|
|||
|
|
|
|
| |||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||||
    
|
|
 Too Much Grammar? by Ruth Beechick For many of their years children learn to use the language. They speak it mostly correctly. Later they write it, again mostly correctly, except that now they must learn the writing mechanics of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. Then finally in the teen years they could learn some systematic grammar that describes and analyzes the language they have been using all those years. Here we look at these three phases of learning language. 1. Using the Language Children learn to use the grammar of their native language from toddlerhood on. At times you consciously teach something. For instance, when your child says “Water” you may model “Water, please” for him to copy. But the majority of the time children just learn without anyone teaching a vocabulary lesson of eight words per day or a grammar lesson of what constitutes a sentence. Family conversation is the main vehicle for the amazing learning of the early years. Reading stories and reciting nursery rhymes and Bible verses help also. All these develop an “ear” for good language usage, and that ear is a powerful tool for now and through the following phases of language learning. By school age, children use interrogatory, declarative, and exclamatory sentences. They use present and past tense of verbs, and express future time. They use nouns with singular and plural forms and with modifiers, pronouns with three cases (nominative, objective, and possessive), prepositions, conjunctions, and other function words. They use most “rules” properly. Occasionally you intervene. If a child says goed, you tell him to say went. Someday in a grammar book he will see a list of forty irregular verbs that are exceptions to the ed rule, and thirty-nine of those he will already know. He may learn from the list a couple of interesting things like that dived and dove are both correct. But he certainly does not need the list in his early years while learning all those verbs. Neither does he need any other abstract grammar information that analyzes the word categories and sentence structure. By age ten, children use grammar up to the level of those around them. This grammar knowledge serves them well for tests, even up to the level of SAT and ACT. Tests do not ask them to find a preposition or a predicate nominative, but they ask which of the choices is the best ending for a sentence and similar questions that students answer by their “ear” for the language rather than by grammar rules. 2. Writing Mechanics When children begin to write, they move into the phase of needing writing mechanics. These are matters used only for writing and not for speaking. At first children must learn to form letters and words. Then they need to punctuate and capitalize their sentences. If they do not know this, you have not fallen down on grammar teaching, and they need no grammar teaching now. They have known what sentences are since about age two. Just tell them to start with a capital letter and end with a period (sometimes a question mark). You can do that with a sentence a child himself wants to write or with a sentence you make as a model for him to copy. If you are not pushing this too early, before the child writes letters well and writes a few words, it does not take long at all for him to make sentences look like sentences. If he does not write yet and you are taking his sentences by dictation, you can do the mechanics and point them out to him. This is slower, but he still can learn it quickly when he writes sentences on his own. After sentence mechanics, children gradually move on to needing to indent paragraphs, leave margins, center titles, format address and letter parts, and other formatting details. You can teach most of these by just telling children once or twice at a time when they need it for their writing. Learning these separately in a workbook is less efficient. This shows a great advantage of homeschooling. Schools use textbooks so everybody gets the information at least sometime, but you can tutor, giving information at points where a child needs it. Moving on to other punctuation becomes more complex. Commas, particularly, are not easy like periods. One book will tell you to put a comma after a phrase that begins a sentence. The next book may say you can skip the comma if the phrase is short. One book will tell you to place commas around the word too. But notice the different meanings in these two sentences. We are going to Disneyland too. We are going to Disneyland, too. The first can mean our friends and we, too, are going. The second can mean we are going to Sea World and to Disneyland, too. Using the comma or not makes all the difference. In speech we make the meaning clear by voice emphasis. In writing we make the meaning clear by using the comma. The best comma “rule” is to decide by meaning, by where the reader should pause. Some books teach that system rather than prescribing formulas in matters like the too above. When you get to more complex sentence structures, sixth grade or later, that is a good time to teach that grammar-book rules are not set in stone. They are not from Mount Sinai. Two styles for comma use are the closed and open styles. The closed style advocates commas everywhere that traditional grammar books teach. The open style says, no, leave them out whenever you can. If you need them for meaning or if you want the reader to pause, then use commas. Otherwise do not clutter up the writing with unnecessary commas. The