Using Grammar to Benefit Elementary Age Students ...



Using Grammar to Teach Language, Vocabulary Acquisition, Reading and Writing Skills

Karen Rochon

Summer 2009

Dr. William Nagy

EDRD 6508 Vocabulary Development

Using Grammar to Benefit Elementary Age Students Vocabulary Acquisition, Reading, and Writing Skills

As an elementary school teacher with seventeen years of classroom experience, it has never failed to amaze me that a solid, structured grammar program is not part of the elementary school age curriculum. My belief that a strong grammar curriculum benefits elementary age students is two fold. First, knowledge of grammar can enhance students’ ability to write well across genres and for different writing purposes, and second, it has the ability to build grammar and vocabulary background knowledge by laying a solid foundation for vocabulary acquisition and in turn success with reading. When defining grammar, “-rules for language: the system of rules by which words are formed and put together to make sentences” (Encarta World English Dictionary), or “The study of words and their component parts combine to form sentences” (grammar), it is clear in my opinion by these definitions that when used well, grammar can uphold these purposes.

What Research Says About Teaching Grammar

It is imperative to note that teaching grammar in isolation is not supported by research. According to Constance Weaver in her book Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing “…research does not show that teaching grammar in isolation has significant benefits for most students’ writing.” (2008). Based on research she recommends instead “…we see grammar selectively taught as a resource for writers, necessarily tied to the writing process and inherently connected to issues of invention and drafting, revision and editing, proofreading and publication.” (2008).

Why Bother to Teach Grammar separately at all?

If research denies teaching grammar separately, they why then do I feel so strongly about teaching grammar separately at all? The truth of the matter is teaching grammar separately as its own subject is neither a fair assessment, nor a clear or whole picture of how I believe grammar can or should be taught. However, tying what students learn about grammar to their reading, writing and vocabulary instruction is. I think of it as the gradual release of responsibility, or the “to”, “with”, and “by” model of teaching and learning. Initially students need something to “hang their hats on” so to speak about the basics of grammar. In order for students to have some background knowledge to refer to in their writing, I think of basic grammar instruction as the means for them to do this. In other words, teaching “to” them what they can use in their writing to “hang their hats” on allows them to apply this to their writing. Reinforcing grammar as students are gradually released from this separate direct instruction approach then becomes a scaffold as their knowledge of grammar improves their ability to write. I think of this as the “with” point of the gradual release of instruction. Students are now working with me and together with one another, using teaching points of grammar in their writing. Eventually the basics of grammar ideally become set in their permanent memory to the degree that they can successfully use grammar in their writing. I think of this as the “by” point of the gradual release of instruction. Students can now use grammar correctly in their writing by themselves. This model of the gradual release of responsibility, “to”, “with”, and “by”, can and should be applied to many parts of the curriculum, not exclusive to writing, but inclusive of vocabulary and reading instruction as well.

The same argument can be made for tying vocabulary instruction with reading and grammar instruction together. In Marzano’s Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement, “It has been estimated by Nagy, Herman, and Anderson (1985, p 250) that students may learn from 1,500 to 8,250 new words each year from reading, this alone may not enhance vocabulary as much as needed.” (2004, p.65) Also in Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement Robert J. Marzano cites a study by Jenkins, Stein, and Wysocki (1984) that demonstrated to learn a word requires anywhere from 6 to 10 exposures to the word in context. They explain: “Although the present findings show that fifth graders can learn word meanings incidentally during reading, this learning apparently does not come easily or in large quantities….for educators interested in building vocabulary, prescribing large doses of reading may not be the most efficient means of reaching this goal: heavy exposure to words in contexts may be required, and in many cases specific contexts may not be sufficiently rich to allow readers even to drive word meaning, not to mention learn them.” (p.782). In other words, this makes a case for teaching vocabulary directly, and at least one possible way to do this is through grammar instruction. Marzano notes the importance of considering the type of word that is being taught on grammatical grounds only: “Although we tend to talk about vocabulary as separate from grammar, they are, of course, connected.” (Pg. 78, 2004). Marzano goes on to say, “Psychologists explain that semantic features are the basis of how we know words” (Katz & Fodor, 1963). He provides a table categorizing proper and common nouns as well as verbs with their semantic features. “This table is designed to provide guidance regarding the critical semantic features for words that are the target of direct vocabulary instruction. Research indicates that instructional activities focusing on key semantic features positively affect student learning of vocabulary terms.” (Johnson, Toms-Bronowski, & Pittleman, 1982; Anders, Bos, & Filip, 1984). Using this table students can do an activity called “attribute comparison”. Students compare two or more terms on selected attributes or semantic features, and then students would be asked to compare how terms are similar and different in terms of semantic features.

What Does Teaching Grammar Well Look Like in the Elementary School Setting?

