Teaching grammar for testing
is not like teaching grammar for writing

To hear some people talk, you'd think teaching grammar is all there is to teaching writing.

Those same people usually lump a myriad of writing mechanics like punctuation, spelling, capitalization, usage, and even formatting under the heading of grammar.

Of course, there's more to writing than grammar — even if you add in all those other writing mechanics that aren't grammar.

Good writing teachers draw a distinction between

• Teaching grammar application to students' own writing, which has its own thread on this website

• Teaching formal grammar for test assessment, also called traditional or formal grammar.

Teaching the two kinds of content is about as similar as teaching art history and teaching a oil painting. Savvy writing teachers know the difference.

Teach prewriting grammar well

A relatively few concepts and rules in grammar (and its cousin, punctuation) should be taught before embarking on teaching writing systematically. Those few items, however need to be taught thoroughly.

You won't know from looking at results of multiple choice tests or fill-in the blank exercises whether your students understood the grammar you taught well enough to apply it in their own writing.

Even if you have not yet begun a program of teaching nonfiction writing, you can evaluate how well you've taught grammar concepts by using informal writing as an assessment tool. If you want to see how to use informal writing prompts for formative assessment of grammar concepts, check out my ebook Shape Learning, Reshape Teaching.

If students' responses to your informal prompts show they didn't understood what you thought you were teaching, teach the material again. Keep teaching the grammar material different ways until all students master it.

Thoroughly teaching grammar students need for writing dramatically decreases the number of writing mechanics errors in their work. The time and effort you need to spend on teaching and grading also decreases dramatically.

Another area of writing mechanics you can teach before you begin teaching writing is usage. Many usage conventions are the same in oral and written English, so you can drill on those before embarking on a writing program.

Exercises are not teaching grammar

Having students read a text, do exercises, or complete worksheets is not teaching, but presenting. Some students will learn enough from a presentation to use the information in their writing, but many will not.

My experience has been that fully half of college students did not learn third grade grammar well enough to apply concepts like sentence and subject.

Assessing post-competence grammar

Competent writers need to learn enough grammar (and other writing mechanics) so they can use reference materials to get answers to their writing questions. The minimal grammar vocabulary they need to learn to write competently will not suffice.

Competent writers can also benefit from activities that show them alternative ways of crafting sentences. Sentence combining activities (or sentence deconstruction activities, including diagramming) can be useful.

Once students have achieved writing competence, you can go back to teaching more of the grammar students need to know for standardized tests, if you see that is necessary.

Research shows students who mastered the writing process do better on standardized tests even without any instruction or coaching in test-taking skills than those who were not competent writers.

I suspect that learning to write creates an awareness of writing that allows students to learn by seeing what good writers do.