How to Deal with Student Grammar Errors

When reading through blog topics, I stumbled upon this one by Jennifer Gonzalez, writer of Cult of Pedagogy, called "How to Deal with Student Grammar Errors." I have been stumped by this over the last few years.

Gonzalez writes, "Grammar taught in isolation, outside the context of meaningful writing, has been found to have no significant impact on the quality of student writing; in fact, excessive drills can have a detrimental impact on it." She applies various peer reviewed articles to support her claim. Grammar must be taught using student writing -- when an authentic learning experience presents itself.

So what should teachers do?

1. Give Students LOTS of time to read and write. There is no better way to improve students’ writing than to have them read and write as much as possible. Building your daily classes around some form of Reading and Writing Workshop is a good place to start.

By the way, “reading” means real books, articles, and other texts that will turn students into people who love to read and read frequently. Regular exposure to lots and lots of good writing will naturally improve the correctness of students’ writing.

“Writing” means both formal pieces that are taken all the way through the writing process and informal writing, like journal entries and free-writes.

2. Curate a database of quick grammar lessons.

Because they will continue to make mechanical errors, and because these conventions are best taught within the context of the writing they’ll be doing in your class, set up a system that allows individual students to quickly learn the conventions they need: This could take the form of a file cabinet or even a shared drive with folders that contain one high-quality lesson for each error: a folder for your-you’re errors, a file for then-than errors, and so on.

3. Have individual students do individual lessons as needed.

Students can go to the lesson they need, refresh themselves on the rule, and then get back to their writing, where they can correct the error and keep an eye out for future uses of that same convention.

4. Understand that this is a process.

You will never, ever be able to teach in such a way that all students are error-free, and even students who understand the rules will occasionally mess up. So rather than try to fix it once and for all, get your students reading and writing as much as possible and help them develop a personalized, proactive approach to producing correct writing.