Over the years I have struggled with how to teach grammar in a way that satisfies both my feeling that students’ need explicit basic grammar instruction and taught in a way that students can apply grammar to their writing. Frankly I have not encountered a program that I feel completely douses students with a solid grammar foundation while doing it in a fun, time conscious way and have the ability to tie nicely into students’ writing and vocabulary acquisition in a constructive way. The closest I have settled on is a program I currently use called Daily Language Review. The premise of the program is to immerse students daily in a variety of grammar experiences. In addition to basic grammar, such experiences include other language skills and content: syllables, homophones, correcting errors in the punctuation or sentence structure using editing marks (which then carries over to students self-editing their own writing), identifying whether the sentence is indeed a sentence, pronoun or proper noun, prefix or suffix (morphology), analogies, comparative and superlative adjectives, identifying the root or base word (morphology), identifying the noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, antonym, the difference between the dictionary, almanac, telephone book, encyclopedia, or thesaurus, compound sentences, compound words (morphology), friendly letter format… and the list continues. I chose this means to teach the basics of grammar because it exposes students to many aspects of language and it does so repeatedly, multiple times, and daily. Research finds that students benefit from multiple exposures to material in order to increase the likelihood that it will then be stored in their long term or permanent memory. Marzano states in Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: “As Anderson (1995) explains: “Memory records are assumed to have a property called strength, which increases with repeated practice.” (p.193) In simple terms, the more times we engage information in working memory, the higher the probability that it will be imbedded in permanent memory. In educational terms, the more times a student processes information, the more likely the student will remember it.” (pg. 23, 2004). DLR is done, as stated, on a regular basis, but also in a fun way that generates great class conversation where an opportunity to talk about words and sentences in embraced. In Zipke, Ehri, and Cairns’ article Using Semantic Ambiguity Instruction to Improve Third Graders’ Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension: An Experimental Study, they state:”Metalinguistic awareness (MA) is the ability to focus on and manipulate the formal properties of language-specifically, the ability to analyze, think about, talk about, or play with language as an object separate from its meaning in or out of context (Roth, Speece, Cooper, De La Paz, 1996). Various types of MA have been distinguished, including phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and morphological awareness.” (2009, pg. 300). Using DLR enables students to do just that when focusing on discussions about syntactic awareness with the sentence errors, and morphological awareness when focusing on the word parts root and base words, prefixes, and suffixes, and compound words. DLR is also set up in a half sheet form enabling all ability levels of students to find academic benefit and success. Also, within this half sheet there are only three to six examples of work for students to do. The half sheet then is a variety of grammar and language tasks that are presented in small chunks. Research finds presenting students with small chunks of input is important for students to best process and store the information encountered. In Marzano’s book The Art and Science of Teaching, he states: “Of vital importance to the success of critical-input experiences is the extent to which the teacher organizes the experience into small chunks (Linden et al., 2003). Rosenshine (2002) refers to this practice as teaching in small steps. Discussing the findings from a number of studies of effective teachers, he makes the following observation: When the most effective teachers in these studies taught new material, they taught it in “small steps.” That is they only presented small parts of new material at a single time…the importance of teaching in small steps fits well with the findings from cognitive psychology on the limitations of our working memory. Our working memory, the place where we process information, is small. It can only handle a few bits of information at once- too much information swamps our working memory. (2002, p. 7). Granted, using DLR daily negates the fact that this information stays new, however as each aspect or type of grammar and language concept is cycled through new every few days to a week. This reinforces students’ learning each time, thereby accomplishing this in small chunks of information, and I believe this format enables students to better process the material. Therefore it goes without saying that I believe there are aspects of DLR that benefit students in their quest to build an understanding of language, vocabulary, and grammar. But is the Daily Language Review program the most effective means for teaching grammar and vocabulary acquisition, in conjunction with writing, while laying a foundation for language and grammar?

Other Effective Means for Teaching Grammar to Increased Student Success in Vocabulary Acquisition, Reading, and Writing Skills

At the conclusion of our Vocabulary class, after reading articles and listening to dialogue about what research says in regards to student’s exposure related to vocabulary (reading and writing), language and grammar, I am persuaded that there is a multitude of engaging ways to teach grammar besides DLR (Daily Language Review). Based on this knowledge, I am convinced that I will be broadening my attempts (beyond DLR) to impart an understanding of basic grammar to my third grade students. Not to overwhelm myself by taking on too much, and all at once, I would like to try three beneficial means of teaching grammar that I find intriguing, and based on research, I feel worth valuable classroom time and effort. They are Mad Lib activities, sentence ambiguity activities, and riddles.

