the fulcrum to handle any weighty sentence. Students needed this skill right away for complex sentences in their history book. So, after some introductory work on word attack skills and after reviewing the summer reading essays, we began studying little grammar by looking for verbs in the history text. We started with an eye-witness account of Indians rescuing Spanish explorers. I reminded students what they'd learned in sixth grade, that verbs are what the subject does or is, and asked them to locate verbs with their subjects in the story. Right away, students encountered "verbs" that didn't fit the old definition: "I made the Indians understand by signs that our boat had sunk and three of our number had been drowned. The Indians, seeing what had befallen us and our state of suffering, sat down among us." We made rudimentary diagrams of each subject and verb, a simple S + V pattern. Among the answers were BOAT + HAD SUNK, INDIANS + SAT, and INDIANS + SEEING. We also saw HAD BEFALLEN, but the students could not locate a subject to go with it. I asked, "Something 'had befallen.' What?" Students agreed that something was all the disasters from the previous sentence. "What is the thing that the Indians see?" Unanimous answer: they saw what had befallen, and a student guessed, "The subject of the verb is 'what.'" One student was troubled by this, however. "But if they see 'what had befallen,' then it's a direct object, and a direct object is a noun, and a noun is just one word," he asserted. This was better than I'd hoped. "You've discovered the most difficult concept to master in grammar. A group of words can act like a noun, an adjective, or an adverb." Several students insisted that this was impossible, based on what they had learned the previous year, when parts of speech were memorized in isolation, away from such messy real-life examples as this. "We'll run into this many more times this year. When we see it, you'll recognize it. Tuck that away for later while we look just at verbs." We moved on to the other verbs they'd found. I asked students what stood out when they looked at our list of S+Vs. To my delight, many felt that "Indians seeing" did not make sense the way the other examples did. I asked, "What do the Indians actually do in the sentence?" There was unanimous agreement that they "sat." So what did "seeing" tell us? "Do you have a theory?" I asked. Hands waved. In this format, prior knowledge could help, but insight might trump it. Students who hadn't scored well in sixth grade grammar waved hands as enthusiastically as those who had aced grammar quizzes. As students offered competing theories, I smiled. I encouraged those diverse theories as Constance Weaver advises. She describes how, for example, a typical child develops a theory that -ed makes every verb past tense. When the child says, "I runned," she's testing her own rule. The child's theory is a good start; more experience will teach her to modify her rule (Weaver 60). So I entertained "wrong" theories and showed students more examples to modify them. A traditional grammar book would explain the rule first, give students twenty examples that all fit the rule. Exceptions and complications would be segregated in a later chapter so as not to confuse the students. By that method, I would be doing verbs in September, subordinate clauses in January, and verbals in May. Yet students were reading texts with verbals and subordinate clauses every day. They needed the knowledge now, and, right away, they figured it out for themselves. A student guessed that seeing describes the Indians while they sat down, and others agreed. Another used knowledge from sixth grade and asked, "Is it an adjective?" I asked if that theory satisfied everyone. Others said that it didn't seem like other adjectives they knew. We all agreed: it looked like a verb, it could be a verb, but it didn't "go" with its subject, and it described the subject as an adjective would do. I wrote "verbal" on the board. "Students, you have discovered 'verbals.' From now on, if it looks like a verb but it has no subject, that's what it is. Are there other verbals?" Students searched the text and saw state of suffering. It's a state of something, so suffering was a noun. So I added to the board that verbals could act as adjectives or nouns. "Write this down in your grammar folders," I instructed. A typical grammar book gives a definition, gives illustrations, and drills. Here we had worked out the what and even the how of a concept before giving it a name. During the next twenty minutes, the lesson deepened from little grammar to big grammar. When we discussed the piece as a whole, it struck students at first that the piece broke down stereotypes of Indians and Europeans as enemies. But one student objected. The author, he said, is despicably ungrateful. I asked what in the text made him think this. He pointed where Indians sympathize with suffering Spaniards. The author comments, "It was strange to see these men, wild and untaught, howling like brutes over our misfortunes." We guessed that "brute"was derogatory; the dictionary showed that it implied "beast." Later, though the Indians are hospitable, the author adds that the Spaniards accepted kindness with "no joy," convinced they would be sacrificed in the morning. We saw two levels in the text, then: what happened, and how the author described it. We agreed that his language showed him to be unprepared to deal with Indians as full human beings. Increasing Complexity Finding verbs and their subjects became routine. We practiced figuring out unfamiliar words starting from their function in a sentence and then looking at other clues to meaning. After a few routine questions about little grammar, my worksheets now posed less cut-and-dried questions about big grammar. For example, we read a speech given