Introduction: How this blog works

Instead of focusing on learning the jargon of a grammarian, this blog focuses on how sentences work, considering words as they work on the context of phrases and clauses as a way to better understand patterns.

Knowing each and every trivial term—pronominal adjective comes to mind as a great example—is not actually a life skill. Highly specified grammatical terms are only helpful to people who already understand how to decode complex sentences. Such terms give you a shorthand to discuss a sentence without having to spell out the relationships between words, but for the terms to be useful, you have to understand those relationships first. For many students, the long list of grammar terms is confusing and overwhelming and becomes an obstacle to understanding instead of an aid.

"sign" by TinkerBells is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

For grammar instruction to be effective, we have to remove unnecessary obstacles. The fact is, with a very small handful of terms, it is possible to decode and analyze even the most complex sentence. Knowing which words work together in a sentence to communicate an idea is a matter of logic, not of grammatical jargon. It’s that simple. Let’s not get bogged down in the details. Instead, let’s get carried away with sentences.

The goal of the grammar instruction presented in this blog is to get students looking at whole sentences as quickly as possible, in all their great big messiness.

Every English teacher has had the experience of attempting to teach simple concepts in grammar and then asking students to examine what appear to be simple sentences only to run into complex problems like noun clauses as the object of the preposition or some other grammar riddle that is above and beyond the aspects of a sentence they have addressed. One solution is to work harder to make the sentences used in grammar exercises simpler and more focused. Another solution—the one I favor—is to lean in to all the messiness. Do deep dives into sentences. Gradually build a vocabulary of complex grammar in the context of understanding how people communicate.

This blog is for people who speak, read, and write English fluently but who wish to improve their reading comprehension and writing clarity through better understanding of sentence structure. “Sentence Basics” is a crash course on identifying the main parts of a clause and distinguishing independent and dependent clauses. Once you understand these key concepts, you can switch gears to the heart of the program, The Sentence of the Day, which is the format of the regular, ongoing blog entries. The only way to incorporate the vocabulary and concepts of grammar into your framework of language is through constant use and repetition, which is why I find the Sentence of the Day model to be so effective.

In my own classroom, as I was developing my method of teaching grammar, I accomplished this by beginning this year with five or six lessons to cover the material I’ve presented here as “Sentence Basics,” before shifting to the repeated practice of “The Sentence of the Day.” Each day, when students entered the room, the day’s sentence was already up. Students copied the sentence into the grammar section of their notebook and picked out main parts. They got settled into the day’s activity while I took care of the various housekeeping tasks that come with starting class, and then we went over the daily sentence, reviewing concepts and adding new ones as they arise. I always posted my PowerPoint presentation on our class portal so students could access the information from home if they were absent or if they wanted to review.

There are three main Sentence of the Day Activities:

• Understanding Grammar. These are sentences students study to understand grammar patterns and to learn to recognize patterns quickly and accurately for improved reading comprehension and reading fluidity.
• Model Sentences. These are sentences that students will study and then imitate in their own essays to learn to incorporate variety and complexity to their own sentence patterns.
• Find the Faults. These are sentences that contain errors. Students follow the steps of picking out the main parts of the sentence in order to uncover grammatical and stylistic problems in sentences. Then they suggest ways to fix the errors.

I am building this blog as I move through the teaching year. New information will be added as I am able to create it. If you have suggestions, by all means, send me an email.

Sentence Basics Lesson 1: Verbs

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Introduction: Making Grammar Instruction Useful

The goals of an effective study of grammar are three-fold: to improve one’s ability to decode sentences when reading; to develop clarity and precision in one’s writing; to build a vocabulary to discuss grammar.

Unfortunately, most traditional grammar textbooks fail at all three right from the very first chapter, because most grammar books spent a lot of time focusing on parts of speech. Students read about all the types of nouns, types of verbs, types of modifiers, types of connecting words, types of pronouns, lists and lists of terms, many of which sound similar but have radically different meanings and usage, many of which have tricky spellings, and all of which are full of notable exceptions to the rule.

The fact is, you don’t need to be able to identify every part of speech to understand the building blocks of a sentence. What’s more, you can’t understand parts of speech without context, because words take on different roles in different sentences. Thus, how can you learn parts of speech without sentences?