Mad Libs

According to a definition given by Wikipedia, Mad Libs consist of a book that has a short story on each page, but with many of the key words replaced with blanks. Beneath each blank is specified a lexical or other category, such as noun, verb, place, or a part of the body. One player asks the other players, in turn to contribute some words for the specified type for each blank, but without revealing the context for that word. Finally the complete story is read aloud. The result is usually comic, surreal, and somewhat nonsensical. Mad Lib activities enable students to manipulate and have fun with words, grammar, and language while at the same time reinforcing some of the basics of grammar. Because students are reinforced in their exposure to words that fit the categories of noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in a fun way making grammar and words fun, and manipulating words even more fun, my students, over and over again, are excited about and ask to have some Mad Libs to do. Stahl and Nagy state in their book Teaching Word Meanings “…another part of motivation for vocabulary learning is simply to make working with words enjoyable. In addition, creating a classroom atmosphere in which words are fun and playing with words is encouraged can be a powerful antidote to the very natural fear of making mistakes that can so easily inhibit learning. (2006, pg. 142). One can hardly argue that Mad Libs are anything but fun while students are benefiting from working with nouns, verb, adjectives, and adverbs, and manipulating words in the process as well.

Sentence Ambiguity

Sentence ambiguity is another form of word fun and manipulation that reinforces the basics of grammar for students as well including the focus on semantics in language. Although DLR does expose students to ambiguity at the word level with homonyms, there is more a classroom teacher can of course do within the framework of ambiguities sentences. Students are given sentences that could have dual meanings similar to single word homonyms. For example in Zipke, Ehri, and Cairns article Using Semantic Ambiguity Instruction to Improve Third Graders’ Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension: an Experimental Study, the authors give as an example the sentences: “The man’s nails were sharp.”, or “The girl tickled the baby with the stuffed bear.” Students then begin to discuss and compare what they think the meanings of these sentences are. Through dialogue, and perhaps drawing illustration depicting the dual meanings, students can begin to see that words and the way that they are combined into sentences may mean more than one exact thing. In a study by Cairns et al. (2004) it was found that students who demonstrated an ability to detect structural ambiguities were significant predictors of their third-grade reading scores. Cairns et al. (2004) suggests two explanations for the relationship between ambiguity-detection skill and reading ability. One relates to the metalinguistic skill required to perform the detection tasks, the other to the operation of psycholinguistic processes. The metalinguistic aspect of ambiguity detection depends upon the child having available two meanings of the same ambiguous sentence. In the case of lexical ambiguities, the two sentence meanings each depend upon a different meaning of the ambiguous lexical item. In the case of structural ambiguity, the two sentence meanings are determined by distinct structural representations of the sentence. In both cases, the two representations are derived by the same psycholinguistic processes that children (and adults) use to understand all spoken language. (2009, p. 301). In other words by using morphology, or the teaching of the identification, analysis, or description of the structure of words (wiki/morphology), students thinking about comprehension maybe in a way they would not be aware of, based on what they are learning about grammar in general and morphology specifically. Students may experience success in making sense of written or oral language because they have been explicitly taught to notice and analyze sentence structure.

Riddles

Once again, much like teaching aspects of grammar through sentence ambiguity, teaching aspects of grammar through the enjoyment of riddles is worth classroom time and teacher effort. In Marcy Zipke’s article Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension With Riddles, she states: “Riddles are the perfect medium for learning how to manipulate language. Shade (1991) pointed out that the source of humor in riddles and jokes includes understanding multiple meaning, metaphors, and idioms; detecting ambiguity; and understanding perspective shifts. In other words, to understand and generate verbal humor, a student must exercise metalinguistic skill.” ( Reading Teacher, Marcy Zipke, 2008, pgs. 130-131).

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is recognized that research does not support teaching grammar in isolation as an effective means to provide student success in language with vocabulary acquisition, reading and writing skills. However, it is my belief after seventeen years of teaching primary students that these children do benefit from being explicitly taught the basics of grammar in order to achieve at least some background knowledge about grammar. To be able to connect ideas and concepts regarding the very basics of grammar, and in order to makes sense of their own grasp on the daunting task of vocabulary acquisition, reading and writing skills, I believe students need a foundation of basic

grammar knowledge and skills to then build from in their language, vocabulary acquisition, and reading and writing skills and abilities. Furthermore, I believe this explicit teaching of grammar can be achieved in a multitude of fun and engaging ways much of which is supported by research, such as DLR (Daily Language Review), Mad Libs, sentence ambiguity, and riddles.

References

Marzano, Robert J. (2004). Building Background Knowledge of Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Marzano, Robert J. (2007). The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Stahl & Nagy (2006). Teaching Word Meanings. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Weaver, Constance (2008). Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Zipke, M. (2008). Teaching metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension with riddles. The Reading Teacher, 62(2), 128-137.

Zipke, M., Ehri, L., & Cairns, H. (2009). Using semantic ambiguity instruction to improve third graders’ metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension: An experimental study. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 300-321.

Grammar. (1999). Soukhanov, Anne, Encarta World English Dictionary. St. Martin’s Press.

grammar

wiki/ morphology

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