Facts, Artifacts, Counterfacts - Blog 2

How do Discovery of Competence, and Fact, Artifacts, and Counter-facts handle grammar?   Is there a place for overt grammar instruction in the two course designs?  Do you think students need more grammar/editing/proofreading practice than the two courses provide? What would you add to their courses?

Unlike Discovery of Competence--which, from what I could tell, had no overt practice or discussion of grammar--FAC does include grammar instruction. The instructors wait until later in the semester to bring up the idea of grammar, and then it is taught not broadly but according to specific areas that students from that class are struggling in. The authors recommend using the students' own texts to introduce grammar discussion, by reproducing a single student essay that is representative of some of the grammar errors commonly found in the class. The errors and their fixes can then be pointed out using the student sample. 

However, FAC asserts that this kind of instruction is not necessary every semester. More commonly, they believe that errors occur student-by-student rather than class-wide, so larger lessons on FANBOYS or run-on sentences aren't often necessary. They recommend having students partner up to help each other find grammar errors in each other's texts, with the instructor going around the room and helping each pair find their specific errors. 

I think some combo of the two practices may be helpful. One way that I like to teach grammar is to introduce a grammar "rule" that I think most students will find useful (FANBOYS, prepositional phrases at the beginning of a sentence, there/they're/their) on a day when they are bringing a draft to class. I'll teach the rule quickly on the board, then have students find that rule (being used correctly or incorrectly) in their own papers. If they've done it right, they circle it. If they've done it wrong, they fix it. If it hasn't come up, they add a sentence using that rule to their draft. I can do a quick check of student understanding when they turn in their drafts, but it's never officially scored or graded. Anyway, I think this way of framing a grammar lesson is practical without being overwhelming or tedious, and I would incorporate it into either a DOC or FAC course. 

I really do like the idea of, later in the semester as students' own abilities to write and edit has been naturally extended through practice, getting students in pairs to help find and correct each other's papers. The problem I see in this is numbers. FAC is a 15-student seminar with TWO instructors, so getting around to each pair of students to make sure they've found the errors and fixed them correctly is pretty simple. A more likely scenario, however, is 30 students to one instructor (though later in the semester, probably only 24 students are regularly attending class). That's 12 - 15 groups for one teacher to walk between. The practicality of this practice plummets. Luckily, I do have a tutor in my classroom for an hour a week. I may try this out later this semester, having Tushar and myself rove between the 12+ partnerships and helping correct comma, verb and usage errors. This will probably be especially helpful late in the semester, as students are compiling their final portfolios.