Teaching About Words & Sentences & grammar & syntax & structure or whatever you want to call it, what a challenge.

Teaching About Words & Sentences & grammar & syntax & structure or whatever you want to call it, what a challenge. Sometimes I wonder why I am an English teacher when it comes to these details. Although I find some of Lindemanns’ ideas and exercises to be informative (whoops, passive voice), it is so difficult to help students with this aspect of writing. I consider myself to be a decent writer, but the grammar, not my passion – it is too logical to think about writing in this context, this is not to say that I have some sort of disdain for logical structures and such, however, it is very challenging for me to help my students with their grammar because I am by no means a grammatical expert. I don’t know where my classmates stand on this one, but I did not learn how to diagram sentences in grammar school and although I somewhat understand the difference between the active and the passive voice; it is difficult for me to help my students understand grammatical structure. I suppose I use the approach that Lindemann talks about at the close of chapter eleven because I tend to, “Whenever possible, base discussions of language on students’ writing instead of examples in textbooks” (186).

When I first started teaching I used grammar books, but found it to be so boring for both myself and the students, that I decided not to go that route. What I prefer to do is use student writing to point out and discuss grammatical errors with the students. Although I use grammatical jargon here and there when discussing strengths and weakness in student writing, I don’t use Strunk and White to guide my instrucation (I’ve tried to read it several times, but always feel too stupid to understand the content). I prefer the approach of asking questions such as: Does this make sense? Could you read that out loud for me? What did you mean here? How does this relate to that? And so on… Okay, maybe not the best approach, but I want my students to care about writing and expressing themselves, not diagramming a sentence. On the other hand, I gained something from reading some of Lindemanns’ theories about reasonable ways to approach grammatical issues by looking at student work and giving students’ methods to look at the errors of their grammatical ways that applies to their STYLE of writing, not some grammar book.