The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar

Yesterday Michelle Navarre Cleary was a guest on Wisconsin Public Radio’s The Kathleen Dunn Show. During the hour she discussed, in short, the wrong way to teach grammar.

Navarre Cleary’s appearance on the program expanded on her recent article in The Atlantic, in which she outlined the research on the ineffectiveness of teaching grammar—memorizing parts of speech, drilling, diagramming sentences—before students are given the chance to actually write. “There is a real cost to ignoring such findings,” she wrote, and by focusing on grammatical correctness, students “never give themselves the chance to explore their ideas or ways of expressing those ideas.”  

Some schools have moved beyond the traditional model, and those that did have seen positive results: programs at Arizona State and the Community College of Baltimore that allow developmental students to start writing immediately resulted in higher pass rates and less time spent in developmental  courses.

“Good writing is clear thinking,” she says, noting that sometimes “it’s easier to worry about where the comma goes than to really push yourself to clarify your ideas.” But if students are allowed to focus on those ideas, grammar will follow naturally: “it’s in that effort to communicate that people start to learn what makes sense in terms of arranging their words in sentences.”

To read the full article in The Atlantic, click here.

To listen to the WPR recoding, click here.



And a reminder for your students: the deadline to submit to the Writing Showcase is April 1st!

Michelle Navarre Cleary on Inside Higher Ed

Last week Associate Dean Michelle Navarre Cleary's article on competence-based programs, "Creating Competent Students," was published on Inside Higher Ed. Presenting quantitative evidence of student success, Navarre Cleary explains, "Different does not mean diminished. To the contrary, by any number of measures, competence-based programs have proven that they can support effective learning as well as, and often better than, traditional programs." 

Click here to read the full article.

SNL Writing Faculty Publish on Teaching Writing to Veterans

An article by Michelle Navarre Cleary and Katie Wozniak was recently published in Composition Forum, in a special issue focused on veterans and writing. 

Abstract: 
Considering veterans in the context of research on adult and nontraditional students in college writing classes, this article proposes Malcolm Knowles's six principles for adult learning as an asset-based heuristic for investigating how writing programs and writing teachers might build upon existing resources to support veteran students. 

Navarre Cleary and Wozniak explain that many institutions take a deficit-based approach to evaluating the needs of veterans and subsequently find their resources lacking, while those that take an asset-based approach find they already have many of the tools to support veterans. Moreover, the deficit approach reinforces the idea of the veteran-student as outside the mainstream, when in fact research on teaching composition to veterans aligns with that of other adult, nontraditional students. As such, the six principles of andragogy identified by Knowles are well-suited to informing conversations regarding improvements to practice and examination of existing knowledge and resources. 

Read the full article here.