The difference between a sentence that’s well-written and a sentence that’s, well, written.
Fill in the blanks…
Do you accept that correct sentence structure is the building block of quality writing?
Then you possibly have entered into a journey with grammar that feels like a road map of rules, terms, symbols and arrangements that are blasting cognitive load.
There’s a great deal to understand and each rule builds on another as students advance toward automaticity in constructing text. Knowing how to work with the rules of grammar frees working memory so students can focus on the way they share thinking. Whether you have an opinion or large knowledge base on the way grammar is taught in schools, one thing is evident. There is a huge variation teacher to teacher in what we understand as being grammatically correct. Maybe it’s a failure of a system that dropped some of the old skills and drills or, an over-reliance on the little blue squiggly line in our Word docs; regardless grammar is moving back to the fore.
Bringing teachers to the right knowledge.
Nothing gave me more pleasure than to walk into the staffroom the other day and find several teachers arguing about the rules around comma placement. We identified in a teacher survey several years ago that overall teachers found the teaching of grammar confronting. To now hear a mix of generations arguing over a symbol with so much passion, shows that knowledge is building. Teaching the teachers has been our journey in grammar lesson design. One of the issues we noted was teacher feedback to students - or lack of it due to their own inadequate usage. Telling students to add more punctuation is useless if we can’t tell them where and how to use it.
A recent scaffold to our work has been the use of MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions) tests that identify correctly formed sentences from The Writing Hub, No More Marking. It has required teachers to align a few key ideas and has clearly demonstrated where misconceptions lie for the students AND teachers. While rules are important, what students actually need is multiple examples where rules are demonstrated. Teachers have benefited from having to think about the overview of key concepts to build their own understanding.
As William Van Cleave says, ‘An understanding of the structure of a sentence shows the student the relationship between not just the words, phrases, and clauses within it, but also the relationship between the ideas that those elements convey,’
Students - to define or not to define?
The problem for the classroom teacher lies in the limited time we have available to embed grammar in a way that relieves cognitive load and makes it routine. While we know to teach it in context, we have to also understand that parts of grammar are sequential. It is common to think about how we could use onomatopoeia, alliteration, narrative dialogue, non-fiction text features and poetry study to demonstrate for students, different grammatical features.
However, in my experience students rarely pick up the rules this way and these are complicated features of text where adding the aspects of grammar make it even more complex for the novice to embed. We don’t necessarily need students to be all over memorised definitions (such as ‘independent’ vs. dependent clauses). But we do want them to be able to identify how to combine these with an accurate conjunction, comma in the right place, and determine which phrase precedes the other. To do this, I advocate for taking the time in your writing scope and sequence to design lessons that focus on a small aspect of grammar, cement it in working memory, practice it, retrieve it and then drop in opportunities for reference or application among all the other moments when students are writing. It is also important to note that students do not need mastery before moving forward.
For teachers though, using some student examples to pull apart, is an incredibly rich way of setting up the next point of need with sentence level grammar. This is one of the exercises we will demonstrate in our next Writing Connect Discussion, Tuesday 30 Aug.
In this example from our Comparative Judgement project start of the year, note some key points to address in a whole class feedback session.
The difference between a sentence and a run on - how can we provide practice in what part of this could be split to create a short sentence? As Daisy Christodoulou notes - students use length as a proxy. Short succinct sentences are useful to the reading flow!
Just ask Hemingway - he did not like adverbs. Have you seen students add one in to ‘improve’ their sentence, then wonder how you will provide the feedback about overuse while they stare at you blankly?It is significant to see this student experimenting with various conjunctions because it is something we taught - however, more opportunities needed to practice and refine.
The use of two conjunctions in a single sentence - exemplars that model how to do this accurately followed by practice in manipulation of sentences. Conjunctions in pairs is tricky - demonstrating when it does work such as ‘Neither…. nor’, ‘Both… and’ or ‘Whether…or’.
It is fascinating to watch people argue grammar rules however as readers we often see that authors break them. When we think about authors, we need to remember that they have developed expertise as writers. The move from novice to expert is a huge investment in practice time—10,000 hours to be exact. We do not have this kind of time, so we need to make our lessons count—multiple opportunities to engage in grammar examples, manipulation, and using them in context.Secure grammar in working memory. Release students to write.