ARTICLE: Inquiry Based Grammar Instruction from Rethinking Schools

[Ryan Goble]

Excellent article from the Fall 2011 issue of Rethinking Schools on teaching grammar through inquiry. The author is a 4th and 5th Grade teacher but I think the ideas apply K-College.

 

Patterns and Punctuation: Learning to Question Language By Elizabeth Schlessman

My favorite chunk...

When my students were 4th graders about to take the state writing test, their teachers did the best they could to prepare them for success; they taught them to add a colon to their writing by mentioning the time of day. Almost every narrative I read in the fall of 5th grade included a reference to a specific time. “It started at 6 p.m. and ended at 7:02 p.m.,” Joel wrote in his narrative writing assessment at the end of October.

Hurling a colon into a personal narrative may help boost the double-weighted conventions score on the Oregon state writing test. Yet the sight of colon after colon formulaically flung into writing made my teaching heart hurt. I saw obedient students submitting to the rules of the red pen, trying to conform to an invisible power. Meaning was compromised to serve the punctuation mark and the state test score. It was painful to watch students dutifully insert colons based on their trust that test scores are a definitive and valid measure of good writing.

I learned punctuation through rules and exercises and red pen corrections. And I learned to trust those rules over my own thinking. As we marveled over a sentence in our bilingual 5th-grade classroom, I felt obligated to explain it away as an anomaly. “This is something that doesn’t follow the rule,” I said as I read some of my favorite parts aloud from Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee: “Bodies. Skin. Colors. Water. Gleaming. Buttery. Warm. Cool. Wet. Screaming. Happy.” Or one of my favorite paragraphs: “Apparently not.”

Whether or not the sentences conform to the simplified rules I learned, there is no doubt that Spinelli’s writing works. It not only works, it shines. The period beckons the reader to slow down and honor each of the words. The choices to use periods over commas and single words over sentences serve the author’s purpose. Although students need to understand the ways their writing will be analyzed on the state test (and perhaps know they will receive a higher mark for including a colon), they also need to understand that the purpose of punctuation is to express oneself more powerfully and imaginatively, to better communicate, not merely to be “correct.”

Read the full article HERE.