Comments on: Teaching Grammar Effectively

By: Agnieszka Kajrukszto

Agnieszka Kajrukszto — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:10:25 +0000

Hi, I tried having students read each others work instead. It is harder to miss errors that way.

By: Jody Rosen

Jody Rosen — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:24:40 +0000

Suzanne’s suggestion about having students read their work out loud is one that I often rely on. This semester, we read the assigned reading aloud almost every day not only to keep us all thinking about the material, but also to hear what grammatical writing sounds like, and I’ve realized how inaccurate students’ readings are. I don’t expect every reading to be flawless, but I’ve begun to wonder if the inability to read aloud a grammatical sentence should tell me something about the students’ ears for grammar in their own writing.

By: Suzanne

Suzanne — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:25:13 +0000

It is a constant question; how to do the same material in different ways. Or even in a more effective way, though that seems to depend on each particular student.

In my basic speech classes, I used to have students re-script a speech by re-writing the grammar to give different oral emphasis. For Example, Mark Anthony’s speech in Julius Caesar,” Friends, Romans…” A student can make it sound and express something completely different simply by changing the grammar and punctuation. Or one activity the students always seem to love is taking a current political speech and correct the grammar or change the punctuation and see not only what it sounds like but what has happened to the main message of the speech.
It is fun way to get students to think about sentence structure and grammar in a way that can also help them when they come back to their own writing.

I would also add the old theatrical way of teaching almost everything, have students read their work out loud. This can also work wonders on students’ ability to hear the difference out loud.