Accio Adverbials!

Previously in Advanced Grammar…

Well, we did study adverbs, and we learned that they can move all around a sentence and still make sense. This time around, we went back to the adverbial prepositional phrase and added the adverbial noun phrase and adverbial infinitive verb to the mix.

As you might expect, several students protested that it wasn’t right that a noun could suddenly act as an adverb! But English grammar is a zany creature, so onward we charged with an examination of passages from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

They had to study the night skies through their telescopes every Wednesday at midnight…

Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff room fire and got up next morning to teach…

From https://www.flickr.com/photos/capitrueno/1140802191

What would these sentences look like without adverbials?

They had to study the night skies.

Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep and got up.

We were able to have some good discussion about what adverbials are necessary for meaning, which ones just paint a more descriptive scene, and what phrases can be dropped easily with no sense of loss. We moved around our adverbials to see if we could compose a more appealing sentence (“Every Wednesday at midnight, they had to study the night skies through their telescopes” got several takers).

The Perfect Poem for Sentence Combos

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnet 36 is just one sentence, in fact:

Hearing your words, and not a word among them
Tuned to my liking, on a salty day
When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them
Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,
I thought how off Matinicus the tide
Came pounding in, came running though the Gut,
While from the Rock the warning whistle cried,
And children whimpered and the doors blew shut;
There in the autumn when the men go forth,
With slapping skirts the island women stand
In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,
With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:
The wind of their endurance, driving south,
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.

Students can be asked to identify where the opening subordinate clause actually stops (end of line 4) and where the first independent clause stops (end of line 8) with the understanding that this is not a run-on sentence!

Millay uses various methods of sentence coordination, with the coordinating conjunction “and” in line 8 as well as a semicolon at the end of that line, and a colon at the end of line 12. She also employs different subordinating conjunctions like “when” in lines 3 and 9 and “how” in line 5.

Students can be asked to go online and examine an additional poem by Millay (the Academy of American Poets lists 34 works in its collection). Does she consistently write one-sentence poems? Does she have favorite methods of sentence construction?

More Grammar Activities

Here’s what we have been up to in Advanced Grammar: form and structure classes, plus application of the “notice, name, apply” model explained in Engaging Grammar: Practical Advice for Real Classrooms by Amy Benjamin with Tom Oliva.

We reviewed the names of structure classes by playing Jeopardy! and looking at examples from current song lyrics:

We then worked through a sample class activity appropriate for even elementary students: an adjective-heavy diamond poem:

Here are some the poems that students wrote:

Heros.

Tall. Strong.

Brave. Fearless. Selfless.

Humble. Kind.

Heros.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Teams.

Large. Ready.

Wild. Energetic. Loud.

Determined. Focused.

Teams.

And we worked with popular early chapter books and YA literature (ex. The Chronicles of Narnia, Night, Speak, The Great Gatsby, The House on Mango Street, Bud Not Buddy) to find sentences we liked, name the grammatical features used, and write our own imitations. To introduce the notice, name, apply model, I used the metaphor of the perfect outfit:

Noun/Verb Redux

Last fall, I did a notecard activity with words that can act as both nouns and verbs in the English language. Since the instructions left many students confused, I tried a new tactic this time around in Advanced Grammar.

1. I created multiple notecards with a single noun/verb like walk, talk, honor, praise, vote, etc.
2. Students paired up.
3. They were challenged to put their word through our advanced definition of a noun: make it plural, make it possessive, and use it in a sentence. Here are some examples of the results, recorded on the back of the notecard:
   1. the smiles of the children    A smile’s power is great.
   2. the works of the students    work’s results
   3. I’ve had multiple talks with the student about his behavior.
   4. your vote’s power   By a show of votes, Alex has won.
4. Next, students had to inflect their word three ways as a verb (add -s/-es, add -ed, add -ing) and then write original sentences:
   1. She smiles at him. I smiled at him. The newlywed couple is smiling.
   2. He worked in the store. I am working for you.
   3. She talked loudly. I am talking to you.

