I'm going to focus on the reading from Mechanically Inclined simply because those concepts are really sticking with me.
As a middle school student, even as a high school student, I certainly remember grammar workbooks. In fact, my sophomore year of high school I had a thick vocabulary/grammar workbook that I lugged around every day. Every night my assignment was to complete 1 section, or about 15 pages, of grammar/vocab practice. Exhausting, right? The book "taught" us prefixes, suffixes, blah blah blah. Surprisingly enough, I could not tell you one thing that I remember learning from that book. Sure, I learned a number of those concepts, but I learned them through application and usage...not from repeated workbook exercises. As future teachers it is extremely important for us to find innovative, creative, and successful ways to teach grammar and mechanics.
"Pseudo-concepts"...wow! I had never heard the term before reading it last night. The example that was used dealt with the usage of its/it's...the pseudo concept is a "budding theory based on initial impressions". Students know that if they were to write The dog's collar was bright blue they would use an apostrophe in dog's to show possession. Therefore, in the sentence Its collar was bright blue they also want to insert an apostrophe even though that is incorrect. This is amazing to me for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I make this mistake all of the time...occassionally I catch myself, but often times I don't. I could be wrong, but I'm almost positive that if I had been taught what a "pseudo-concept" was and why I was missuing it's/its...I would have understood my error and stopped! Really, it seems so easy to me now that I've had it explained in such a different context. I also like this concept because I think it opens the door to teachers understanding the minds of students. Students learn based off of what they already know. Even as a college student I often rely on prior knowledge to gain and understand new information. Prior learning almost acts as a type of scaffold to future learning.
It is no secret that grammar is a "shudderwhenyouhearit" kinda word. That applies to learning it...and it also applies to teaching it. It is obvious that over the past few years the attitude toward teaching grammar is fairly negative. Does that mean that as future teachers we should just ignore the problem and get that area of the curriculum done as soon as possible? No, as future teachers it is our responsibility to be the leaders of change. We need to start "creating" not "correcting". What we have always done in regards to teaching grammar is no longer efficient, so it is time to start figuring what would be effective. There are several aspects of teaching that I think are extremely important. Scaffolding, application, and context. Anderson explains the following strategy:
A teacher uses one sentence from a short text or passage the students have already read or will read. The teacher should read the sentence aloud, then ask the class what "sticks with them" or what they like about it. This is excellent for starting an open discussion and really getting to the heart of your students' minds. When you udnerstand how they see a sentence and its parts, you can better teach them to understand the grammar and mechanics of those parts. In other words, perhaps teachers can use the learning strategies that students already have to teach them new concepts. If I see that Susie really likes that a sentence is longer and has several parts, I can then begin to explain to her the idea of a complex sentence as well as how to form one. Now Susie knows how the concept that she already likes, works. This may not work for everything, but if it works for something, then it is useful.
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