Thoughts on Dornan, Ch. 4
Having misread the syllabus for last week’s assigned reading, I’m doubling back this week to cover Chapter 4 in Reade Dornan’s Within and Beyond the Writing Process in the Secondary English Classroom.
Thankfully, Dornan’s text provides both a clear context of the focus of each chapter within her work, as well as a wide variety of best practices that support high quality reading and writing skills among students. Her systematic presentation of material concerning teaching grammar, correctness, and style facilitates a higher quality of learning, while serving as an excellent reference for teachers interested in addressing these issues among their classes. The list of sample skills worth bringing up in editing conferences functions as a good short-hand reference guide for teachers (p. 100, figure 4.2). One website that can be used for reference to teaching grammar is Kim's Korner for Teacher Talk.
Also it’s worth noting that when students are practicing or trying out new forms recently learned, then there is a higher propensity for them to make simple mistakes (e.g., spelling, punctuation, capitalization). To these points, Dornan suggests being selective about which errors to focus young writers’ attention on, and at times restraining from pointing out too many errors (she refers to as “benign neglect"). While there is some emphasis on not marking up a paper in a sea of red, Dornan provides plenty of real support for how to teach grammar in schools (e.g., process writing; teaching sentence combining; developing a culture of literacy through reading and writing practice; and crafting efficient, mature writing style).
Briefly, I often feel surprised to hear people’s horror stories of receiving a paper that’s littered with teacher revisions. I can remember plenty of times that I questioned why a teacher had “marked up" my paper – sometimes there were explanations as to why (with my own doubts and confusion remaining), whereas no explanation as to what was wrong with my error just frustrated me. It’s important for teachers to reveal explanations as to why students have made any errors in their writing. If there is no time for student/teacher conferencing, then the marked up text is all the student has to refer to. Additionally, students need reinforcement from teachers, so it’s important to illustrate to them that you noticed strengths in their writing as well.