Teaching Community Report



Teaching Community Report

Fall 2014

Teaching Community Focus: Grammar

The fall 2014 teaching community focused on grammar: sharing creative, fun, and meaningful ways to teach grammar and grammar usage. More specifically, participants designed new and/or improved grammar instruction aligned with sentence-level SLOs (for developmental and transfer-level classes). We read excepts from Preparing to Teach Writing and Teaching Grammar in Context in order to gain further knowledge and generate discussion and ideas. This semester’s projects focused on the following: teaching grammar in context, drawing from students’ implicit knowledge of grammar, relating grammar to reading comprehension, empowering students’ grammar usage, improving preposition usage through creative methods, and evaluating the effectiveness of line editing on students’ papers.

Specific Goals for the Fall 2014 Teaching Community on Grammar

1. Design new and/or improved grammar instruction aligned with sentence-level SLOs

2. Explore new ways to teach grammar

3. Assess student sentences in response to the above

TC Participants:

There were five instructors, each focusing on a different English course ranging from English 70 to 221. We met for a total of 9 hours over the semester, each meeting set at 1.5 hours.

Participants included David Eric Parkison, Marcella Lapriore, Laura Bernell, Caitlin Mitchell, and Margaret Seelie (online only).

Facilitator: Sara Toruno-Conley

TC Sessions:

We began the semester by reading excerpts from Preparing to Teach Writing and Teaching Grammar in Context. Discussion of the chapters followed, and the subsequent meetings revolved around sharing our ideas and progress around the research project, which involved exploring less traditional approaches to teaching grammar and/or evaluating those traditional approaches. Each member was required to survey the students and make copies of some of their work to include in the project.

The Research Project Guidelines

Each member was responsible for doing a research project, which included the following:

1. Explanation of Project: This section should start by explaining the purpose and focus of your research project. It should then pose a particular question that you want to explore and explain how you plan to explore it. It can even give the hoped-for results. Remember, in faculty inquiry, the question should be able to be assessed but will probably not lead to one definitive answer.

2. Table of Contents

3. Methods of Investigation: This section should explain an action plan (or plans) you will implement this semester that will help you to explore the above question. Each lesson or action plan should include the following:

1.) a clear explanation of how it will be carried out and your rationale for doing it

2.) a clear explanation of how you will assess the results

3.) an approximate time when you will carry it out.

4. Results: This section should provide the actual assessment in terms of how well the methods of investigation worked, and the effect they had on students. This section will also include a sample of student work and the student feedback you gathered, as well as attempt to answer your original research question.

Note: To see completed projects, contact Sara Toruno-Conley in the English department.

Summary of Teaching Community Projects

Caitlin Mitchell

Caitlin put her project in the context of students’ implicit knowledge of grammar, beginning by asking why teaching traditional grammar or grammar usage “does not lead to improved writing.” She connects the reason for traditional approaches not working to students’ home languages, saying while students have an internalized sense of grammar to communicate in speech, the challenge for them is to “translate the language of home into standard written English.” Because of this, students often “write long, convoluted sentences that violate grammar rules” all to try to not write “like they speak.” She concludes her introduction with the following research question.

Research Question: “Instead of focusing on a specific error or teaching students how to fix such an error, is it possible for students to use their own sense of learned language to improve their sentences?”

Methods of Investigation:

Caitlin asked “students to complete a series of exercises,” saying that the “tasks [will not be] aimed at a specific grammar error, and […] students will receive no formal lecture.” Instead, she will go over the directions with students to “allow them to identify the error and fix it on their own.”

Over the semester, she gave the students three exercises all focused on having students rewrite sentences, but each with a different aim and direction. The first exercise asked students “to translate ‘informal’ terms to ‘formal terms,’ the second asked them to “rewrite ‘wordy’ sentences from an exercise book, and the third had students rewrite sample sentences from their own class. She says that the third exercise “is the heart of [her] project” because her plan is to “test if students are able to rely on their learned language and implicit sense of grammar to revise sentences […].”