by Benjamin Franklin in favor of the Constitution. Students used little grammar as a tool to figure out what constituents, general, and partisans meant in context. My worksheet asked for each word, "If the word is a noun, is it a person? If an adjective, does it seem to show a positive or negative quality, a physical quality, or something else? If a verb, is it transitive, intransitive, or a linking verb? Do you see a familiar root in it? Guess the definition; confirm your guess with the dictionary." After these little grammar questions, students worked in groups on big grammar, and I introduced the term "rhetoric." They looked for techniques Franklin uses to persuade his audience. Students compiled a good list: He starts by respecting the views of his opponents; he asks questions that they're bound to answer his way (I said they had discovered "rhetorical questions"); he appeals to his own experience; he acts humble, "apt...to doubt [his] own judgement"; and he uses logical argument. Clash of Perceptions, Clash of Assessments Yet, by mid-semester, the course bogged down in questions of little grammar, and, more to the point, questions of my own authority. The problem was not so much grammar in context as a method, but the fact that my course was still to be evaluated by whether it got the "same results" as the other grammar classes. I was feeling very satisfied with our progress. We had touched on the crux of any grammar course, distinguishing main clauses from their modifiers. We had practiced word attack. We were using both of these skills to de-code hard sentences. More importantly, from my point of view, we were building a vocabulary for appreciating rhetoric, and we had seen how there was more to read in a text than just its overt message. Indeed, from my point of view, all was well in our class. But the students' perception of the course so far was different. When I asked students for feedback, I heard few specific positive comments and a lot of negatives. Students missed the textbook approach. Their friends in other grammar classes had proceeded in orderly fashion from one page to the next, totting up dozens of examples of each concept; they'd played review games; they'd taken quizzes and moved on to new topics. In my class, however, we "just read" things from the history text, and we were "still on verbs," and we didn't have units or tests. In a grammar text, once a student finishes a unit that gives him trouble, he can be rid of it and hope to do better on a different unit; but in my course, a student asked me plaintively mid-year, "When are we going to stop doing clauses?" A text book prints the definitions and rules right there on the page; but in my class I allowed more than one correct way to look at problems, and many in the class wished I'd just say, "No, that's wrong, so memorize this." I saw the little grammar details sinking in gradually, while I also saw improvement in the students' reading and writing. They were reading difficult material with better understanding and were writing with clauses and phrases. But to the students, reading and writing were not grammar, and their teacher was letting them down. More and more I found that I was having a problem of authority. By "authority," I mean both perception of expertise and ability to lead. For twenty years, I've been a teacher who, in one student's words, is "strict, but it doesn't feel strict." But in this one class, every meeting brought some kind of confrontation or uproar. For the first part of the year, I blamed this on scheduling - I met these kids at the end of every day when, as one put it, "My mind is outta here." I also blamed it on "chemistry," explosive combinations of students. Indeed, a boy who made trouble with a student in other classes as well this one was soon separated out of the class, providing some relief. Still, the mix was volatile. I'd always managed difficulties like this before, so I had to blame myself. I vacillated as I wondered how much to let students wander into theories and side-questions, and how far to take control and direct the lesson. Another part of the story that I learned later, second-hand, was that many of my students spoke derisively of my teaching outside of class, taking my unwillingness to dictate and define as ignorance. All of these feelings came to the fore when I made the mistake of giving my students a test that the other classes had just taken. My colleagues and I were interested to know if my methods were indeed getting the same results as theirs. I had only one qualm, that my students had not practiced drill. Still, they had certainly done this kind of testing in sixth grade, and I saw no trouble with the content of the questions. Of terms on the test, linking, transitive, intransitive, direct object, indirect object, predicate adjective and predicate nominative, my students and I had routinely used all but the last two, as I preferred the more general term complement. It seemed a small thing to tell students, "If the complement is an adjective, label it p.a., and if it's a noun, label it p.n." But my students were not prepared for the dilemmas they faced. For example, they ran into sentences such as these: (a.) Red Riding Hood was a girl. (b.) She was walking through the woods. (c.) She became hungry. In (a), was is a linking verb, and girl a predicate nominative. In (b), students were meant to see was walking as an intransitive verb, walking plus its helping verb was. But my students had been working with verbals. Might walking be a verbal? Might was link walking to the subject? During my class, both theories would have been encouraged, as the distinction makes no practical difference. In fact, a good writer probably would treat walking as a verbal to combine these choppy sentences: "Walking through the woods, a girl named Red Riding Hood became