Students acquire a sense
of how subjects and verbs function from listening to others talk.
What they do not absorb naturally is the lingo they need to:
To achieve those skills, they need some grammar study.
Teaching writers' grammar
Your grammar teaching for beginning writers should focus on helping
them develop a vocabulary for talking about their tacit
grammatical knowledge (given grammar).
To enable students to talk about sentences and use grammar references
dealing with sentences, you need to pull out students' ingrained
grammatical knowledge and help them associate that knowledge with
four grammar labels:
-
Subject
-
Verb
-
Main verb
- Auxilliary (helping) verb
Students will already know how these grammar parts work, but
they may not know their names.
Using language is a bit like using a computer. You may know how
to use the picture thingy at the bottom of your screen but not
realize it has a name until you have have to talk to a computer
technician about a problem or read a help screen.
In the linguistic world, students use grammar thingies every
day, but they won't be able to solve grammar problems without
knowing the experts' name for those thingies. So you must teach
them to recognize the thingies to which terms like subjects
and verbs refer.
Here's how to go about that teaching task.
Isolate the main verb from its helpers
The first step to helping students develop a working grammar
vocabulary is to help them learn to find subjects and verbs. You
start with the main verb. The grammatical subject of the sentence
will be the subject of that verb.
Rei Noguchi has a neat trick for finding main verbs. The trick
separates main verbs from their helping verbs.
Noguchi uses two "frames," which are two fill-in-the-blank
sentences:
Frame A. They somehow got ___________ to ___________________.
Frame B. But it wasn't me who did the ____________-ing.
To use Noguchi's trick, take any declarative sentence. In the
first blank in frame A, put the appropriate pronoun
substitute for the subject of the sentence. Put the rest of
the sentence in the second blank.
If the second blank in frame A begins with the word be,
try to fill the blank in frame B with an appropriate word from
the original sentence. Two notes:
- Do this only if the second blank in A begins with
the word be.
- The word you put in frame B must appear in the second blank
in A.
If you can't figure out what to put into frame B, don't worry
about it. (Don't you find that direction encouraging?)
Example 1
Let's see how Noguchi's trick for finding subjects and verbs
works. Take this sentence:
The winners of the state elections and
the local elections will take office in January.
Plug in the required information in the frames, like this:
Frame A. They somehow got them
to take office in January.
Frame B. But it wasn't me who did the
take-ing.
The main verb in the sentence is take. The subject is
the winners. See how easy
it is to find subjects and verbs this way?
Example 2
Here's a second example sentence.
Whether Evan wants to or not, Joyce should
make him do homework before supper.
To identify the subjects and verbs, plug the required information
into the frames, like this:
Frame A. They somehow got her
to make him do homework before supper, whether Evan wants to
or not.
Frame B. But it wasn't me who did the
make-ing.
The main verb in the sentence is make.
The subject is Joyce.
If students try to make Evan be the subject, their Frame
A won't make sense. At best it will read
They somehow got him to want to or not Joyce should make him
do homework before supper.
Remember, it's OK to skip Frame B if you can't figure out what
to put there, but you must have a sensible statement in Frame
A.
Example 3
Students whose primary experience in identifying subjects and
verbs comes from worksheets may have the impression that a subject
is always one word.
Working with frames allows students to dissect grammatically
complex sentences from authentic texts (such as their textbooks
or their own writing) in which the subject is a whole string of
words instead of just one.
For example, look at this sentence. Although it is only 13 words,
it is very complex grammatically.
For Abraham Lincoln to win the 2008 election
now would be an impossibility.
If you asked students to put that material into the frames, their
first reaction will be to try this combination:
Frame A. They somehow got him to win
the 2008 election now would be an impossibility.
Frame B. But it wasn't me who did the
win-ing.
Frame A doesn't make any sense. (Remember, Frame A is the one
that must make sense.) So students have to find another alternative.
The correct response is:
A. They somehow got it to be an
impossibility.
B. But it wasn't me who did the ??-ing.
It
in frame A replaces the long phrase that is the complete subject:
for Abraham
Lincoln to win the 2008 election now.
The verb
is would be.
Students only have to do two or three sentences like that before
they understand that the subject of a sentence need not look anything
like a single-word noun.
All this business of identifying subjects and verbs seems very
complicated when you are reading it off a web page, but it becomes
clear quite quickly if you work it out with pencil and paper.
Use student teams for learning
Noguchi's
technique for finding subjects and verbs is suitable for pairs
or small groups of students to work on together. For many
students, hearing how the sentences sound makes grasping the underlying
grammar easier than trying to figure it out by visual inspection.
Approach this team activity as a process of discovery.
Students usually assume that the purpose of doing any classroom
exercise is to get the right answer. However, in writing, as in
science and math, sometimes the difficult work is finding out
which answers are wrong and why.
