Grammar and Writing in the Classroom

In the article entitled “How to Teach Grammar, Analytical Thinking, and Writing”, Lynn Sams (2003) voiced and suggested methods on how grammar and writing should be taught in the classroom. This article was published in the English Journal by the National Council of Teachers of English. Sams based her research on her 16 years of experience as a high school teacher and the instructional approaches she used with her sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grade classes. Sams refers to grammar as “the relationship between structure and meaning” (57). The information in this article demonstrates processes of analyzing the structure of sentences and suggests students cannot completely understand writing without first understanding the basic concepts of grammar.

Sams explained that both traditional and in-context approaches to teach grammar are unsuccessful because “they treat grammar as something that exists apart from and outside of the writing process itself” (57). When referring to grammar and writing, Sams suggests “to study one is to study the other” (57). Sams explained that she first emphasized the process of drafting and revising. Sams’s instruction included the students working together and sharing their ideas and feedback during the drafting process. However, Sams realized that this process would not be successful without first teaching the students how to revise. Sams then based the instruction on the concept that the students needed to organize their work in a reasonable order that can be understood by others. Sams explained that to organize ideas, the students needed to be able to understand “how their ideas relate to one another” and how to separate “main ideas and supporting details” (58). However, to separate main ideas from...

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...Grammar Alive (2003) discuss the use of sentence diagrams to provide students with visual displays of the material. According to the authors of Grammar Alive, “many students do indeed find the diagrams helpful in seeing the relationships among sentence elements” (75). The use of questioning strategies in this process can ensure that students learn the content and can encourage critical thinking. Teachers should provide interesting and challenging questions designed to engage students thinking. Creating a classroom environment in which thinking and analyzing are valued is important to the success of all students. This process is definitely a process I would use in my classroom to improve the students’ understanding of grammar and writing. With improvement of grammar and writing, the students’ written work will improve and evolve to a more professional level.