Content area
Full text
The author offers a new strategy for working with sentences in college composition that prompts students to access and apply their native grammatical abilities.
When composition talk turns to sentences, the fearsome specter of grammar rises and the hunt for errors begins. Teachers sigh, students freeze, and the whole magnificent process often comes to a screeching halt. One may well ask what is wrong with this picture. Braddock et al. (1963) told us that traditional methods of teaching grammar were not helpful for student writing, so we stopped using them. Chomsky (1965) told us that humans have a native competence in grammar, so many teachers stopped talking about grammar at all. Why then do problems persist in student writing? Could it be that students need a new strategy for accessing their native capacity for grammar? I think so. I call the method "chunking."
Instructors also need a new strategy, one that can address the students' native varieties, as well as academic varieties, without demeaning or ignoring any of them. This requires a fundamental shift in thinking - away from the focus on error, which necessarily privileges the standard against which error is measured. The chunking strategy that I advocate is based on meaning and rests at a level of analysis that transcends varieties. It builds on the grammatical competence that we share. It is not a formula for writing sentences, because that would stifle the creativity and original thinking that we hope to promote for our students. It does not bury the students in technical terminology. Instead, it is a way to think about sentences and a strategy that promotes discussion of whether those sentences effectively convey the author's meaning to the reader.
"Chunking" is not a new term. In 1956, George Miller used it, with Information Theory, to discuss the notion that our brains work better when information is organized into chunks rather than linear "bits." Kolln and Funk use the term, in the 7th edition of Understanding English Grammar, to urge students to see sentences as more than "a string of words" (17).Vavra (1996) uses the term in a fine sketch of the conflict between the pro- and anti-grammarians. If we want students to understand sentences, we have to talk about sentences...