Not One Grammar, but Many Types of Grammar

Before reading this article (The Grammar of Context: Breakfast, Bumper Stickers, and Beyond), I hadn't thought about there being many different types of grammar because growing up my teachers had just drilled grammar into me. It wasn't fun and no one liked to learn about. Although I think now there are many effective ways to teach grammar in the classroom where students will be engaged. I found a great article that talks about great advice to correct grammar in a middle school classroom. It makes a lot of good points about exposing students to good examples of grammar and also how being a grammar police will ruin it. 


As a teacher we can silently correct the grammar but we don't want to overwhelm students with mistakes on their papers. Grammar is more than misspelled words and punctuation and that's why there isn't only one type of grammar. In each situation that your student is writing in their is a different type of grammar that is associated. The article talks about many different examples of activities or examples that you can look at to give students examples of these different types of grammar.

 For example they talk about the back of cereal box which was very interesting and something that I hadn't thought of before. From the back you can look at the audience intended and punctuation that was chosen and even the types of sentences used. Most of these things depend upon the audience that the author is trying to reach. I think it is hard for parents to see this as teaching grammar because for them grammar wasn't taught that way but teaching it this way is more beneficial and teaching grammar in isolation doesn't help students with using it in their writing. The connection of having these examples and having students practice these will have way more meaning than having separate grammar lessons.