If they read, their grammar will come

Princess Chulabhorn's College Chiang Rai Thailand

I’m always pretty happy to read another chapter in Building Adolescent Literacy but when I saw that the chapter was about grammar I sighed an uncontrollable sigh. Grammar is my worst enemy when it comes to Language Arts. I comma-splice the heck out of my papers. So as I dove into the chapter I prepared myself for the worst–a dry chapter about the functions of grammar and how to teach it to students as unwilling to learn it as unwilling as I am to teach it. Leave it to Dr. Bomer, however, to change my mind on the significance of grammar and how “pointlessly distinguishing between gerunds and participles, underlining the subject once and the predicate twice, or circling the subjects and verbs, that do not agree” wastes our students’ time (Bomer, 278).

Dr. Bomer asserts that the things I mentioned above aren’t the important characteristics students need to learn about grammar. What’s important is the different ways people use dialects, written versus spoken English and how power comes into play when using standard written English versus other spoken English, like Chicano English, for example. The case study he discussed that caught my eye the most was the contrasts among different languages’ patterns and rules. Classrooms are becoming more and more multicultural and that is only going to continue into the future. A class where students speak a different language at home is a great place to implement a case study involving different languages. Living in Thailand made me appreciate the intricacies of how difficult English is and it made me really respect how hard my students worked to learn a language that is completely different from their own. The picture above is the sign at my school, Princess Chulabhorn’s College and it is just to give you an idea about how vastly different Thai is from English. A case study of the different native languages you can find in your classroom can foster a mutual understanding of your students’ cultures and the diverse ways languages are constructed and used around the world. I think this exercise can be really useful in a class where students might make fun of a student who’s English isn’t up to par with the others. It could help the bullies see why a student might not use pronouns correctly or why they put the adjective behind the verb etc. and it can foster mutual understanding and respect. It benefits both the bully and the student being made fun of, by giving the non-native speaker a chance to show pride in her heritage and maybe make new friends in the meantime. It widens your students’ sociological imagination to include students’ whose first language isn’t English.

I also like the idea of making the chart with Standard written English on one side and a specific group’s English, like Chicano English, on the other. Letting the students think about what are the differences between the two lets them think about their own identity and how it relates to the power standard written English has in the US today. You can help your students to grasp the importance of understanding and using standard written English in situations like essays and interviews but that they don’t have to be ashamed to use their group’s English dialect in other situations.

Dr. Bomer sees the normative teaching of grammar as a bland waste of time that only corrects students’ errors in sentence structures. His ideas and suggestions on teaching grammar as a part of social and class struggle are refreshing. He offers great ideas to make your students think about grammar in new ways that actually pertain to their lives. He thinks teachers should spend more time helping “students becoming strong, independent, purposeful readers and writers with active literate lives is much more important, and it’s such a high expectation that it requires most of our attention” (Bomer, 277). In other words, grammar is important to a certain extent but engaging your students to become life long readers is a more beneficial endeavor. I personally believe that if they read they will come to understand grammar through their literate lives.