Blog #4 Integrating Language Instruction into Authentic Reading and Writing

How do language and grammar enliven our writing?

The most important boon that grammar provides to our writing is that grammar makes things understandable. The most pressing issue I see with my sixth graders’ essays is that they use run on sentences all the time. Every time I assign a writing project, I get responses that read like they were written by the Micromachine Man. (Maybe I should explain that one – He was in a bunch of commercials in the 80s and talked really fast so that he could fit a ton of words into a thirty-second advertisement.) My students like to write without punctuation separating sentences as if their words were on a highway. Any comma or period would cause a word jam due to the constant pouring in of incoming next ideas. They don’t yet know how to emphasize impactful ideas using the negative space in the pauses around them.

When I was young, grammar came naturally to me. Math and science were like a vast tundra that my brain didn’t want to suffer through, shivering. But writing English was a walk in the park. Grasping onto lessons quickly, I was able to easily write in whatever format would please my instructor. However, this isn’t the kind of instruction I want to give my students. When Harry Noden suggests sharing grammatical lessons with our students, he isn’t saying that the students need to write exactly the way he does. Instead, he’s giving students tools that can improve their personal writing. If a student were to take to heart Noden’s grammar instruction, they would have a serious advantage over those students who studied traditional grammar style. Noden’s way leaves space for students to be creative. The students will be encouraged to keep their own voices when writing, but they’ll also be empowered to add things like absolutes, appositives, participles, and parallel structure. In this way, our students will end up more like master painters than precisely synchronized literary automatons. I’m not interested in sanitized writing that comes out rule-following but uninspired. But even Picasso had to start with figure drawing and still life practice.

How will I design ELA instruction that helps my students achieve these goals?

So how do I implement Noden-style strategies to solve my students’ problems with run on sentences? The answer came to me at the KATE conference. I believe the instructor was Ms. Fox who showed us how to teach grammar by having the students identify conventions and then practice the techniques themselves before we add more complex ways of doing things. I’ve already started this in my classroom. Whereas we were already telling them how to write correctly, I didn’t think we were giving the students enough chance to use the lessons in their own writing. Now English class has become more of a writing lab, and I think that is for the students’ benefit.

 

Works Cited:

Noden, Harry. Image Grammar Teaching Grammar as Part of the Writing Process. Heinemann, 2011.