Qualitative Results/Reflection (for quantitative results and student survyes, see Caitlin’s actual project):

Caitlin wrote the following:

“I think the project proves that students can rely on internalized and learned grammar and sentence structure to effectively and accurately write academic essays. As the results indicate [see her project] most students do not revise sentences. However, they have the ability to improve the grammar of a sentence when doing so. I think that the exercises can be implemented at times to encourage students to focus less on content and more on syntax and diction. In doing so, students can improve the sentences and can develop a stronger sense of grammar and syntax. It also provides students with confidence in their own abilities and their own knowledge of language since they can see ways that they improved the sentence by simply relying on their own experience […]

Although I found the results encouraging, I feel it would also be important to combine exercises with traditional lessons on grammar errors. I think integrating general lessons will help students to learn to fix errors that they see in these revision sentences.”

And overall, “I think that it is a positive way to teach grammar since it encourages students to use their own experience with language as a foundation when learning to write academic essays.”

Laura Bernell

Laura focused on trying to find a correlation between grammar and reading comprehension. More specifically, she set out to investigate whether students’ ability to identify subjects and verbs correlates to their level of reading comprehension. Her rational for the project is “that all declarative sentences are, in effect, an argument: some assertion is being made about some subject. It is my hypothesis that recognizing those sentence-level assertions is essential to comprehending the claims, premises, warrants, and development of the larger argument of an essay.”

Research Question: “Is there a direct correlation between a student’s ability to identify subject and verb in complex sentences and that same student’s ability to comprehend the essay from which those sentences are extracted?”

Methods of Investigation:

Laura gave the students two different pairs of tests. Each pair contained a test on identifying subjects and verbs and a test on “comprehending the essay from which those sentences came.” The students took the grammar test first and “preparation for the text [was] minimal.”

Qualitative Results/Reflection (for quantitative results and student survyes, see Laura’s actual project):

Laura’s final thoughts on the results are the following:

“Though the results of this very small sample do not lead to a strong conclusion that there is a correlation between subject-verb agreement and reading comprehension, the student’ self-report indicate that they believe there is.

This instructor also believes that there are enough samples in her collection to indicate that knowing subject-verb pairs does correlate and can lead to better reading comprehension, especially of complex, dense sentences.”

Margaret Seelie

Margaret focused her project on “Empowering Grammar”: empowering students to use grammar in unique and individual ways. She cites Paulo Freire’s philosophy of avoiding the “banking” model of education as to why she wants to move beyond lecturing about grammar and towards empowering students. For this project, she chose to reflect back on her English 83—Sentence Skills class taught the previous semester as well as her background in studying grammar pedagogy at Mills College.

Research Question: “My question is how can instructors empower grammar through language, lesson design, and a student-generated curriculum?”

Methods of Investigation

Margaret chose to analyze and evaluate a “Grammar Scaffolding” lesson she had learned through her assisting of an instructor, Kate Brubeck, in a grammar course at Mills College and had used in her English 83 course later. The Grammar Scaffolding consists of four parts as shown below:

Grammar Scaffolding (to be completed each unit / week)

0. Increase Student Confidence by Writing What They Know

I. Lesson / Learning Stage

A. Lecture

B. Exercises

C. Pass / No Pass Assessment

D. All or Nothing Assignments

II. Life Experience Lesson

III. Contextualize & Synthesize with Surrounding Grammar Landscape: One Lesson to Rule them all

IV. Traditional Assessment

She states, “In the [methods of investigation] I will dissect my proposed grammar scaffolding mentioned above by explaining what each section means, discussing ways in which Professor Brubeck and myself manifest these approaches, and assess what worked and didn’t work within each section. Samples of assignments and student work will appear where necessary.

