Higher Education and Students

¶ … Landecker (2009) examines the methods of teaching by a professor at Trinity College who teaches sentence diagramming to her students. The technique is no longer a common one in English classes, so the methods of the professor are quite unique.

The students, however, show great enthusiasm for the practice and are able to break down the structure of complex sentences with skill and they do so in a competitive manner as part of the professor's overall testing of their abilities: they must partake in a competitive diagramming game in which one half of the class competes against the other half and points are deducted for sentence diagramming errors.

The study indicates that the method is helpful for promoting participation and enthusiasm in the classroom but its narrative structure does not provide any indication as to whether the exercises have an effect on the students' ability to craft a well-written sentence as the professor grades the contest "only for participation in the slam" and not on actual merit (Landecker, 2009, p. 11).

Nonetheless, it is clear that the students do learn the parts of speech and how they should be used -- what is not clear is the extent to which diagramming impacts their overall ability to write. The study will be helpful for my study because it shows that diagramming can be a positive method of teaching sentence structure. Clearly the students are engaged and active in their learning, which suggests that they are enthusiastic about the subject.

If anything, the study takes away the myth that learning sentence structure via diagramming is boring or impossible in today's classrooms. The professor in this study generates a great deal of excitement. Thus, this study will be used to show that diagramming is still be used to teach the basics of English grammar and that students are responding favorably to it.

The study by Sipe (2006) describes a teacher's experiences with teaching isolated grammar exercises in her writing class and how she could spend a week on something like that comma, have the students score well on the tests, yet they would continue to commit comma mistakes in their writing all the time thereafter. The study suggests that the teacher's experiences show that students need to spend time learning about different styles of writing and not just attempting to diagram sentences in futile attempts to understand the parts of speech.

The teacher's conclusion is that grammar matters but ideas and genres of writing matter, too. The study shows that the teacher's main lament -- "the huge amount of time the exercises took away from writing and reading what mattered" -- is based on the desire of the teacher to engage the students on a level that is less concerned about grammatical rules (Sipe, 2006, p. 16). The study will be helpful to my study because it shows the difficulties that one teacher had teaching grammar/sentence diagramming to students and how.