hungry." On this quiz, however, there was no room for discussion. Up to then, I'd used formative assessments - one-to-three question "quizzes" and discussions - for I expected their knowledge of little grammar to be work-in-progress for the whole year. Now, without warning, my students faced a summative assessment, and one that did not match the philosophy and daily practices of their instructional program. For the first time, there was supposed to be only one right answer, and they might fail if they didn't find it. So when I distributed these forty sentences to label, I faced a teacher's nightmare. Within a few minutes, many of the students quit, pencils down, waving hands for help, rolling eyes at each other while they waited. While some had no trouble at all, others had labeled every noun "p.n.," every adjective "p.a.," and all verbs "linking verbs." Resentment bubbled up in the class because "you haven't taught us any of this." Partial Rehabilitation After my mistake, I moved little grammar to the foreground of class. I had learned that "getting the same results" on the traditional form of assessment meant working at least some of the time within that traditional framework. Besides, the students perceived that we trailed the other classes, and I myself was unwilling to leave the mess of that "linking verb" test behind. I had to mop up. We re-considered the terms on the test and re-took it with better results. Soon after, when the other classes spent two weeks memorizing irregular verbs in three tenses, so did we. When English teachers of upper grades complained of pronoun errors, we worked through dozens of sentences choosing who or whom, I or me. When standardized testing approached, we practiced finding one error or "D. no error" in dozens of examples, using the same format as the test. I instituted a regular short quiz to reinforce the concepts we had studied. On Fridays, I instituted "grammar Olympics" for teams of students racing to identify errors in paragraphs, to find words from phonetic spellings in the dictionary, to finger the "odd man out" in lists of words or phrases, and to create the longest sentence. All of these partly restored the students' confidence that we were keeping up with their classmates. Still, I used constructivist methods to introduce concepts or to answer questions. "Constructivist" principles flow from the observation that learning-to-last "involves not the mastery of isolated facts, but the construction of concepts," and that the process of learning is "idiosyncratic," "gradual," "non-linear" even though instruction may be presented in a linear fashion. (Weaver 153). In my class, we compared examples, generated theories about them, and then applied the grammatical terms. For example, I wrote on the board Marc sneezed and posed a paradox, "We can add something to this to make it less than a complete sentence: What?" Soon we had answers: while Marc sneezed, before Marc sneezed, that Marc sneezed, and Marc, who sneezed.... In a few minutes, we had compiled a long list of words that make clauses subordinate. I asked if all these words were alike, and students saw two categories that I afterwards labeled "relative pronouns" and "subordinate conjunctions." I worked those terms into the next few daily quizzes, each of which had something old, something new, some little grammar, some big grammar. Students were averaging 70% or higher on these little quizzes, sometimes missing the new thing early in the week but catching on by week's end. After the short quiz, we'd move on to read and write about a text from history or from some other source such as a news magazine or the school's newpaper. I felt that we had at last found a workable routine, though the low proportion of our time spent on big grammar disappointed me. I hoped eventually to give students a tough text to read and to have them explicate it in writing, without blanks to fill. Shortly after Marc sneezed, near the end of the semester, a collision with a speeding car put me in the hospital. When I hobbled back to grammar class, I found stacks of worksheets and quizzes on my desk left by the substitute. As I leafed through those, a student remarked, "We learned more grammar in the last three weeks than you taught us all year." I asked what they had learned. "We memorized all the prepositions and subordinate conjunctions." "Do you remember them now?" I asked. With a sheepish grin, he admitted that he couldn't think of one. I took this issue to the whole class. Stewing for weeks in my wheelchair about the beating my authority had taken in this class, I felt determined to give myself and my curriculum some rehabilitation. I reminded students how Marc sneezed, and we quickly re-generated that list of subordinate clauses and relative pronouns. I brought out the quiz we'd taken the day before my accident. Like others in the series, its questions concerned clauses, verbs, and common errors drawn from their own papers. "You already know the hardest concepts in grammar. Because you're getting it from reading and writing, you've already learned things that the other classes haven't, and you'll keep practicing things that the other classes won't see again." After class, a few students made a point of assuring me that they appreciated this approach, now that they understood what it was! It was a turning point: at least my authority in the sense of my expertise was more firmly established, as students got a clearer idea of why I drew answers from them instead of telling them answers. Still, moving forward with this class continued to be a struggle second semester. So long as I kept all students busy with a quiz or with marking up a text, we had the productive peace to which I was accustomed in other classes. When some "got it" instantly and others did not understand, and when some wanted to