This approach seems to have worked a little better in showing how diverse — not to mention confusing — English words can be.

 Click here for a massive list of noun/verbs !

Grammar Flipping Thoughts

ENGL3223 had some big numbers this fall:

• 15 activities
• 28 YouTube videos (26 available to the public)
• 32 online quizzes
• 5 exams
• 1 major project

Was the flipped classroom a success? I don’t know!

We had far more time for interesting in-class experiments, many of which I have documented in earlier blog posts. Everything I used to do during instructional time became homework, thereby freeing up 150 minutes each week for more in-depth discussion, practice, and teaching demos.

Did students emerge with a better mastery of grammar? I can’t really compare Fall 2013 to Fall 2010, the last time I taught the course, because I changed so much of what students did. I rewrote every exam as well as the project assignment.

What I do have are the results of a pre/post-test: nine short-answer questions over grammatical concepts covered through the whole semester. Students took it on the first day of class and then again on the last day.

Average scores went from 2.55 to 5.40.

Scores for 16 out of 19 students increased; 2 stayed the same.

Clearly there was some value added, and I made sure that I gave the post-test before we started reviewing for the final exam so the results showed what knowledge they had retained over the weeks. Some areas showed dramatic improvement — from 0% to over 73% able to give a linguistic definition of a noun, from approximately 6% to 52% able to identify a prepositional phrase in a sentence.

Grammar Check Choke

Forgive the dearth of posts, you brave two people who browse this blog from time to time. A month ago, I took over four additional classes, all of them unfamiliar to me, on top of my usual hectic load. Blogging just hasn’t had time.

I did make sure, however, to save the sad results of our Advanced Grammar sentence logic experiment with Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker. Previously we had examined what Word did with “that” vs. “which” clauses in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and Frankenstein–lots of “which”s flagged as needing commas or “that”s. Word reliably questions the construction of such clauses.

But how does it do with general sentence-level issues beyond passive voice (which we already had discussed as sometimes useful and necessary for cohesion and meaning)?

Inspired by “My New Teaching Partner? Using the Grammar Checker in Writing Instruction” by Dorothy Fuller and Reva Potter, we each decided to come up with two different sentences:

• a sentence 100% guaranteed to trigger the colored Dread Squiggle of Syntax Error
• a sentence designed to fool the software

Well. It went even worse than I had expected.

Here is a list of all of the sentences that students shared. I typed them into a Word document, projected on the classroom screen, and we waited to see which ones got a reaction. The only one flagged is in green:

• Yesterday I start class.
• Cat had gone to the market next morning.
• If you isn’t got two kids by 21 then you goanna die alone.
• When all you have, purple dress.
• From yesterday to today, my stomach still hurts.
• Bob sit on the porch and drank his tea.
• They done did the wrong thing.
• I like going to the store to buy snacks but I’m always broke my mom gives me money.
• The dog ate the tiny bits of paper from the store I bought.
•  I know I’ll past the fourth grade on the third try.

Clearly, many of them were going for shifts in verb tense and time frame, which, as we had discussed, Word is not great at catching. But it marked neither the blatant slang of “you isn’t got” nor the non-existent word “goanna.” It didn’t notice the common homophone error of “past” for “passed.” Students were amused, then increasingly horrified as both their 100% error-filled and designed-to-fool-the-checker sentences sailed through as OK.

“Write something completely wrong,” they begged. So I typed this…

Jump window black dog.

…and Word was silent.

This is great if you’re into free verse poetry. It’s not so great if you’re a student relying on word processors to help you avoid the wrath of the teacher’s pen. It was an enlightening (if sobering) activity as we moved to the end of Advanced Grammar.

You Wanna Be on Top?

There are works of literature that appear, decade after decade, on the reading lists of American high school classrooms.

Today in Advanced Grammar, we’re looking at very short excerpts from three of those literary masterpieces:

 

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding (grades 9 or 10)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (often grade 11)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (often grade 12)

Click here for a PDF copy of our class handout!

