Teaching grammar for writing
Fit content and strategies to students

Since grammar underlies writing, teaching writing is always going to require you to do some grammar instruction. Fitting your teaching to students' needs is a more effective and efficient teaching strategy than following some educator's idea of age-appropriate instruction.

Beginning writers' grammar needs

Teaching beginning writers to use grammar correctly in their writing is very different from either

• Teaching grammar for assessment by standardized tests.

• Teaching grammar to competent writers.

Both those situations can use a different — and more traditional — teaching approach than you will need to teach beginning writers. (Information about teaching grammar for those purposes is on the writing mechanics thread.)

Not-yet-competent writers have far more to think about than either the test taker or the competent writer. Beginners have to think at every step about what do to next. Their heads are ready to explode with all the stuff they are trying to master. They have to ignore something, and that something will probably be grammar.

Just-in-time grammar teaching

Grammar is basic to writing, but we don't have to teach it before we teach writing. Our students know enough grammar to get started writing without further study. We can shape and refine their knowledge as we go. I call this just-in-time grammar teaching.

If you are going to be successful at teaching beginning writers to become competent writers, do as little grammar teaching as possible along with writing practice so as not to detract from students' learning the writing process.

Once students are competent writers, you can do some more formal grammar study to help them develop a wider repertoire of ways of constructing sentences.

Before teaching, identify essentials

What we must do before launching into teaching writing is to decide which grammar rules and concepts are essential for students to know to write competently. The list is surprisingly short: just 24 rules.

You need to know what the essentials are. (I'll help you there). Then you have to make sure students understand those essentials.

You may find, as I often do, that students can recite definitions and rules, even do well on standardized tests, and still have no clue how to apply the information in their own writing. That shouldn't happen, but it does, as I learned from a student with persistent sentence fragments.

Teaching grammar in writing context

Most of the grammar teaching you do as you are teaching writing should be focused on helping students correct errors in their own writing. Your primary tasks in teaching grammar are to

• Identify each student's habitual errors.

• Help each student track his/her own errors.

• Teach students how to identify sentences in their own writing to check for their habitual errors.

• Teach students to correct errors after composing.

Some students will be scared to wait until the end of a process to correct their work. (Research shows that poor writers get hung up correcting writing mechanics to the neglect of more major tasks such as planning and organizing their writing.)

Another bunch of students will not correct their work at all. (Isn't that what teachers get paid to do?)

It will take all your ingenuity to get both groups to edit their work at the end of every writing stage. Thus speaks the voice of experience.

Incidentally, I recommend you use the less familiar terms edit and editing instead of words like correct and corrections. It is easier to get students to change their behavior if you call the desired behavior by a different name.

Let grammar serve writing

Because students are able to do well on a standardized test of grammar knowledge does not mean they will write grammatically. An ability to pick the sentence that uses whom correctly is of limited use to students who don't write sentences requiring the use of whom.

When you are teaching writing to beginners — those who are not yet competent expository writers — try to limit your teaching of grammar to the few essentials students need to write so they can be understood.

Once students achieve competence, you can go beyond the basics.