argue points of grammar with me or with classmates, then some were bored, others frustrated, some impatient, while some sought distraction any way they could find it. The further we moved into the year, the more I resorted to teacher-centered control via worksheets and, yes, to asking students question after question from a workbook. In a class survey, some students told me that this was stultifying. Others said it was fun, as they felt like they were learning from other peoples' mistakes. For me, it was a cop-out, an expedient, and a respite from chaos. What Might Have Been That the students did not understand the approach for much of the year is a great failure of communication. That students neither knew what to expect from week to week, nor shared a clear goal, breaks principles I learned twenty years ago in my first classroom. What might have been, if I had worked these essential elements right? I had a glimpse of it near the end of the year. The epitome of all that worked best in the grammar-in-context approach coincided with the climax of the Elián Gonzalez story in the news. Students were eager to sound off about the controversy, and I promised them the chance to do so. "But first," I said, "let's master the facts." As we had done many times, we started class by reading and marking a document. This one was from a news service, purporting to tell different views of the Federal officers' taking the boy into custody. The article engrossed students, who frequently called me over to remark on facts that surprised them. As they read, they applied lessons from throughout the year. Students used context to crack hard words, little grammar to crack sentences crammed with adjective clauses and quotations. I circulated throughout the room, answering their questions with more questions, confirming their theories. As usual, they were to summarize the article in two parts. We had practiced this skill often. I would set students' summaries side-by-side on the overhead so that students could compare effective techniques in each others' work. It was a moment of collective "eureka" when they saw how a student used just a few verbals and one appositive to cut his sixty-word summary in half. So, with the Elián article, students were confident as they set about trying to work important facts around the essential ones into phrases and clauses. The next part of the assignment, as usual, was to comment on the author's rhetoric. As we discussed this, students saw that the overall structure of the article favored the Federal government's side to the story. The pattern began in the opening paragraph, where an accusation by the Miami relatives was subordinated to Janet Reno's interpretation. Column by column, the Justice Department got the last word. Students also picked up on the fact that as the article progressed, it moved further away from the people involved and toward distant commentators. Finally, I pointed students to an Internet bulletin board devoted to the issue. Here, they could see rhetoric of all types, opinions reaching to all extremes, a lot of it full of cheap shots, unsubstantiated claims, presumptuous rhetorical questions, and non-standard grammar. A little grammar unit interrupted, so we never followed up on that assignment the way I had hoped. I had hoped to have each student post a response to one of the commentaries, using facts in a reasoned reply. But I was asked just then to focus attention on distinguishing types of verbals, and the project was cut short. So long as it lasted, it did engage students in using everything we had studied all year. I wonder now, if I ever teach this course again, how I might start with this same sequence of activities: analysis, summary, and publishing a response. Implications: The Larger Context for "Grammar in Context" At the end of school year, I had to admit to myself that this course turned out to be mostly little grammar in isolation, not grammar in context. This has not diminished my belief in the promises of grammar in context, but it does show me that I have to take greater care to fit what I do into the culture of the school at large. Looking back, I see more clearly why my attempt to graft a little Weaver onto an English curriculum focused on basics didn't take and grow. Not only do I have to understand a great deal of what it means to teach grammar in context (just getting a content area book and moving from there does not equal "in context"), but I need the support of colleagues who are willing to try a different method with me. If I had it to do over again, I'd do several things differently starting with redefining the larger context of my grammar-in-context course. I thought of the readings as the backbone of the course - that's what would put the grammar in context; the students saw them as incidental. Whenever I felt we were on our way to a good discussion of a reading's content and style, questions about little grammar derailed it. At the end of the year, when I asked students to evaluate what had been both interesting and useful for the year, students across the spectrum of expertise rated lowest all activities connected to readings from history. On the other hand, students and I agreed that the most successful activities of the year involved their written responses to the texts. Students did learn to shoe-horn quoted phrases into their own arguments smoothly, with correct punctuation, to prove points. Colleagues in upper grades complain how students have trouble with that skill, but mine routinely did it well by early spring. Students also found it interesting and useful to use grammar techniques to compress long sentences and paragraphs into fewer words, and they enjoyed comparing others' summaries for effective technique, for unnecessary words, and for errors. Whenever we did this, I saw students across the range of