Because we are studying Chapter 9 of Kolln and Gray’s Rhetorical Grammar, our focus is on choosing adjectivals — or, more specifically, the adjectivals chosen by these three authors.

Students must locate expanded noun phrases with preheadword modifiers (determiners, adjectives, nouns, prenoun participles) and postheadword modifiers (prepositional phrases, participial phrases, and relative clauses). Then, they choose the four most memorable from each excerpt for a total of twelve contenders. Finally, each student narrows down the field to his or her nominee for Top Adjectival.

Here is the complete class list for each passage, with those phrases still in the running to be Advanced Grammar’s Top Adjectival in blue:

The Lord of the Flies

• Ralph’s scarred nakedness
• the struggling pig
• the thing that had happened
• a long satisfying drink
• memories of the knowledge that had come to them
• a living thing
• their will

The Great Gatsby

• the colossal vitality of his illusion
• every bright feather that drifted his way
• the expression of bewilderment
• a faint doubt
• the quality of his present happiness
• a creative passion

Hamlet

• muddy death
• her coronet weeds clambering to hang
• on the pendant boughs
• snatches of old tunes
• in the weeping brook
• the poor wretch
• his hoar leaves in the glassy stream
• our cold maids
• long purple that liberal shepherds
• her clothes spread wide
• an envious sliver
• her weedy trophies
• her garments, heavy with their drink

Results of the Final Vote…

• the colossal vitality of his illusion (5)
• muddy death (3)
• hoar leaves (1)
• a satisfying drink (2)

Congratulations, Fitzgerald and Gatsby! Your determiner-adjective-headword-prepositional phrase has been voted Top Adjectival.

Sentence Transformations

My Advanced Grammar course is pretty predictable: 1) read book, 2) watch video, 3) complete short activity, 4) come to class and do more activities and sometimes a test. Students have marked up the coordination and subordination strategies in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” They have learned about sentence pyramids and then constructed said pyramids. We look at a lot of literary excerpts to identify and critique grammatical choices, and we review sample classroom exercises that we do ourselves.

On this particular Monday, to reinforce two sentence transformations, I broke out the sentence strips again. (Previously we worked with movable adverbials using almost the same materials.)

Since students had seen the strips before, as well as little bits of construction paper in these four colors, it should have been a slightly familiar experience. It took a few moments, however, for them to realize that they needed scissors in order to complete the activity. Transformation sometimes requires destruction!

Thanks to a set of 20 craft scissors, I was able to start everyone cutting up the sentence strips, all of which used the pattern subject + verb + direct object + adverbial phrase, and rearranging the many pieces into the following:

• at least two it-cleft transformations
• at least one what-cleft transformation

I made sure to include “who” on one side of the yellow piece and “that” on the other, and I also wrote “was” and “were” on the blue pieces. I can see where you might have students do this part, but honestly, I wanted the time spent on transformation rather than handwriting.

Students recorded their sentences on a sheet of paper that I promised to collect, and they also had to mark their preferred version of their original sentence — which one sounds the best? Which would they use?

* yes, I am well aware that the grammatical sentence would read “It was her aunt whom she took to a concert”!

Added bonus: since I put the construction paper pieces in a small envelope, after the strips were cut, everything fit neatly in the envelope to take home for hours of fun!

Cohesion & the Sentence Dating Game

We’re to Week 6 of Advanced Grammar and Chapter 5, which focuses on cohesion, in Rhetorical Grammar. Today we examined two grammatical features of cohesive writing, to make sure we meet our readers’ expectations and generally write organized texts.

1. REPETITION

To reinforce the idea of strategic repetition, we read and listened to an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech. It’s relatively easy to pick out the repeated phrases (“one hundred years later”), but it’s a little less obvious to note King’s use of coordinated nouns modified by increasingly adjective-laden prepositional phrases:

• “the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination”
• “a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”

Students observed that the determiner choices in each pair are the same — first “the” and then “a” — and discussed the rhythm of the passage.

2. THE KNOWN-NEW CONTRACT

To wrap up our exploration of “I Have a Dream” and segue into the next activity, we turned to the known-new contract as used by Dr. King with the following example:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.

