Essay on Should grammar be a focus in undergraduate composition classroom?
Being literate has always been considered as a dignity. However, paying excessive attention to grammar when it is not the main focus of teaching is often severely criticized by educators. They say, grammar can contribute to better writing, but it is only one part of it, not the whole. Composition classroom is, for instance, aimed at developing students’ writing skills through research, argumentative writing techniques, and critical thinking. Meanwhile, it has become a matter of continuous debate whether knowing grammar rules and principles affects the quality of an ultimate text. As a student enters a first year course, it is implied that he or she has some basic grammar knowledge and writing skills. However, practice has shown that teachers’ expectations are not always satisfied. On the contrary, the majority of students composition teachers deal with are likely to have gaps in their early education, which create a grand barrier for further advance. Current research is intended to find out the significance of grammar for a composition classroom and to provide clear evidence that applying certain deliberate tools for instructing grammar from a freshman course on is a way to make the students of language art progress considerably.
Controversies of Grammar Instruction
Earlier, there was a widely spread opinion that there is no sense to worry whether your spelling is right or wrong as long as the English orthography is nothing but human convention. It was stated that this kind of convention has nothing in common with the natural order of things and the word can be written in any way with the same power. What is more, grammar was thought to distract attention from actual writing and thus to be harmful rather than helpful. The members of the NCTE Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar (ATEG) resume that grammar used to be “the skunk at the garden of the language arts” (Lanham 111). Earlier, traditional grammar instruction was really a curse for schools and their students. The notion of prescriptive grammar that was popular a few decades ago included continuous “skill & drill” exercises. The students were expected to “swot up” a discrete set of rigid rules that were to be strictly followed and endlessly practiced (Turner 39).
Taking over curriculum, grammar could really become an obstacle to the students’ advance. On the one hand, much precious time was spent memorizing and reproducing rigid formula. On the other hand, students could soon lose their interest to the major and change it for anything else. With time, however, the educators came to understanding that principles of writing are more important than the rules of grammar, and the alignment of forces altered. In other words, broader generalization came into being leaving each writer a chance to make his or her own choice (Butterfield 275). With the height of language movement, the time for revolutionary change came. Prescriptive grammar was substituted by transformational, also known as descriptive grammar. The chief goal of innovation was to subordinate grammar instruction to the needs of a particular user. Descriptive approach made grammar instruction more flexible, practical, and more helpful in self-expression.
Benefiting from Grammar
Of course, knowing the grammar rules is not a panacea. In fact, fixing the grammar will hardly make an unsatisfying essay effective. There is much other stuff to attack when a teacher is to create a good writer. Still, poor grammar is often not so much the reason for poor writing as the inherent part of it. Grammar ignorance is often the consequence of careless attitude to reading and checking the original text by the author himself. Accurate and perceptive reading for revision is a necessary condition not only for higher literacy, but also for the overall writing skill. It is almost impossible to write a clear, coherent text without grammatical awareness. The latter is ultimately based on a sentence sense that is worked out through reading students’ own compositions, either aloud or to themselves. As Brandt (463) assumes, “Educators can no longer afford to assume that students acquire an accurate understanding of formal language structures through reading, writing, and speaking.”
Further on, the ability to work with grammar constructions enriches the overall writing capacity of a student. A wealth of knowledge is rather a prerogative than a burden, and such exercises as “finding the subject-predicate core, diagramming sentences, searching texts for various constructions, comparing language varieties, expanding or imitating sentences, unscrambling sentences in a paragraph, and experimenting with the parts of essays and stories” (Newkirk 111) help the writers see the language as a system. Therefore, the writers feel free to find and utilize alternatives to make their thoughts sound clearer and more catching.