Let me give an example. Perhaps a student is looking at an exercise in which he is supposed to identify the part of speech of the underlined words in a series of sentences. He reads the first sentence, “I swim every Tuesday.” Easy. Verbs name actions. Swimming is an action, so it’s a verb. The next day, back at his workbook, same task, he sees the sentence, “Swimming is a fun activity.” Without a thought, he records his answer, verb, because he knows “swim” is an action and verbs name action. When his teacher asks for a volunteer to answer that question for the class, he proudly raises his hand and proclaims “swimming” is a verb. His teacher tilts her head at him, a tell-tale gesture that says, “Are you sure?” And he is. Swimming is an action, so swimming is a verb.

“In this case, Timmy, swimming is the subject of the sentence, so it is acting as a noun. It’s a form of a verb, but it isn’t acting like a verb, so it’s a gerund.”

“Sam” by Dave_Gray is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

Now the teacher has said a whole bunch of things, none of which fully make sense because Timmy has no framework for words acting in ways other than what he has memorized. He knows what nouns are and what verbs are. He has memorized that nouns can be the subject of the sentence, but he doesn’t really know what that means, nor does he understand how an action be a noun, because he has learned that nouns are people, places, things, and ideas. He’s not sure how you spell gerund or why you’d want to. He marks the answer wrong in his book and the teacher moves on.

Imagine Timmy’s misery the next day, when he stumbles on the following sentence in his workbook: “I believe we’ll get along swimmingly.” He’s never before heard of swimming have an “ly” on the end, nor, in context, can he figure out what it means. Yesterday “swimming” was a noun, the day before “swim” was a verb, and now swim doesn’t mean swim at all and has a “ly” on the end. What in the world does it all mean? He has no idea, but he just wants to finish the exercise so he writes “verb” on the line in his workbook and moves on.

Understanding grammar is recursive. With each new added bit of knowledge, we have to loop back to previous knowledge, adding details and modifying what we’ve previously understood, expanding our framework of knowledge. Memorizing lists of types of words doesn’t help build any framework at all. All the information is segmented in isolated lists that are hard to connect. Instead of starting by studying parts of speech one at a time, we need to dive right into whole sentences.

That’s right, whole sentences, without spending much time distinguishing nouns from verbs, because actually, as the swimming example illustrates, without sentences, no one can tell nouns from verbs.

Introduction Part 3: How This Blog Works

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Introduction: Why Grammar

“Good English journal” 
by ChaosToArt is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Ask any seasoned high school English teacher how he or she feels about teaching grammar, and you’ll likely get a grunt and an eye roll in reply. If asked to elaborate on that eloquent gesture, you’ll probably get an answer like this: “They just don’t get it. I don’t know why they don’t get it. We go over it, we do exercises, and then they fail the quiz.” In response to the “I taught it, you missed it, now flunk it” approach, many teachers have given up on formal grammar instruction at the high school level, and, it would seem, at the middle school level as well. The National Council of Teachers of English has been discouraging isolated grammar instruction since 1985.



What’s more, grammar is not on many state standardized tests, such as the Massachusetts MCAS exams, so is grammar instruction even needed? The knee jerk reaction for people like me, people who went to parochial school and had grammar drilled into our brains from earliest youth, people who enjoy geeking out over a long and winding, grammatically perfect sentence, is that of course students need it. The more nuanced answer is that it depends what you mean by grammar instruction. If you mean memorizing dozens of grammatical terms and recognizing them in isolated sentences in workbooks, then no, they don’t. If you mean developing an understanding of how ideas are assembled into sentences and of how sentences tend to follow recognized patterns, then yes, they do.

The study of grammar can be a course in jargon and mechanics, or the study of grammar can be a course in logic and reason. Learning how sentences work can help students read complex texts more fluidly and deepen their own critical thinking on complex topics by understanding the coordination and subordination of ideas. The development of language skills and the ability to connect ideas is closely connected with the ability to have complex thoughts. In other words, language development and the development of thought processes are recursive and interdependent. It’s not so much that we have a thought and then discover a way to express it; rather, we learn new ways to express ourselves and then begin developing new thoughts.

So, the short and long of it, if we want to read well, to speak and write clearly, and to think complex thoughts, we need to understand the dynamic ways sentences work. Grammar is logic, and grammar instruction that focuses on logic over memorization, that worries less about getting the exact right grammatical term and more about understanding the ways groups of words work together, is a true critical thinking exercise.

Introduction Part 2: Making Grammar Instruction Useful

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