1. Nouns and Noun Phrases 2. Verbs and Verb Phrases 3. The Clause 4. Adjectives, Adverbs, and Prepositions 5. Independent, Coordinate, and Subordinate Clauses 6. Complementation and Modification
The basic grammar components and their order are based on Navigating English Grammar: A guide to analyzing real language by Lobeck and Denham. Get yours here. (Actually, I can get you copies if you think you can use them. Let me know.)
The novel (re)introduction to nouns and verbs will allow students to see that they already have strong intuitions about these basic parts of speech, and that the traditional meaning-based definitions (a noun is a person, place, or thing; a verb is an action or state) are insufficient. Instead, they will discover new tests and tools to employ in determining parts of speech.
Understanding nouns and verbs is critical in order to identify clauses. And there are some great tests and tools to help students find subjects (and therefore clauses). [I’ll add some links to these soon.] There are lots of applications here to writing – connections to fragments, run-ons, subject-verb agreement issues, for starters.
Tackling verbs is big, so I think it’s probably best to do a short introduction in order to get to clauses, but then come back to it to discuss the various kinds of verbs (modal, auxiliary, and main/lexical), the tests/tools to identify them, and then applications of all of this knowledge (discussing tense and aspect to address consistency of tense, if that’s an issue for your writers; identification of and discussion of passive voice; the power (and lack thereof) of be, etc.).
Mostly, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions (and particles, which are actually part of verbs, like look up), are straightforward and don’t cause any issues in writing. However, there are some prescriptive shibboleths associated with adjectives and adverbs (Don’t say drive slow or cook good) that it is useful to talk about to discover how and why such variation comes about, that they are not actually “incorrect,” but that we can come to understand how to make educated rhetorical choices. Also, they need to be able to identify prepositional phrases, for example, to understand the variation that exists in certain subject-verb agreement constructions. [Link to lesson plan and draft of article - will add soon.]
Having students understand how and why language changes and varies is a crucial thread throughout this grammar story. The stigmas associated with certain variations (typically deemed “incorrect”) are based on socially-determined biases rather than linguistic fact. Discovering this through investigating linguistic patterns and exploring the origins of some of the prescriptive rules is enlightening, and, again, allows writers to make informed choices.
The bigger discussion of clauses connects very directly to writing in a variety of ways – understanding how to punctuate subordinate clauses compared to coordinate independent clauses, for example; avoiding fragments; adding variety to writing by using different kinds of clauses, and so on.
And the last section on complementation and modification also connects directly to writing – movable/dangling modifiers, putting ‘modifying’ information at the beginning, setting it off by commas, discovering the difference between essential and non-essential information (and learning to listen for cues in our intonation to discern the difference). Lots of applications here, which we’ll return to.
No comments:
Post a Comment