In addition, Brodkey (82) states that the students who master the tools of writing and language structure together tend to be more confident and effective in their writing. “Many students will be able to recognize a sentence fragment as incorrect, but they may not know the concept by its correct name, why it is incorrect, or how to correct it,” Spellmeyer (273) notes. It goes without saying that many people possess inherent, intuitive knowledge of how to spell the words and sentences correctly, but the conscious employment of language opens larger opportunities beyond all doubt. Knowing grammar provides the writer with the confidence to experiment because only when you know what is right, you can play with what is wrong; it becomes much more interesting for a writer to introduce new stylistic devices or context neologisms (Spellmeyer 163). Only in this way both native English speakers and second-language learners become able to see the perspective of linguistic expertise while language is a bottomless resource.
Tips for Teaching Grammar
Although descriptive grammar has demonstrated a number of advantages as against prescriptive grammar, the latest studies reveal that both approaches are better in their combination rather than in isolation. Each of them has its benefits, so a good language art teacher should derive from both. Assessment and planning are probably the best items to start a sound instructional practice.
The experience of educators who have already faced low levels of literacy among their first year students and who try their best to improve the situation can be summarized in several transparent rules. First of all, there is a need to present grammar principles as a review because of the students who really possess enough knowledge and would feel tired and bored if they have to go through the same way again. One more advice is to communicate the grammar skills as professional skills like proofreading or editing. At the same time, the teacher is to begin with the basic rules as they are the foundation for further knowledge. Although the language is full of terms, the aim is to reduce terminology for better comprehension and memorization. The advance from parts of speech to sentence fragments and clauses and then to run-on sentences, for example, would be the best scheme (Brandt 460). It goes without saying that grammar lessons should be concise, entertaining and always to the point. For that end, teachers often use handouts and power point presentations to make the material visual and clear. In order to entertain, teachers apply the practice of cooperative games, self-check quizzes, and interactive Web-resources.
Further on, it is useful for a student to note his or her mistakes and corrections. Such an error journal makes a student more self-aware and diligent, while his or her motor memory is combined with visual memory (Anson et al. 172). While revising and editing their drafts, students can simultaneously study grammatical options that certainly influence style and voice of the text. According to the representatives of ATEG, teaching grammar significantly depends on reading and language play, so these two fundamental practices should be prioritized in the composition classroom. As Turner (121) resumes, “the goal of effective grammar instruction is to weave it into the reading and writing that function as the backbone of the English curriculum.”
After all, the needs of students should be the first and foremost criterion to depart from. Individual approach will never do a bad turn, so the students should have an opportunity to train grammar according to their own essays and to get individual assistance from the teacher in case of need.
Conclusions
The experience of numerous educators and researchers has shown that writing skills can never be mastered in isolation from grammar. Developing such writing skills as a sense of effective organization, logical argumentation, manipulations with language and style is highly dependent on grammar knowledge. Once traditional school grammar became an uncompromising weapon to fight illiteracy, but its demands won a bad reputation. As long as grammar was taught in isolation, the wave of protests soon rose because grammar instruction took unprecedented time and effort and in this way did interfere with the educational process. Next, transformative grammar approach was introduced making more focus on the particular needs of a student and making the learning process more flexible and actual. The application of descriptive grammar within a composition classroom has proved that a wide variety of prose and poetry can be enhanced by effective vocabulary and creative sentence construction that is gained via grammatical options. It is stated that frequent training with grammar constructions makes the author express his or her own thoughts and emotions more fluently and precisely. Grammar makes individual thesaurus broader and enunciation more flexible. A meaningful and relevant instruction should, nevertheless, be based on both prescriptive and descriptive grammar practices.
While the practice of numerous composition teachers has shown that at the first course the level of students’ language knowledge is rather low, most of them have to spend much time not for review but for grammar mastery instruction from the very beginning. Consequently, grammar instruction and testing are obviously needed in the undergraduate composition classroom to make freshmen present a coherent argument and go through less critique on their rough drafts. For that end, intensive but not overwhelming guidance with practice should be provided on a regular basis. Above all, reading is still considered the best practice to improve one’s grammar, as most of grammatical patterns are easily absorbed from the context.
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