He wraps up one sentence with the Emancipation Proclamation (our new information) and then rewrites it, with the help of a demonstrative pronoun and attention-grabbing modifier, as the known information at the beginning of the next sentence with “this momentous decree.”

The stage thus was set for the Sentence Dating Game!

http://www.icvdm.com/studio/images/gallery/dating-game-01.jpg

SENTENCE DATING GAME

Taking my inspiration from the TV game show The Dating Game, I carefully chose pairs of sentences from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. My goal was to find sets that showed good use of the known-new contract…pairs that clearly were made for each other. Perfect matches, if you will…

• “She left the porch pelting her back with unasked questions.  They hoped the answers were cruel and strange.”
• “His coat was over his arm, but he didn’t need it to represent his clothes.  The shirt with the silk sleeveholders was dazzling enough for the world.”
• “The idea was funny to them and they wanted to laugh. They tried hard to hold it in, but enough incredulous laughter burst out of their eyes.”

Students were given a sentence strip at random and informed that somewhere in the class was the sentence that came either before or after theirs in Hurston’s novel. Because of this, their first task was to determine what information logically would come both before and after the sentence in their hands. For example, in the first pair above, students might ask if someone had a sentence about questions or answers; in the third pair, the key idea is laughter.

This information formed the basis for the questions they had to ask their classmates. As with The Dating Game, where the eligible singles were hidden from view by a screen, student contestants could not reveal the actual sentences. They only could ask questions designed to elicit recognition (or rejection).

I told the students flat out that this was an untried activity and while I hoped it would be illuminating, I wasn’t sure how long it would take or how hard it would be.

Well, within minutes, students were parading around the classroom arm and arm, declaring they were meant for each other. They joked about love at first sight and fear of commitment. In less than 8 minutes, all sixteen of us (I played, too) had our matches.

The Sentence Dating Game worked, therefore, at least in terms of students being able to perform the desired task in excellent time. Did it reinforce ideas of cohesion and the known-new contract? I hope so.

Here’s a link to a brief description of the known-new contract, along with a practice passage for revision.

Post-it Scramble

I used the same approach that I tried in Fall 2010 for reinforcing form classes and the valuable content they provide: labeling all the nonsense words in Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky.”  I doubt I’m the first or even the 207th to come up with the idea, but I like it 🙂

I wanted a different activity to drive comprehension of the seven structure classes as outlined in Rhetorical Grammar:

• determiners
• auxiliaries
• conjunctions
• qualifiers
• prepositions
• particles
• pronouns

To be prepared for a full class, I crafted four sentences, each 12 words long, that included as many of the structure classes as possible:

• If she passes the somewhat challenging exam Joanna might get reading time.
• Marcus did ask him for help but the assignment was too difficult.
• Put the phone down so you listen very carefully to the lecture.
• When we see unfamiliar words we look them up in the dictionary.

I then wrote each word on a post-it note, careful to put them out of order and to not identify the first word in the sentence with a capital letter. I was prepared to reveal the first word if groups needed a boost.

I ended up passing out just three of the sentences and picked the ones with particles. Students got out of their seats and started rearranging and resticking the notes. Once they were satisfied with their sentences, they had to label all structure class words.

 

The first group to finish had the dictionary sentence, so maybe that one was too obvious. Then again, it may have been because they didn’t have an auxiliary verb. The group with the Marcus sentence wanted to use “did” as an intransitive verb rather than a helping verb, which threw off their structure. The group with the phone sentence wasn’t expecting to start with “put.” It’s one of those activities where suddenly everything just falls into place. With labeling, qualifiers seemed to cause the most confusion.

We then discussed switching the sentence clauses. Would it work to say “The assignment was too difficult but Marcus did ask him for help”? What about “Listen very carefully to the lecture so you put the phone down”?

My goals in this course include a deeper thinking about the choices we make as writers. Yes, it’s great to recognize a particle or auxiliary, but can we use them effectively? Which sentences sound the most impressive to which readers?