Home : Teaching grammar
for writing
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 slavishly following a curriculum.
This thread includes writing mechanics topics that are not, strictly
speaking, part of grammar, such as punctuation and homonyms. They
are here because they cause more problems for writers than for test-takers.
Beginning writers' grammar needs
Teaching beginning writers to use grammar correctly
in their writing is very different from either:
Beginning writers 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.
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.
You will have one group of students who think all there is to writing
is correcting errors, and another that see no value whatsoever to
correcting their own errors. You must help both groups understand
and apply a sensible approach to error correction.
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
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.
The procedures for teaching grammar for writing that I describe
on these pages are those I use in classes I teach.
My students asked for help to keep on developing
their ability to correct their own grammar errors after our course
together ended. The material I wrote for those students is now available to others an e-book:
Grammar Abusers Anonymous . The book guides mature high school, college and adult students in learning how to study grammar using their own error-riddled writing as practice exercises.
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