Bridging the Gap in Grammar and Style Instruction

I teach a course in our university’s English teacher preparation program on grammar pedagogy for secondary school teachers. In this course, inspired by the research that shows that isolated study of grammar has little or even a negative influence on student writing, we focus on connecting classroom grammar instruction to authentic writing contexts (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer; Hillocks; Weaver). While I explain this approach to students in a conceptual way, I’m more interested in having them experience the approach themselves through numerous mini-lessons I give on concepts such as participial phrases, adverb clauses, compound sentences, and stylistic punctuation. We practice these techniques through exercises in sentence imitation, combining, expanding, and unscrambling (following the ideas of Bill Strong and Don Killgallon), and my students then apply what they’ve learned to a piece of writing they are working on independently or for another university course. The instruction and practice are focused primarily on grammar and style at the sentence level although we do talk about helping their future students develop self-editing skills and master conventions.

It is my hope that by experiencing this more authentic, contextualized approach to teaching grammar (which usually differs markedly from their experience with grammar instruction in high school or even at the university), these future teachers will replicate such practices in their own classrooms. And my efforts seem to be working, at least on one level. On end-of-course evaluations, students have reported that they feel not only more knowledgeable about grammar but also that their writing is stronger for having been in the course.

It became clear to me in the last couple of years, however, that the transition of these teaching practices, from university course to their classrooms, was not happening or, if it was, was not happening smoothly. As I met and talked informally with former students who are now classroom teachers, the questions they asked and experiences they shared suggested that they were struggling to translate the concepts and experiences they were introduced to in the university course into their own classrooms.

A Lesson Study Project

These experiences inspired the study that I describe in this article. In the fall of 2015, I invited former students who had taken my course and who were now full-time teachers to join me in exploring the implementation of the practices we had examined in the university course. All of those who joined me were female and had between two and five years of experience in the classroom. We split into two separate groups due to geographical distances between the participants and met about once a month to conduct a form of lesson study to explore their grammar pedagogy.

In each meeting, one or two of the participants share an upcoming writing assignment and then the group brainstorms some possible grammar instruction that might dovetail nicely with the assignment. These teachers leave the meeting with a plan for instruction, which they then implement; as they do so, they observe the results, then return and report on those results during the next meeting. Wherever possible, I have invited participants to also observe each other teaching in order to provide another set of eyes on the process and the results. Not every teacher participant in the study has a colleague at the same school, so I have tried to observe as often as I can. In addition to the group meetings, I have conducted a one-on-one interview with each participant at the beginning, the mid-point of the study, and at the end of this first year of the study.

All of these meetings and interviews have been recorded and the recordings transcribed by student assistants. I have been reviewing these transcripts, seeking to identify (1) the challenges that these early career teachers face in implementing sound grammar pedagogy, (2) the ways in which they are finding success in their efforts, and (3) the impact of the lesson study format. Although this analysis is still in an early phase, I share some of my initial observations focused on the second goal, the pedagogical techniques that...