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.