Unfortunately, I was ill this day. I was able to review Professor Gleason's lesson materials from her sentence combining workshop at home and comment on them individually.
Five Basic Sentence Patterns
These sentence patterns were something I might have only been taught a few times in linguistics classes designed for educators or English majors. Periodically, I have brought this up with ESL students I have tutored in the past, but I have not taught all five types. I think this is a useful guide for ESL students, which therefore means it would be worthwhile to teach in a CCNY class since so many students are multilingual. I don't know that I feel that confident teaching this type of grammar content all at once. I think I need more resources for teaching common ESL content since it feels less comfortable for me to teach it than some of the more literary and writing content that has come up in the course.
Sentence Combining Practice
I like this practice sheet. I think that encouraging students to be more intentional about their sentence lengths is really important. I do wonder if this exercise is valuable enough to be done with actual student sentences during a revision portion of class. This would take more prep work, but I think this skill needs to be revisited throughout the course.
Sentence Structure: Independent & Dependent Clauses
Generally, I find that this type of explicit grammar instruction out of context is something that ELL students really like. They generally have learned more grammar content in a classroom and feel confident on these days. They also are the students who continue to need the most direct grammar instruction. I think that having knowledge of the terminology for grammar is really important. Lack of understanding technical terminology is to me one of the biggest reasons that students get unnecessarily intimidated when studying grammar.
Five Basic Sentence Patterns
These sentence patterns were something I might have only been taught a few times in linguistics classes designed for educators or English majors. Periodically, I have brought this up with ESL students I have tutored in the past, but I have not taught all five types. I think this is a useful guide for ESL students, which therefore means it would be worthwhile to teach in a CCNY class since so many students are multilingual. I don't know that I feel that confident teaching this type of grammar content all at once. I think I need more resources for teaching common ESL content since it feels less comfortable for me to teach it than some of the more literary and writing content that has come up in the course.
Sentence Combining Practice
I like this practice sheet. I think that encouraging students to be more intentional about their sentence lengths is really important. I do wonder if this exercise is valuable enough to be done with actual student sentences during a revision portion of class. This would take more prep work, but I think this skill needs to be revisited throughout the course.
Sentence Structure: Independent & Dependent Clauses
Generally, I find that this type of explicit grammar instruction out of context is something that ELL students really like. They generally have learned more grammar content in a classroom and feel confident on these days. They also are the students who continue to need the most direct grammar instruction. I think that having knowledge of the terminology for grammar is really important. Lack of understanding technical terminology is to me one of the biggest reasons that students get unnecessarily intimidated when studying grammar.
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