Unit 9: Grammar & Grammar Instruction

1. His brother bought land last winter. Later, the economy was bad, so he sold the land. John loves fishing but wants to be a better fisherman. John’s boat’s name is ‘Troubled Waters.’ When he was sad, he painted his boat blue and cleaned it. John asked his brother what he thought of the blue, clean boat. His brother laughed and said, “You always want compliments.” John didn’t have a lot of energy, so he didn’t argue with his brother. He just made more nets. John wants to catch more fish tomorrow with the nets.

2. Vocabulary may also be challenging to the ELL student; for example, I replaced ‘crashed’ when referring to the economy, since I was not sure if this would be confusing in this context. Similarly, I wasn’t sure if the word ‘successful’ may be too cumbersome. It is hard to judge lexicon when we are dealing with a hypothetical audience whose linguistic background is unclear, underlining the importance of knowing one’s students and performing needs assessment. Other words, like compliment, I left in the story since I felt they couldn’t be translated well without changing the meaning. To address these challenges, new vocabulary will have to be introduced before the story is read. We could, for example, practice giving ‘compliments’ to each other as a class. The other glaring issue is that once the story is changed, some of the meanings change subtly, as well. For example, when one just uses the present and past, it appears as if the story is taking place in real time, which is a different timeline than the original story. This would only need to be addressed once the students were actually working with those verb tenses, though. If the purpose of the text was simply to explore the new ideas and play with the story itself, it could be accomplished with the ‘watered down’ version.

4. Although there are anomalies to any generalization, I think that grammar cannot typically be acquired through immersion alone. There were examples of this lack of acquisition provided by Ms. Azar (like the college freshman writing juvenile criminal justice). This student clearly didn’t acquire enough grammar to be successful at the college level, even though he had been ‘immersed.’ And I think another point worth remembering is that there is no standard for ‘immersion.’ We cannot control how our ELL students experience English outside of our classrooms. Do they speak it with friends, or at home? We can’t assume that immersion looks any particular way, so we have to stay focused on that which we can control in the learning environment. Mr. Swan made a good point when he stated that grammar is patterns, and our learners need help identifying those patterns. Even if a student can gain successful competency without explicit grammar instruction, would some ‘hybrid’ (Azar) be destructive? It would only succeed in explaining the language phenomenon that s/he has already noticed. And my best ‘evidence’ (Swan) for thinking that explicit instruction is required—at least in part—is the success I’ve seen with my NS students in my Social Studies classes after simply pointing out the grammar pattern to them. Once it was made explicit, they were able to recognize the correct way to write or say their idea.