Saturday, April 30, 2011

Memories of Grammar Classes

Most of the grammar that I learned was taught by the teacher presenting rules along with a few examples written on the chalkboard or reading the examples that were presented in the textbook. Then the class was assigned practice exercises. This involved either copying sentences from a textbook using the correct word(s) to fill in the blank or rewriting a sentence and incorporating the newly learned grammatical concept. These practice exercises were corrected the following day in class. Most of the grammar rules were fairly easy to learn and apply to the exercises that we were assigned. However, the practice exercises were seldom directly followed up with writing our own examples or applying the grammatical rules to a written composition. When the class was assigned to write a story, we were not provided with a rubric or suggestions on how to use specific grammatical concepts to improve our written compositions. I think this would have facilitated my learning of and ability to apply grammatical concepts.

Adding partner and group learning activities that involved all four language modalities would have facilitated learning and made it more enjoyable. I find that learning a rule is easier if I can associate it with a meaningful event or situation and have opportunities to verbalize it as well as write it.

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