Sentence combining in room 105

The most surprising statement so far in the Lindemann book is that some studies show that input from English teachers has no beneficial effect on our students’ writing.  Another radical idea in the book is that doing grammar drills, likewise, has no positive effect. 

Another surprise in chapter 10 was that K. W. Hunt wrote that all we need to do to teach writing is to do sentence combining drills.  Today is the first day of the new semester so I tried out the idea.  I had another surprise.  My students weren’t as good at it as I imagined.  The sentences they combined were, “She was our Latin teacher.  We were in high school.  She was tiny.  She was a birdlike woman.  She was swarthy.  She had dark eyes.  Her eyes were sparkling.  Her hair was graying.”  Easy, right? No.  Most started, “When we were in high school….”  I don’t know why they started like that.  Two students gave her a name.  One student wrote, “When we were in High School, Ms. Lu was our Latin teacher.  Her eyes sparkle and were dark brown.  Her a tiny and swarthy.”  It looks like we need to do some work on this topic.

The next topic will be “cumulative sentences”.  I can’t wait to see what they come up with using this model.