This month I will embark on an academic journey that I will call "The Syntax Search". To me this is the most difficult subject in in English composition. When ELLs come into The Writing Center for help, they have the most horrified looks on their faces. Although I know that writing in a foreign language can be a stressful task, it is my job to smile and say something like "aw don't worry, I'll show you a couple of brainstorming games and then we'll work on the structure, it'll be fun." In all reality I might be thinking something like da*n how in the world can I take this student from zero to at least twenty-five.
I tell myself and my students that essays are only a bunch of paragraphs, paragraphs are only a bunch of sentences, sentences are only a bunch of words and words are only a bunch of letters. But as I suggested in my Teacher Inquiry Proposal talk is cheap! If it is so easy to turn letters onto words and words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs etc... why haven't I written a bestseller to teach it to millions of students who are struggling with the English language? Is necessity not the mother of invention? The truth is that it is not as easy as it seems to create a blueprint for every type of sentence using the parts of speech in which students can plug their words into and construct clear sentences. I don't even know if what I conceptualize is possible but I know that this month I will do extensive research to see what I can come up with. If you come across any resources please let me know. Thanks
Belle,
ReplyDeleteI am having very similar issues in the class that I am teaching now. I have one student that admits that she just doesn't get it,the others seem to get it but are mostly pretending. I have a block against what we used to call "parsing" sentences, that is, breaking a sentence into its component syntactic parts. How do I teach something that I don't like doing and don't feel that I know well enough to explain? My students are able to express themselves verbally in English very well but their written English (syntax) is not grammatically correct. Their short term goals are to pass the CUNY entrance exams, they don't see the point of learning grammar. If I could find a simple formula, I would be happy too.
I am working with a few FIQWS and ESL professors this semester. They send me their troubled students and the first thing I do is truncate their sentences. The way I do this is by teaching them to produce clear concise simple sentences, one at a time. the next step is looking over those sentences to see how many of them can "graduate" or be "promoted" into compound sentences. When they get to the point where they can clearly decipher between dependent and independent clauses, I let them graduate into complex sentences. By this time they should be comfortable with the word order of the English sentence.
ReplyDeleteIf novice writers of English try to write what they are thinking without syntactic training, they usually find themselves grappling with local idiomatic and prepositional phrases that they are not culturally accustomed to. That is one of the reasons why so many students write as if they have no idea of what they are saying. They try to transfer phrases from their countries (verbatim) and they end up tripping over diction, syntax, punctuation etc...