I feel badly about my last post--just wanted to clarify that I was thrilled that my wonderful niece wrote us a lovely thank you note. My point about the spelling was that when students present themselves as adults--say, writing a note to a child's teacher or a paragraph about past job experiences for a perspective employer--misspelling common words such as "been" will reflect on them in negative ways. Poor spellers (like me) need to learn when and how to use some form of a dictionary. Instead of circling "bin" in red, teachers should make the student learn how to spell "been." (I speak as a student who had to write "first" two hundred times in 10th grade because I consistently spelled it "frist.")
Our reading noted that direct teaching of grammar had a negative correlation with writing improvement. I'm not surprised. I spent part of each 9th Grade Special English class last year on grammar (parts of speech, homonyms, verb tense, possessives) and "got ya" do nows--I saw minimal carryover into students' spontaneous writing. Sentence combining seems promising, but there must be something more. How can grammar be remediated in the secondary classroom? How can a teacher discuss parallel structure when her students can't identify a verb in a sentence? Does anyone have experience with techniques that work? Any links to helpful websites? Should we go back to diagraming sentences (I'd have to learn how, of course!)?
Barb
Funny thing is, I must admit, I love the study of grammar. But, I know that being strong in grammar does not necessarily make one a strong writer. Or a writer with his or her own voice. And, spelling...thing is, there are so many spelling and grammar programs available for writers. You can hire or download an editing service. If we understand how words are used in context, do we all need to be "spelling bee" ready?
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