Blog #3

Every student is going to make errors, especially when they’re still learning new words or concepts. In Sudden Possibilities: Porpoises, Eggcorns, and Error, Darren Crovitz explains some specific errors that students have made and some alternative ways to react to these errors. This is done while focusing on what the student is actually learning; contrary to what many teachers do. He explains in his writing that “Language is learned through a process of experimentation, error-making, and self-correction”. Within this statement, he expresses the importance of having students realize their mistakes and fix them on their own—self-correction.

Crovitz continues on and describes Daily Oral language. He talks about how in a typical classroom, this may not be the best way to teach young students grammar. I agree with the points he makes on this. Daily Oral language is definitely a way to present students with grammatical errors and to have these students address the errors. A downfall of this technique is that students are working on mistakes made by others rather than their own mistakes… which is what they need to work on the most. Individual students are going to make their own individual mistakes. DOL is directed at a generic audience while teaching off of one’s individual work is personalized and will likely present better results. Crovitz writes that many of the sentences presented by DOL contain errors that are easily recognizable, and for the students, this makes it much easier to find the errors within. [Compound sentence: Two independent clauses brought together by a comma and the word ‘and’]. He also makes the point that continuous negative feedback can cause a student to the opposite of better. Giving up. [Rhetorical Fragment with no subject]. No student likes to hear that they are making mistakes over and over again, and if this is the only feedback that they are receiving then they will likely stop trying new things and just stick to what they already know. [Compound sentence: two independent clauses combined by a comma and the coordinating conjunction ‘and’]. Students shouldn’t let their mistakes drive them to feeling forced to stay within their comfort zone and as teachers, it’s important that we make sure this never happens.

My group’s alternative to the DOL exercise focuses on constructing more interesting sentences. In a typical DOL lesson, students are asked to focus on what is already wrong in a sentence and to fix it. Contrary to the DOL, our lesson will ask the students to take a very basic simple sentence and to turn it into more by adding to it in different ways. At the beginning of our lesson we are going to give two different examples. Starting with two simple sentences, “The dog played with the ball” and “The students had a lot of homework”, we are going to use different grammatical techniques to make them more interesting. This will include the addition of prepositional phrases, new verbs, adjectives, and more. Following our examples and the explanations that accompany then, we will assign a simple sentence to the class and have them create a more interesting, more complex sentence. I hope the students take from this lesson that there are so many different ways to write a sentence, and they have the right to explore them all. They can choose what they want to experiment with. Since all of the students in the class are working on the same sentence, they can learn from each other as well.

Crovitz, Darren. "Sudden Possibilities: Porpoises, Eggcorns, and Error." The English Journal 100.4 (2015): n. pag. National Council of Teachers of English. Web.

Exploring the two sources about grammar and the use of it in everyday language compared to the use of it on written paper, I was informed on other points of view on the subject. Linda Christensen wrote an intriguing article on the teaching on the standard of English. In many ways I felt as though I could relate to this article. If not from solely first experience, I have been classmates with many people who have struggled to hit the “standard” that many feel needs to be met in the United States. It is important, as Christensen said, to make sure students know the benefits that being able to follow this standard will bring but I appreciated how she emphasized that it does matter how these students are taught the lesson. The very last sentence in this article says “I was an outsider, a foreigner in their world, my students won’t be”(Christensen,104) which, in my opinion, says a lot coming from someone who now teaches grammar.

In “Grammar Alive!” they talk about how different everyday conversations are from correctly written out grammar. This isn’t emphasized quite as much in the article by Christensen but I think that they are both making the same point; students are all different when it comes to their grammar. [Two closely related sentences joined by a semicolon]. Different students may need help with different things. The authors write “...It is not language itself that is the crucial issue here; it is people, and the match between the language they use and the circumstances they find themselves in” (Haussamen, 11). I completely agree with the emphasis the book puts here on how important it is to know the different kinds of languages that should be used in different circumstances but it isn’t necessary to always use perfect grammatical sentences or proper tones.

In the second chapter the book also talks about some examples of standard English that some people may find no problems with but can be very confusing to students that just may not understand them yet. One example in particular is the word you. The book says “Stand English requires us to use you regardless of whether we are addressing a whole group or just an individual within that group, an inconvenience that we learn to adjust to”(Haussamen, 12). I like this example in particular because personally, I have heard many different things from different teachers throughout my education career about it. I had one extremely intelligent English teacher in high school but he scolded us for ever using the word “you”—which was a commonly used word in many of our vocabularies. I very rarely used the word throughout my freshman/sophomore years of high school but looking back I think he made a mistake in telling us to never use the word in general. As the book says in the quote above, the word you is “required” in standard English. The article by Christensen also relates to this; she had one bad experience with being taught a lesson when she was young and now she is hesitant to use certain words that she has perfected but still feels unsure about.[Two closely related sentences joined by a semicolon]. The word “you” could be one of these words for some people because they may get confused when they attempt to use it and then not use it at all—this is a mistake because this word is required in standard English! [emphasis of an important point].

Christensen, Linda. Reading, Writing, and Rising up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power if the Written Word. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2000.

Haussamen, Brock. Grammar Alive!: A guide for Teachers. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. Print.