Middle School Grammar

Photo of posters that I made to help my coordinating
teacher.

Throughout my experiences in classrooms and talking with different teachers, I have found that many schools have moved away from explicitly teaching grammar. However, in the school that I did my middle school field experience, my coordinating teacher was required to teach several different aspects of grammar.

In addition to parts of speech, my coordinating teacher was also teaching students about comma usage and sentence structure, both of which are skills that can help students in the world beyond school when they’re expected to write in Standard English.

Now, I also find this interesting when I approach it from a linguistic point of view. In my linguistics class, we are currently learning about how there is a notion of prestige when it comes to language, but that there really is no reason for this, as no one dialect is better than any other.

With all this in mind, I have given a lot of thought as to how I will support and teach my future students when it comes to grammar instruction. If I have students who speak in a dialect that is different from mine, how do I make them feel their language is valued in my classroom, while also trying to teach them Standard English?

While I don’t have one single solution to this very complex and delicate situation, I have come up with a way to let my students use their own voice in my future classroom.

I fully intend to use writer’s journals in my future classroom, and when students are writing in their journals, they will be free to write in their own dialect and use their own unique voice. Additionally, for certain assignments that students complete, I will let them use their own dialect.

Furthermore, when it comes to the instruction of Standard English, I will do everything in my power to learn as much as possible about my student’s dialect(s) so that I can cater my instruction to suit their needs and set them up for success on assignments in which Standard English should be used.

Certain dialects of English have different grammatical structures, so in order to teach a student a new grammatical structure, they first need to be aware of the grammatical structure of their dialect.

In several of my class this year we have talked about making students feel like their dialect is valued in the classroom, and I am hoping to discover more ways to go about this as I learn more throughout the rest of this semester and through my student teaching experience in the fall.