After reading the article, I found
myself agreeing with Shaugnessy when he said, “[Basic writers] write
the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal . . . but because they
are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes.
(Shaugnessy 32.)” This is something I
think all teachers and aspiring teachers should take to heart (not just English teachers) (used to show an aside) and realize
that making mistakes is only a part of the natural learning process and
shouldn’t be looked at with contempt. I myself
(looking back on my own memories reflectively) remember making multiple mistakes when first beginning to learn the more
complex subjects in grammar and any number of other subjects. My teachers would
always put me down when I made a mistake, except for my math teacher. She would
show me how and why I made a mistake and how I could fix it so that I wouldn’t make
it again. It is this type of environment, I was able to learn so much more than
in traditional teachings, where mistakes are punished and that is the end of
the story.
As stated in the
article, the biggest problem with todays grammar lessons is that they aren’t
applicable to actual daily speech. Students learn cut-and-dry methods of applying
grammar just long enough to pass the quiz, then lose the information
immediately. “Essentially, DOL-type exercises ask students to apply knowledge
of standard grammar rules in an arbitrary, context-free situation using safe,
cherry-picked samples containing rule-specific mistakes” (Crovitz, pg. 33).
This shows how students can’t really apply what they are being taught in
schools to their lives, much less their writing.
As I read the
different lessons in the DOL section of the article, one stood out to me
because it seems to also encompass the SRTOL ideas that we have been talking
about so far this semester. It’s: “Discuss contextual differences between
similar statements with different registers. Students articulate situations
that might appropriately call for either sentence. Sentence A: I am going to
buy one of those boats. Sentence B: I'ma get me one them boats.” I really liked
this idea of a lesson. It is one thing to know that there are other forms of
English out there; it’s another to come face-to-face with them.
One way that this
could be turned into an actual lesson is, if you have students from different
parts of the country you could ask them all to say the same sentence in
different ways, like above. Or you could look in different forms of literature
to find sentences that are basically the same just said differently. Students
could identify what makes the sentences different and how the rhetoric changes
slightly with the different ways of saying it.
ReplyDeleteI loved reading your post! I like that you brought up the fact that most of the DOL exercises are not applicable to the way we speak on a daily basis. I think this is important for teachers to realize because we need to be preparing our students for standardized tests but also the real world. I also really liked the way you incorporated the pattern of the week with the parentheses. You used it very well to show an aside because it should be an issue that all teachers address, not just the ones who teach language and grammar. You could have incorporated another pattern of the week with a list using “and” instead of commas with the sentence, “Students learn cut-and-dry methods of applying grammar just long enough to pass the quiz and then lose the information immediately and don’t end up learning anything.”