To Implement or Not to Implement: DOL in the Classroom

I think an important place to start when thinking about grammar use is the quote by Crovitz that reads: “language is learned through a process of experimentation, error-making, and self-correction” (32). It's important to remember that students wouldn't make an error on purpose, but rather, there is something else going on. The importance of explaining the correction and why the students error didn't work was shown throughout this article, especially with the underlying learning opportunities teachers face with these errors. I think parts of the article went too far in depth on these errors, sort of making something out of nothing, but other errors definitely needed to be seen, depicted, corrected, and explained [compound sentence joined with a comma+FANBOYS/Coordinating Conjunction]. An important notion explained in this article was the fear of failure after receiving too many corrections; it's extremely easy for a student to feel unmotivated after being shut down. Turning corrections into a lesson and learning opportunity is a great way to bring students together to help each other and for the teacher to help the student, rather than having the authoritative voice, with a sudden correction.

The idea of DOL was foreign to me before reading this article. DOLs seem like a good intro to grammar teaching and learning at face value but lack many aspects that are needed to learn the depth and complexity of the English language. Studying a sentence alone is a great way to pick out pronouns, punctuations, capitalization, helping words, etc., but how often do we really write just one sentence down? Reading and correcting sentences, passages, student's work might be more applicable in the teaching of grammar because then students can see writing as a whole and understand why certain things do and do not work. Instead, the best alternative would be the “discuss contextual differences between similar statements with different registers” that Crovitz talks about on page 37 [conjunctive adverb +, used to transition between two sentences]. In this exercise students would compare and contrast languages used in different discourses to learn grammar for different situations. This is great because students are usually thought what is right, what is wrong, what needs to be changed, but what they don't understand is that it's only wrong in the setting they're in-school.

Teaching contextual differences could happen in a number of different ways. For instance, if I were teaching students to write their own short story about an experience in their life relating to a book we were reading-lets say Frankenstein for the purpose of this Blog Post-I could have them incorporate home language and standard English in their writing. Both of these would be appropriate and could be shown in a number of different ways: they could write in standard english and have dialogue in their home language, they could write half in standard english and half in home language, etc. The goal of this exercise would be to show the students what is correct in academic writing and what is correct in other situations and that they can co-exist in certain circumstances. The students may choose to write about a time when they had too much knowledge about something (a theme in Frankenstein) and how it was fine and maybe even fun at first, but how it became out of hand and some point. In my editing portion of this lesson/exercise, I would correct the essays and point out parts where they correctly used standard english or home language and explain why it was correct. Students could also share with the class and have their classmates explain the different elements of the writing as well. I like the idea of a collaborative editing because I think it brings more opportunity of growth and development for all of the students instead of just one student getting one set of feedback. I'd hope this experiment would be a good lead in for more experimenting with different types of writing and editing/feedback.

I incorporated the patterns-of-the-week after I wrote my blog post because I had a lot to say on this topic and didn't want to stop to construct these sentences. I found that it's easy to write a compound sentence, so I didn't need to change any of my writing to use that pattern. I think my difficulty may be more in identifying the pattern rather than writing it. The other sentence pattern I used was the use of a conjunctive adverb. I thought both patterns I used were pretty self-explanatory and are kind of used in every day writing.