expertise using discernment. For complicated sentences that we saw in real-life writings, all but two students agreed that learning how to find the main clause was a useful tool. Those two students maintained they never had trouble reading complicated sentences; others, however, said that finding the main verb and its subject "helped a lot" or most of the time. This concurred with my observation. Looking for the main verbs in complex sentences near the end of the year, some students still selected a subordinate verb or a verbal, but then corrected themselves without prompting. It's hard for me to imagine achieving these effects without the students' reading and discussing substantial texts. At the same time, while all students demonstrated the ability to cut a main clause out of the surrounding verbiage, many students needed constant coaching to identify the surrounding verbiage by name. Since the very first lesson with the Indian story, students had seen the terms verbal, gerund, participle, infinitive, adverb-noun-or-adjective clause every week. Yet, right up to the last week of class, I was still reminding students what a verbal is. When prompted, these same students did not hesitate to tell me that some verbal was the subject of a sentence, or that some clause told when something happened; but only after that prompting did they go the next step to say, "That verbal is a gerund," or "That's an adverb clause." Their need for coaching on these terms at the end of the year can't be blamed simply on my grammar-in-context methods, however. They had memorized subordinate conjunctions and identified them in worksheets and a final test during my absence; they had identified gerunds and participles in oral and written drill straight out of the old grammar book. And, of course, they had "discovered" these concepts in the history text as early as the fourth week of school. I'm facing here the same thing my colleagues have faced before me, that "some don't 'get it' even after repeated drill." But though they didn't apply the terms, students did get the essential skill: they could detect the abstract differences between one part of a sentence and another. Going a step further to apply a term with its abstract definition to part of the sentence seems to have been one level of abstraction too many. One particular example stands out, showing how understanding of a concept did not necessarily mean mastering the terminology of grammar, and vice-versa. We were looking at an example of a noun clause that I'd written on the board: Give the tickets to whoever wants them. A student identified the last three words as a noun, the object of a preposition. Parker said, "No, it has a verb in it, so it can't be a noun." Marc jumped in: "Look, if it said, Give the tickets to Bob, there'd be no problem. And if Bob wants the tickets, then Bob is equal to whoever wants them. So all those words are a noun, see?" Parker saw, and I was pleased to have that settled once and for all. But the very next week, Marc was frustrated on a quiz and asked, "What do you mean 'noun clause?' How can a bunch of words ever be a noun?" That disastrous linking verb test illustrates the same phenomenon: Monday, it was no problem to see that the word after was referred to the subject. Tuesday, identifying that word as a predicate nominative or predicate adjective seemed impossible to some students. In the end, my attempt to teach little grammar-sentence structure, parts of speech and usage-through our history text was no more successful than the traditional method of teaching grammar through a grammar book. Measured objectively by performance on quizzes, there was a range of success and failure in my class, as there was in the other classes. My colleague teaching eighth graders this year detects no difference between my group and those who had other teachers. Measured in frustration and the students' own sense that they weren't learning what they were supposed to learn, it was much less successful. Though teaching sentence structure and parts of speech via the history text seemed a failure, teaching usage in context was an unequivocal success. By the end of the year, students punctuated quotes, quotes-within-quotes, excerpts from quotes, words and phrases in a series, and multiple clauses correctly. I proudly announced in March that we no longer needed our weekly punctuation story exercise because everyone was making an A every time. As far as the success of teaching the big grammar-essay structure, points of an argument, and rhetorical devices-I'd say the continuing emphasis on having to make sure students would score well on traditional grammar tests kept us more focused on little grammar than I had anticipated. Therefore, I'm not sure the success of teaching the big grammar was a little more than incidental. I do hold on to the notion that students themselves recognized that understanding the structure of an argument helped them understand the content of the argument. That is a positive measure of success I'll hold onto. And perhaps that's the most important lesson I learned in this year-long experiment: that the measure of success must change as the strategies change, as philosophies shift, as pedagogy and practice reflect current theories and understandings. As we learn more about how students learn, we must be willing to revisit our assessment tools. When assessment and evaluation methods are designed hand-in-hand with curriculum and pedagogy, then the measure of success will be true. Sources Cited Schuster, Edgar H. "Reforming English Language Arts: Let's Trash the Tradition." Phi Delta Kappan. March 1999. 518-524. Vavra, Ed. "On Not Teaching Grammar." English Journal. November 1996. 32-37. Weaver, Constance. Teaching Grammar in Context. Porstmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1996.

top of page