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Statement on Teaching Grammar
for Writing Program Instructors at UMass Amherst

By Deirdre Vinyard, Deputy Director of the Writing Program

How do we address “grammar” issues in our students’ writing?

A major component of first year writing courses at UMass Amherst is helping student writers build awareness of their own language use. Through readings, class discussion, and direct instruction, we try to foster understanding of the languages and literacies that students bring to our writing classrooms, and we hope to heighten our students’ attentiveness to the linguistic choices they make in creating texts. We hope to advance ideas about the complex ways that language and dialect interact with school or standard language and dispel notions of absolute correctness in favor of contextualized choices in language form. Aspects of the first-year curriculum support the integration of local or “home” features of language while other parts of the curriculum demand the use of more “academic” language. Primarily we strive to help students inform their language use by making visible these choices.

While we wrestle with the idea of “correctness” and the political implications inherent in the forwarding of a standard language in the classroom, we nevertheless recognize the currency of academic language for our students. Indeed, the inclusion of a large section on style, grammar, and mechanics in our curriculum represents our commitment to helping students refine their command of standard American Edited English. How best can we do this?

We have good ideas, both about what works and about what doesn’t work. Traditionally, language teachers identified structures of language they wanted their students to learn and presented these pieces of language to their students in discrete bits for study and practice. Teachers have used this technique, based on a behavioral theory of learning, in both first and second language writing classrooms for centuries. It seems common sense that writers will produce structures which they have studied and practiced in a focused way. The idea that creating and practicing habits in language use stems from behavioral psychology and has informed teaching in all fields for many years. While this practice-and-repeat approach to learning may appeal to us logically, empirically it has little to recommend it.

The “behavioralist’s notion that learning consists of habit formation” (Weaver 162) has yielded to a “constructivist model of teaching and learning” (157) in which learners actively engage in their own development. The ways we as teachers approach the task of increasing our students’ sentence level abilities has shifted as a result. This constructivist view of writing and language is supported by years of research which maintains the view that the explicit teaching of grammar is ineffective in helping writers develop increased accuracy and fluency on the sentence level. In her review of studies concerning the efficacy of grammatical instruction since 1936, Constance Weaver writes that “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that teaching formal, isolated grammar …makes no appreciable difference in [students’] ability to write, to edit, or to score better on standardized tests” (26).

Despite overwhelming evidence that teaching grammar to student writers does not produce better writing, the myth that teaching grammar works persists. Learning to write is messy. Part of the appeal of grammatical instruction is that it isn’t. In a discipline with few absolutes, prescriptive grammar instruction offers the prospect of definitive answers, but not a lot else. This is not to say that writing teachers are not central to the process of helping students develop sentence level competence and flexibility. But in order to help our students become better writers on all levels, we need to understand that students increase their facility with language primarily through reading and writing. Research findings (e.g., Krashen) consistently tell us that students adopt new structures and vocabulary as a result of reading and that encouraging students to create texts in which they are invested fosters writing development.

The curricula in both Basic and College Writing are based on these views. Students read and reflect on published texts from which they glean structural and rhetorical strategies. They write extensively, often in low stakes contexts through generative and exploratory writing exercises. From these activities emerges the bulk of their development.

Additionally, we can help students hone their editing skills of their own and their classmates’ work. The studies referenced above illustrate that de-contextualized language study is ineffective. Writers learn best from examining their own texts, and, of course, this is what we are training them to do. After College Writing is behind them, our students will need to edit their own writing. We ask that teachers teach their students to use the style, grammar, and mechanics sections of the Penguin Handbook to help them edit their final drafts, in terms of both grammatical and stylistic choices, remembering to focus writers on a few specific points at a time.

So specifically, what should we do with our students and why?

1. Look at issues of style, grammar, and mechanics near the end of the writing process. This is important for several reasons. First, focusing a writer on her sentence level choices early in the writing process will hinder fluency. We want developing writers to have time to focus on global issues in the creation of their texts (generation of ideas and organizational strategies) without stopping to ponder every word ending or article choice. Writing process studies (Perl, Sommers, Zamel, etc.) indicate that less skilled writers often struggle with sentences in first drafts, greatly slowing their production of text, while more skilled writers leave such work to later stages in the writing process. Second, the central focus of both Basic and College Writing is revision, reflecting Toby Fulwiler’s view that revision is “the operational core of the composing process” (60). Hence, much of what appears in first drafts changes in subsequent drafts, rendering sentence level efforts (by both student writers and their teachers) wasted.

2. Focus on specific student level “challenges” in an individual piece of writing. Developing writers cannot productively focus on every stylistic, grammatical, and mechanical issue in their writing simultaneously. And we know from the research cited above that explicit teaching of these issues is not a fruitful use of time. Therefore, teachers need to guide students to focus on two or three important surface issues at a time with the goal of helping them be better editors of their writing.

3. Recognize that for students, writing in either a first or a second language, sentence level dexterity (as well as overall writing skill) takes time. Student writers – in fact all writers – develop writing skill for as long as they are engaged in meaningful writing. This includes every part of writing, from the sentence to the overall text. Students will not master every aspect of writing during one semester.

4. Multi-lingual writers may encounter sentence level issues different from their first language counterparts, but our approach to fostering their work is similar to what we do with first language writers. While second language (L2) writers may struggle with articles, prepositions and verb tenses in ways that students writing in English as a first language do not, we approach these issues not with explicit instruction, but by developing editing skills and allowing them time to acquire more of the language.

5. Begin with issues of clarity and move to issues of style. With both L1 and L2 writers, begin sentence level commentary on areas of the text where the meaning is not clear. Focusing on these areas directs the writer to places in her text where she may still be developing meaning. This approach also carries the message that the primary purpose of writing is communication.

6. Address issues of sentence boundaries. Run-on sentences, comma splices and fragments are all good places to begin developing sentence level awareness in student writers; fragments can additionally be discussed in terms of their use as stylistic choice.

7. With L2 writers, begin with the verb system; leave articles and preposition to later. The verb tense system in English is complex and all students need to focus on tense as it applies to the construction of meaning in their texts.

For a selected bibliography of books and articles on the teaching of grammar, click here.

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