Many teachers find that their grammar instruction includes piecing together grammar lessons and resources. Grammar may be under-emphasized (who has the time!?) or over-emphasized (marking EVERY error in student papers for the students). Maybe you can relate?
I find success in teaching grammar through sentence combining and use of mentor sentences, and have tried a weekly “one pager” to build toward the summative grammar assessment (though I did not find that this strategy was as successful as grammar in-context).
“In context” grammar instruction, according to expert Constance Weaver, simply means teaching grammar in connection with professional and student writing. Teachers can find patterns and sentences in student writing to bring to the class for discussion or have students self-identify patterns and sentence structures from their own writing.
I think that it’s important to remember that “in-context” doesn’t mean teachers shouldn’t engage in direct instruction and practice of the skill, but that this instruction should find its origin and/or final product in student writing, hopefully both.
Sentence Combining and Sentence Expansion Activities for Grammar Instruction
Currently, my department is required to teach grammar via sentence patterns and formulas. Students might be asked to combine sentences to follow the pattern 1 sc 2, cc 3 using the joiner words “if” and “so.” Their combined final sentence might look like this: My mom would let me go to the party if I earned a good grade, so I studied for the test.
In addition to sentence combining practice, teachers can try sentence expansion activities.
- Challenge students to find 5 different ways to say the same idea.
- Give students a simple sentence and ask them to add different phrases and clauses to it.
- Ask students to add a particular type of phrase to a sentence as an opener, an interrupt, and a closer.
One resource that I love for sentence combining & expansion is Killgallon’s Sentence Composing for High School and Sentence Composing for Middle School. If you’re looking to challenge students in 11th and 12th grade (and beyond), try Sentence Composing for College.
If I had to pick ONE resource for grammar instruction, Killgallon’s work texts for grammar instruction would be it.
Here’s why…
This approach focuses on asking students to imitate the sentence styles of professional writers. These workbooks train students to manipulate sentences through unscrambling, imitating, combining, and expanding activities.
Teaching Grammar with Mentor Sentences
When you teach with mentor sentences, students learn to recognize what great writers do.
I really like the work of Jeff Anderson for the teaching of grammar with mentor sentences. His instructional resource, Patterns of Power, supports the assumption that the use of mentor sentences is necessary for student grammar acquisition. In this must-have text, he suggests an “invitation-centered” approach to grammar work.
First, students are invited to notice, and then they are invited to label what they’re noticing in mentor sentences and texts. Experts such as Constance Weaver suggest that teachers should not unnecessarily bog students down with technical terminology, but to teach through examples, so I think that Anderson’s “noticing and labeling” step is a great student-led way to introduce grammatical concepts.
After students have noticed and identified (with the teacher as facilitator), the next steps ask students to revise the mentor sentence, empowering them as experts to change the form and, perhaps, the meaning. This step produces interesting conversations about what students would change and why. As a final step, Anderson suggests imitation of the mentor sentence structure as a “pattern” in actual student writing.
In the mentor sentence activities I have created, I blend the noticing and labeling with unscrambling and imitation of mentor sentences. The interactive drag-and-drop are an engaging format for grammar instruction!
Activate & Apply Grammar Concepts
Experts suggest that students should engage in some sort of activation related to the grammatical concept and then move to application. Students need to be able to play around with language in a way that transfers to their own writing. It’s also important to show students examples of grammar concepts at work in the texts students are reading and to discuss the impact on tone, meaning, style.
Larry Ferlazzo suggests an inductive learning strategy called “concept attainment” to activate student learning.
Using this strategy, teachers project two categories, “yes” and “no.” Then, they reveal sentences that belong in each category, one at a time. This strategy turns grammar instruction into a puzzle that students are being asked to solve: what is the “rule” that places some sentences in the “yes” category and some sentences in the “no” category?
From here, I can see how students would be able to find other examples of the rule in published writing, discuss, and work integrate it into their own writing. Though Ferlazzo states that this strategy is typically used with ELL students to teach basic grammatical skills, teachers can modify the strategy to use more sophisticated sentence patterns and types of phrases.
Quick Fixes for Improving Grammar Instruction
| Basic Instruction | Evolved Instruction |
| Isolated Grammar Instruction: i.e. 1-pagers on a certain day of the week | Try teaching grammar in-context with games such as America’s top editor or The Lazy Editor. Use revision stations and sentence combining exercises when in the drafting and revision stage of writing. |
| Use of Quill for skill practice | Quill can be quite powerful for differentiated grammar practice. Rather than using this tool in isolation, you might have students demonstrate the skills they are working on in Quill in their writing assignments. |
| Teaching grammar sporadically or prior to a test because grammar is not a “priority standard” and I only have 47 minutes with students. | Have grammar conversations naturally and often. Write with your students and talk about how you would revise to include sentence variation or a particular type of phrase / clause. You could have students find and correct errors in a celebrity social media posts or signs they see in the real world. Post these on daily agenda slides and talk about them. Emphasize that a wide range of choices may be acceptable for stylistic reasons. This exercise suggested by Read Write Think seems like a good one to integrate toward that end. |
| Just focus on ACT / SAT prep questions | Add a bit of ACT practice to your grammar instruction toolbox! Pull excerpts from ACT practice tests to create a weekly “5 for 5” practice. Students answer 5 questions individually. Then, they discuss in their small groups and change their answers if they wish to do so. Really, the key to this activity, the piece that makes my students focus and have really great discussions about why they picked their answers… is to gamify things. You see, this is an activity that happens in ALL of our sophomore classes. After small group discussions, we collect the individual papers and pull one at random to represent the class. We go over the answers, and the number that the randomly-pulled student answered correctly is the class “score” for that week. This is a semester-long “game” that we play. The highest scoring class at the end wins a cookie party. |
Consistent and meaningful grammar instruction is important, and it is vital that students become adept at using language to communicate clearly with others. This post does not ignore the fact that we are teaching in an age of AI and tools like Grammarly. We’re teaching students who read less than ever, are on their devices more than ever, and who have access to more tools than ever. That’s why it’s more important than ever to teach grammar in ways that engage students beyond what AI can do for them. “Brains on” grammar instruction is not just a matter of correctness…it’s a matter of style and voice and fluency.
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