I am proposing that steps I. through V. can be completed within each unit in the semester, which means this process would be done approximately sixteen times within one semester (every week). Starting with the first week of instruction using Chapter 1 Parts of Speech in At a Glance: Sentences by Lee Brandon.

I suspect this process will be too time consuming to complete every week, but upon investigation, it may work.

Can all grammar lessons be taught with the following scaffolding that would ensure each student imbibes, owns, and retains each lesson?

Can steps I. through V. be taught every week within an eight week accelerated grammar course (Engl-083)? Or is this too time consuming? Does this cycle work for both technical grammar lessons and usage lessons?”

Results of Analysis

Along with giving a detailed reflection and revision of the various steps involved in her grammar scaffolding lesson, Margaret writes, “Revisiting the original questions, I see that the overlooked aspect of my original inquiries is timing. I realize now that all of these steps cannot be completed on a weekly basis and in relationship to every grammar lesson. Rather, they must be masterfully paced to give the students space and time to imbibe lessons, explore their writing, and pursue improvement.

Consequently, in examining student work and revisiting the question I will focus on the aspect of timeframe.”

David Eric Parkison

David focused on creating grammar exercises that put grammar into context and “are more interactive” and creative than traditional grammar workbook exercises. He states, “Part of what conventional grammar instruction ignores is the possibility that there is a connection between the experience of language in creative contexts – short stories, novels, poems – and increased usage proficiency.” To that end, he created “a set of worksheets that utilize creative works in an attempt to contextualize preposition usage.”

Research Question: “The question I seek to answer is whether or not creative worksheets that introduce students to usage in literary contexts might engage students more, and whether or not a worksheet might be formulated to measure student usage more accurately.”

Methods of Investigation

David gave his students two different types of preposition usage worksheets: one “creative” and the other “conventional.” He differentiates the two by saying, creative worksheets contain excerpts from creative works while the conventional “is typically concerned with identifying a task and repeating that task ad nausea.” He gave the two worksheets in two trials. For the first trial he waited three weeks between giving the creative worksheet to the students and the conventional one, and for the second trail he gave the conventional worksheet immediately after the creative one. His reasoning was that he could “examine the correlation between the creative writing worksheet and student preposition usage on conventional exams. [He] hoped to find an improvement in performance reflected on a conventional worksheet” in Trial 2.

Results

David found that students performed better on conventional worksheets consistently than the creative ones, stating that “students perform well on worksheets that ask them to repetitively perform a specific task.” Furthermore, “the creative worksheet, because it assesses understanding along more than one axis, painted a more complex picture of student understanding, selection and preposition usage.” Overall, “Student usage and knowledge […] didn’t seem to improve from one trial to the next, so I don’t think we can conclude that the creative worksheets are a sufficient teaching tool. Instead, I conclude that such worksheets are valuable in that with enough revision and crafting, we could potentially use them for student assessment in a way that would give us a more complete picture of what students understand or fail to understand about preposition usage.”

Marcella Lapriore

Marcella focused on ways “to find valuable, measurable instructional models for grammar and usage acquisition in English 70.” More specifically, wanted to improve students’ usage of commas with subordination and coordination through “instructor line editing” of their sentences and by using a “four-pronged approach.”

Research Question: “Does instructor line editing assist acquisition of grammar and usage skills if done in conjunction with a four-pronged instructional approach?”

Methods of Investigation

Marcella’s four-step action plan, which she refers to as the “four-pronged approach” consists of the following: 1) Explicit review of comma usage in readings, 2) Substantive line editing of student drafts, 3) Practicing grammar usage, 4) Revising. She applied this approach to the first two essay assignments in her English 70 course.

Results

Marcella found that “students gained a measurable level of correct usage acquisition when using commas in coordination and subordination of clauses and phrases” and that line editing did decrease student coordination and subordination comma errors on final drafts. However, she states, “the in-class writing assignment revealed that students were still making incorrect choices, but the incorrect choices were still outweighed by the amount of correct choices.”

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download