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Amy Benjamin
Hendrick Hudson High School
Montrose, New York
President, NCTE Assembly on the Teaching of English Grammar
I teach grammar for two reasons. The first is that grammar instruction gives students metalanguage, "language about language." Having this, students can learn a great deal more about how to communicate clearly than they can without it. The second reason is that students are interested in language-its changes and variations-and they feel gratified to learn how it works and what it can do. Whether I am teaching Shakespeare or contemporary literature, oratory or poetry, writing as a means to learn or writing through process, the effort that I've put into teaching grammar pays off.
But aside from its utilitarian purpose, grammar instruction is fun. Everyone seems interested in language on some level. As John Crow of Florida Southern College points out, properly structured grammar instruction is highly brain-compatible because the brain is a pattern-seeing device and grammar is a patterned system (email message to the author 5 Jan. 2006). If we go with the natural ability of the human brain to make meaning through patterns, we can easily teach grammar and have it be something that delights students because of how much of the system they come to us already knowing. I use visuals and manipulatives to teach English grammar as a slot-and-filler system: students literally build sentences with color-coded blocks. We all know how much young children love to learn through colors and blocks. Well, secondary students (and adult learners) love this, too.
The English language, despite its complexity and flexibility, is simple when we understand it through patterns: With just a handful of sentence patterns, with expandable and shrinkable noun phrases and verb phrases, we can accomplish the most extraordinary of human capabilities: communication.
The better to communicate: that is my most compelling reason for teaching grammar.
Carol Jago
Santa Monica High School, California
My son just received a performance evaluation of his first eight weeks on his first real, career job. The communications section of the rubric began with, "Written communications are logically organized, have appropriate level of detail and are free from spelling errors and grammatical mistakes." He is working for a financial consulting firm doing internal audit. The expectation is...