Hey.
I know there's a few people reading this who teach, and if you wouldn't mind, I could do with picking a few ideas off you to steal and pass as my own.
Essentially, I have a student whose struggling with spelling and grammar. He was doing alright, but recently there's been a bit of a relapse, and I'd like to get him back to paying attention to it and picking it up (without getting into too much detail, it's a pretty bad side of things, and is making the difference between pass and fail in High School English). Anyhow, what I'm looking for is basically some different ways to do this--something that's a bit off the beating path and which will be (hopefully) more engaging than the usual stuff you do with this kind of issue. So if you got any experience of teaching it (or having it taught to you) feel free to drop some notes down in the comments for me.
Thanks.
(crossposted)
I know there's a few people reading this who teach, and if you wouldn't mind, I could do with picking a few ideas off you to steal and pass as my own.
Essentially, I have a student whose struggling with spelling and grammar. He was doing alright, but recently there's been a bit of a relapse, and I'd like to get him back to paying attention to it and picking it up (without getting into too much detail, it's a pretty bad side of things, and is making the difference between pass and fail in High School English). Anyhow, what I'm looking for is basically some different ways to do this--something that's a bit off the beating path and which will be (hopefully) more engaging than the usual stuff you do with this kind of issue. So if you got any experience of teaching it (or having it taught to you) feel free to drop some notes down in the comments for me.
Thanks.
(crossposted)
Comments
Hope that helps!
*cough*
Maybe you could extend the "swearbox" concept and have a "mistakebox" for spelling errors that get into essays he's had time to edit and check. Couple that with two minute "spelling slams" in which he has to read through a page of text with introduced errors, and gets to leave tuition a minute early for each one he correctly spots.
Or you could just try getting all Bogart on his arse: "kid, take my word for it: being able to spell never lost no one any respect, but not being able to sure has". Oh wait, that's ungrammatical.
I've even done the kind of exercises that kids learning English don't usually get, but which foreign language classes are full of, like:
I run
you run
she/he/it runs
we run
they run
etc
And having done that with a couple of basic verbs, I then go on to do the important ones like to be and to have and to will which function as tense modifiers.
I have run
you will run
they are running
etc
It sounds boring, but it can actually help by providing rules and structures which can be referred to when struggling with a particular sentence.
Find examples of well written and poorly written sentences might help. Sometimes people can see that something is not quite right, even when they don't have the tools to express why.
The other thing I did with my year 12 English kids is teach them what an essay is, i.e. a coherent argument expressed in sentences and paragraphs. I find that most people coming through the Australian school system are never taught about argument structure, and that an essay is an argument, and not a summary or report.
i think the i run, you run stuff is a bit low for him, but thanks anyhow.
When I was teaching Critical Thinking classes in uni, a lot of the students had go through high school and into uni without anybody ever bothering to explain some basic grammatical rules, and they often expressed surprise and gratitude at finally being shown how things work.
Prefacing it with "this is stuff people don't usually learn until uni" can actually help.
Edited at 2009-06-11 04:54 am (UTC)
You can do it in reverse with things that piss the student off. If he hates newspapers, attack a newspaper with him. Make fun of the thing with him while hunting for demonstrative errors and the like.
Again, not sure if that helps. Good luck with him.