Grammar Instruction and Reading Comprehension

                One of the most important aspects of learning how to read, in my opinion, and one that is largely partitioned off into its own realm is grammar instruction.  Knowing how sentences are structured is imperative to making meaning of the thought before difficult vocabulary can even be considered.  In our English group, we discussed this as a necessary part of analyzing the Voynich Manuscript.  Traditionally, grammar is taught from a grammar book or from worksheets void of context.  Even the ACT, arguably the most important test a student takes in the Midwest, has the literacy portions of the test separated into English, which is the grammar assessment, and Reading, which is the comprehension assessment.  In “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents” by Shanahan and Shanahan, the authors give an example of a sentence from a history text where the subject and verb is buried amidst a list of things the United States was doing pre-WWII (53).  This sentence is something more likely to be found in higher Lexile texts by the time elementary explicit reading instruction has ceased.  At this point, sentences have gone from the repetitive pattern of subject, verb, object, period, subject, verb, object, period to a variety of structures unique to the flexible and complicated English language.

                This is not an issue unique to history, as in “Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy,” Lee and Spratley assert that “…technology and syntax are important and sometimes difficult challenges of reading to learn in science” (4).  Science, like history or literature, does not prescriptively structure sentences as subject then verb, so students must be taught to identify the different kinds of sentence structures in order to find out what part of the sentence is doing what.  In essence, students have to find out what the writer wants the reader to focus on and what is auxiliary information all organized in a new pattern.

                One way I’ve tried to bridge the gap at the upper grades is to teach commas with a review of subject and verbs to help students recognize the patterns that we use in our speaking as well as writing.  By breaking sentence structures down to its bare bones form, which I believe can best be seen through commas and the way we break down sentences into clauses, students have another tool that allows them to more effectively read texts.  The primary way I attempt to do this is through a “Comma Rule Booklet” that I distribute to each student towards the beginning of the year, and we practice in chunks as the year goes on.

Pages 1 & 4 of aforementioned comma booklet

                This is not to say grammar should be taught first and writing second, but the merging of the two has been proven to be most effective at both creating literate adolescents while not making them hate the language through rote memorization. ¹  By teaching students different sentence structures and then asking students to identify and eventually use those structures in their own writing, their writing will not only become more complex as their thoughts can be more developed and organized but more importantly they will be able to read better by identifying the intermediate and advanced patterns of the English language.

^{1 http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-wrong-way-to-teach-grammar/284014/}