Each spring, after teaching massive CI in the form of stories and reading, I am always conflicted (I’m sure we all are) when it comes to thinking about teaching them some grammar. Some of them, after all, are next year heading straight into classes where grammar instruction is the order of the day. I just don’t know whether to take any class time to prepare them for that sort of silliness.
To add to that conflict, I don’t even know if the pop-up grammar I do serves the kids at the next level in a traditional setting, where they will spend much of the year filling in blanks with verbs and adjective forms and such. I see them get the pop up grammar in our CI classes, but does that mean they can ride the big fill-in-the-blank surfboards that await them next year?
We all know that the best way to learn grammar is to experience it as auditory input structure by hearing the language spoken correctly (isn’t that how we all really learn grammar?), but there is that conflict about not preparing them for those surfboards. I don’t want them to fail, to think that I didn’t prepare them properly in the language by all the auditory and reading input we did.
In my district I have to give certain end of year grammar tests. I have started doing that now. Not all the kids are comfortable with it when they see it. It is too standardized for them – too left brained. I recently did a grammar class for awhile and a gifted kid came up to me after class and said, “I can’t learn this way.” I went to the closet and handed her a textbook and said, “Here, take this and hang out with it at home a little every night. You’re going to need this skill.”
Could it be that this is a developmental thing, because my kids are 13/14 years old studying this grammar? Rudolf Steiner says that abstract thinking, which grammar is, doesn’t really kick in until around that age of 13/14, so I am wondering if the kids I teach in level 1 can even transfer the pop ups they got from me this past year into next year’s classes with relative ease.
My kids deserve to go to their level II classes with good grammar skills, even if I think that grammar should come in to their study of the language at a much later point than in those first two years.Forget the fact that the grammar trained kids at the high school have miserable, in many cases non-existent, auditory skills in the language – nobody seems to think that is a problem.
But the fact is that we live in the real world, plus, to tell the truth, I love grammar. I would NEVER have gotten into teaching grammar in the spring, but now, with district common assessments and such around the corner, I want my kids to feel confident in level two with their grammar teacher next year, so I do this.
I will say that when we kick up some grammar dust, because we have been doing stories all year, the kids are ready and interested to learn it. It is an amazing thing, because years ago I would teach grammar in the fall and they wouldn’t be interested at all. I thought they were lazy and it really frustrated me back then, I remember. It was me who was mistaken then. The kids just needed to have something to connect the language to – duh! – the spoken language!
Just don’t tell anybody that I love French grammar as much as I do and how much I love to teach it (I am in love with the pluperfect subjunctive – it is an elegant, attractive form of a verb as I have ever seen. I am not joking about that. Grammar is so beautiful – but it is just not useful in terms of real results in the real world. So, as long as my students have had a good five to six months of massive comprehensible input first, I go ahead and let the grammar train out of the station here in spring.
They are so focused in these grammar classes, and I can see incredible connections being made all class period between the sounds of L2 that they are so truly good at, and the written structural stuff. It is really very cool to see that. But, the reverse is not true. Honestly, teaching grammar to kids who don’t understand the spoken language first is crazy!
My question is, if anyone has any insights into how pop up grammar instruction in stories and readings transfers over to grammar based standardized tests imposed by colleagues in the schools they work in, I would be grateful.
[Note: Fooled ya. I wrote the above blog entry in early 2009, when I was still a middle school teacher. It was one of those unpublished animals rattling around in the labyrinthe of this blog for the past two and a half years. Since then, my thinking on grammar instruction has crystalized from the above soup into this: we teach grammar by speaking correctly to our kids – grammar is properly spoken language. That is the only way that they can acquire the real grammar, not its Evil Twin. The rest of the discussion – all the stuff above – only exists because we work in schools, where people think that teaching discrete grammar items has value. Let’s be clear – it doesn’t. We teach grammar by speaking it correctly and not by using English to teach Evil Twin Grammar. If we want to, we do it in year 3 or later. Then, in those upper levels, the kids will pick it up fifty times faster because they know what the hell they are looking at and hearing. But that is another discussion, when and how to get into it at upper levels, if at all. I should ask Bryce and Laurie about that.]