Grammar Time 6 Teachers 23
Taichi Reilly
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So, it has been a busy year, you and your colleagues have been writing curriculum and putting the mastery and artwork that is your craft of teaching in motion! A blueprint that is a pathway to learning and now it is time to get resources! No worries! Dual Language SLA unit's of study alignments can be done! BUT THAT IS NOT THE PROBLEM!
Now that you have those resources, you are all done right? Time to teach, but wait! Bi-literacy unit frameworks have a writing segment, so do you now have to create grammar lessons and writing activities? Do you extract them from their contextualized hiding places in the text? What if you are like me? Bilingual, Latino, but English is your first language. So......hmm! When they get to HS? Those heritage classes? Teachers are wondering what happened down there in K-8 dual language ? This is not an opinion, this is what I have been hearing for 6 years from DLP schools and we have the resources to help, without the need of a basal.
I want to stress that we have so much to offer districts for students! In fact many companies do, some buy books from us directly, and those classroom libraries are great. Some think you can just buy a translated version of their English ELA! Yes! (NO)
The question is where are you the teacher getting the support you need? A bilingual endorsement is not a PHD in teaching grammar concepts. Sometimes we need guidance, but we do not want a basal. SO? You have options!
Admittedly, the teaching and study of grammar were already in the doldrums in 1933, as Hudson and Walmsley demonstrate in The English Patient (2004). Long before Jespersen, British academics had sidelined the study of the contemporary language as being of minor interest compared to the more noble study of literature.
It has not been a happy marriage, and it is high time now for a divorce. The marriage was one of convenience; a century ago, grammar was a well-established and noble family, with a pedigree stretching back to Ancient Greek and Latin. English grammar was born in the sixteenth century with strong Latin genes, genes which remained prevalent right through to the twentieth century, by which time the subject was desperately in need of new blood. Linguistics brought into the world by Ferdinand de Saussure, was a natural suitor.
The marriage was a convenience for both parties, English grammar was a field of philology in decline and linguistics was a bold new human science in search of a place at the academic high table. It was a fruitful marriage too, giving birth to a large family including Generative Grammar, Transformational Grammar and others, most sporting the surname Grammar, but adopting the two-tier approach to language derived from Saussurian Linguistics.
In the English-speaking countries, among the reasons for the decline in grammar skills is the fact that for much of the past sixty years, the subject was largely or entirely excluded from school curricula. Though this has now changed, the damage is done, leaving large numbers of English teachers in schools and language centres who themselves have had little or no training in the subject . Those who had most training are teachers whose degrees involved a course or module in linguistics or grammar where in most cases the approach was morphosyntactical, in line with linguistic orthodoxy, and thus ill-suited to the needs of teaching .
It is worth noting here that the grammar teaching problem is particularly acute in the sphere of teaching English as a first language. In EFL / ESL, where teachers and coursebook writers have not been subjected to the constraints of a specific national curriculum, approaches have remained more varied and more rooted in tradition.
Divorced from linguistics, grammar can be explained in a way that is much more understandable to lay readers. There is no need for technical jargon, just for essential terminology, little need for morphosyntaxic analysis, just for semantics and of appropriate examples. If post-linguistic grammar were to have three keywords, they would be clarity, simplicity and relevance.
It is a concrete subject: you learn a rule, then you apply it and use it. Many English learners are familiar with doing worksheets in class and feel in their comfort zone, even when the grammatical concept they are learning is a bit more difficult.
I am a big proponent of practicality and communication in language teaching. So can you imagine how THRILLED I was when I heard an honorable ESL professor and author of multiple books on teaching English learners echo my sentiment almost exactly?!
One of the more popular ways to teach grammar is to teach a rule and provide worksheets for students to complete. And while a good grammar worksheet always has its place, it does not give a teacher lots of information about whether the student can actually use the grammatical rule in real life or not.
Younger children (ages 6-9) learn grammar best through play, singing and real-life use of grammatical structures because they are not able to process the abstract information that is grammar yet. Older students have the ability to think abstractly and therefore, form-focused grammar instruction works well with them.
Finally, if you are an ESL/ELL teacher, who is craving more time, sanity and confidence and is looking to have ready-made ESL/ELL beginner resources in one place, click here to see if The ESL Teaching Roadmap is right for you. (We open several times a year, so join the waitlist if you happened to find us in the off-season and get notified about behind-the-scenes and special offers).
ELLEN: I began about five point something years ago to set up on the streets of New York City with a pop-up grammar advice stand. And people just come up to me and ask me language questions. The why is because it seemed like fun.
ELLEN: So, a simpler way of explaining this is, Swahili is one of the multiple languages that. Does that make you want to change your answer at all? Anyone, does that make you want to go plural, where you went singular before?
ELLEN: I like that question a lot. So, for me, that is very relevant, because these are about human tale for me. People share personal human tales. I have to treat those with respect. So, that matters to me very much. And thank you for that question.
DANIEL: I thought Spanish was an accidental similarity, and I thought that maybe the Smi was a borrowing, which would count as related, not genetically, but through borrowing. That was my answer. Hedvig, what do you think?
BEN: Well, question, is it possible that the three boys are identical triplets? And so, there is some sort of roster to the stacking. Meaning, that at any given instance of Vincent Adultman, you were getting a different person in the stack order.
HEDVIG: This has been a really fun show, and we like to continue making our show. And one of the things that makes that possible is the support from listeners like you who choose to donate a little bit of money every month on patreon.com. You can support Because Language that way.
DANIEL: You can also become a patron. Your support means the regular episodes are free for everybody. It means we can get transcripts from SpeechDocs so that our shows are readable and searchable. How many times has Hedvig mentioned hating lime green? You can check by looking through our transcripts.
Additional notes:
The term "grammar" is typically used to refer to "the proper use of language." More specifically "a grammar" is a set of rules for using a language. These rules guide users in the correct speaking or signing of a language.
Who decides what is correct and incorrect grammar? The grammar (set of rules for proper use) of a language is developed by the group of people who use the language. New grammar rules come into existence when enough members of the group have spoken (signed) their language a particular way often enough and long enough that it would seem odd to speak the language in some other way.If you don't want to seem odd to others in your group, you've got to speak (sign) a language according to the rules which have been developed by the community which uses the language.American Sign Language is tied to the Deaf Community. We use our language in a certain way. That "certain way" is what constitutes ASL grammar. American Sign Language has its own grammar system, separate from that of English.
In general, ASL sentences follow a "TOPIC" "COMMENT" arrangement. Another name for a "comment" is the term "predicate." A predicate is simply a word or phrase that says something about a topic. In general, the subject of a sentence is your topic. The predicate is your comment.
[The "Pro1" term means to use a first-person pronoun. A first-person pronoun means "I or me." So "Pro1" is just a fancy way of saying "I" or "me." In the above example you would simply point at yourself to mean "Pro1."]
Using the object of your sentence as the topic of the sentence is called "topicalization." In this example, "my car" becomes the subject instead of "me." The fact that "I washed it last week" becomes the comment.
There is more than one sign for "WASH." Washing a car or a window is different from the generic sign for "WASH" to wash-in-a-machine, or to wash a dish. The real issue here isn't so much the order of the words as it is choosing appropriate ASL sign to accurately represent the concept.
For example you could say: "I STUDENT I" or, "I STUDENT" or even, "STUDENT I."
Note: The concept of "I" in these sentences is done by pointing an index finger at your chest and/or touching the tip of the index finger to your chest.
I notice that some "ASL" teachers tend to become fanatical about encouraging their students to get as far away from English word order as possible and thus focus on the version "FROM U-T-A-H I."
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