copy-dictation method helps teach how good writers use punctuation and develops awareness of these mechanical details. At whatever age children write stories with dialog, show them how to handle quotation marks. Older students will also learn about colons, semicolons, hyphens, and em dashes as their thinking and sentence structures become more advanced. Punctuation is related to grammar, even at the beginning when children place a period at the end of a sentence. But we do not teach sentence syntax to the young children to show why a period goes there. Advanced punctuation becomes more intertwined with phrases, clauses, and other sentence parts. You can use the meaning approach: “We need a comma at this pause.” Or the grammar approach: “We need a comma after this phrase.” It does not hurt to drop in terms like noun and verb when they help you explain something. The grammar phase of learning thus begins to overlap this mechanics phase. With all these mechanics of writing, avoid “correcting” papers. Instead, do all you can to encourage writing and not discourage. 3. Grammar After students become adept at writing is finally the time to let them study systematic grammar. They will not have been burned out on it through the early years, and they now can understand this abstract analysis. A highschool girl reading a grammar book for the first time exclaimed, “Mom, this is interesting!” Some homeschool suppliers offer one-book grammars for this more efficient way of teaching English. These are not lesson-by-lesson workbooks, but they present grammar in an organized form so you can look up items when you need them. These books go on a shelf alongside the dictionary and become a permanent part of the student’s library, not a throwaway as lesson books so often are. You could have lessons, though, from any part of the book. Later you could add books on writing style and anything else your family finds helpful. Students will gain a lot by this delay of grammar study. No research anywhere shows that learning grammar helps students become better writers. There is no correlation between knowledge of grammar and ability to write well. This topic has been researched for practically a century because there has always been high interest in the question. Researchers studied not only the Latin-style grammars but also newer ones called generative, transactional, and others. They researched this method and that method with this content and that content, including diagramming, and all the research was negative. Learning grammar does not improve children’s writing. We inherit a Latin-style grammar because of the way grammar came down to us. That is, grammar that fit the Latin language was grafted onto English, and it is a poor fit. For one example, Latin prepositions are prefixes attached to their words. The very word means pre-position. Examples that came into English are indent, transport, and submarine. In Latin, then, prepositions could not end a sentence, and the Latin-style grammar books taught that we should not do that in English either. That results in clumsy sentences from people who try to follow the Latin rule. Another holdover from Latin is a “rule” that we should not split infinitives. English infinitives are two words, as to run, to close, to split, and so on, but in Latin the infinitives are single words. Since Latin infinitives cannot be split, the books often teach the myth that we should not split ours either, regardless of what makes the best sounding English sentence. A number of other myths about English arrived the same way, via Latin. Many people say they finally learn grammar when they study Latin. They don’t realize why, but the reason is that in Latin they finally have a use for all the cases and other Latin grammar matters the English books had tried to teach them. Today a good many books still follow much of the Latin style. You can try to identify them by ads that emphasize rules. English-style grammars usually take a more descriptive approach rather than prescriptive. That is, they describe good ways to use English language rather than giving formulas and rules to follow. By the teen years, students know most of this English already, but the grammar books will teach them a few things and will educate them on what grammar is. The schooling world and the advertising world oversell homeschoolers on the need for grammar, too much and too early. The most efficient route to a good language education is 1) learn to speak, 2) learn punctuation and spelling and other mechanics for writing, and 3) learn about grammar. This last phase usually will not arrive until the teen years. Students should write well before embarking on serious grammar study. Follow-up Ideas 1) If your children have any writing curriculum, you and they could try to label a few pages G or M to indicate whether they mainly teach grammar or writing mechanics. If a page teaches what to say without giving a grammar reason, label it U for usage. 2) In a book catalog see if you can find a one-book grammar for teenage use. You can assign this job to a student, as analyzing book ads is a useful reading skill. © 2005 by Ruth Beechick. Reprinted from “Home School Enrichment” March/April 2006. Definitions: grammar analysis of parts of speech and parts of sentences. writing mechanics matters needed only for writing and not for speaking, such as punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. Related Products:  Dr. Beechick’s Homeschool Answer Book |
||||||||
|
Home |Return
Policy | Contact
Us |
|
© Copyright 2010 Family Eductional Resources, Inc. |
||
 |
||
