Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 Response Blogs

In chapter one, “How Language is Learned: From Birth Through the Elementary Years and Beyond,” Jane Kiel focused on the ways children learned to speak and subsequently learn the basic aspects of grammar. Kiel explains the process of learning language, beginning at infancy and a baby’s first sounds. She then moves to young children who learn what they hear when being spoken to and around. Lastly, she argues that children learn the most about language and grammar through reading. Kiel feels that four things influence the ability to learn language: one’s cognitive capacity to learn, the physical development required to produce speech, a desire or need to communicate with others and the stimulation from one’s environment.

Kiel, when describing a child’s vocabulary and what she calls “overgeneralization,” she gives an example of her daughter referring to “all four legged animals” as “woof” (5). This made me laugh and reminded me of a funny story about a friend’s child, Conner. Conner was in the middle of being potty trained and said words like “pee” and “poop” after he used the potty chair to tell everyone of his accomplishment. Mind you, this was done after looking into the toilet bowl at his “accomplishment.” Not too long after her started doing this, we took him out for ice cream and made the mistake of getting him chocolate. We held the cone out to him, he pulled his hands away quickly and said “Eww, poop!” Unlike the advice Kiel gives on not correcting a child when verbal mistakes are made, we did try to convince that this was indeed not poop, but it was no use.

On a more serious note, Kiel advocates reading as one of the best ways to teach students grammar and vocabulary and I completely agree. It makes sense that students who enjoy reading and comprehend what they read will do better to internalize the information they are getting than students who memorize words for a spelling test. It should come as no secret to any teacher that the majority of students feel that, after the grade is earned, they can relax and forget about those words.

Chapter two, “Teaching Grammar in the Context of Writing,” by Constance Weaver, explores the successfulness of the traditional ways of teaching grammar and introduces aspects of grammar that should be taught and how. Weaver presents numerous studies showing that teaching grammar lessons while addressing grammar as a school subject on its own is not conducive to students learning the material. As a side note, those of us who are not familiar with grammar terms, cannot be completely sure about what she is suggesting should be taught in schools. This article is not written in layman’s terms. I have no idea what an “adverbial free modifier” is (22).

Using three different examples of teachers honing their grammar teaching skills, Weaver presents the idea of grammar “minilessons,” which I thought was effective in this article. I understood the teachers who were teaching grammar the way they had been taught (and they way I probably would have taught, too) even though it didn’t do any of us very much good. I think it is smart that people are realizing the traditional way of looking at grammar hasn’t been effective and we need to be looking for better solutions.

I found one of the ideas in Weaver’s article very interesting. Weaver suggests that “the power of dialect and the dialects of power” be taught as part of grammar (22). I feel this would be a wonderful thing to incorporate into the classroom. First of all, by teaching dialects and then exploring which “dialects are appropriate in what kinds of situations,” as Weaver states, we can avoid telling a student that his or her dialect is incorrect. We could instead teach that all dialects are correct, but that some are acceptable in certain situations and others are not. Also, there are often prejudices held towards people who speak in dialect. Your students may think that people who speak in African American Vernacular English, or who speak with Southern accents, etc., are not as smart as those who speak Standard American English and teaching many dialects in your classroom could be a way of undermining those biases before they become problems.