I will be on Jennifer Gonzalez’s Cult of Pedagogy this week to talk about my book Good Grammar, and when we recorded our discussion, Gonzalez asked me an important question that I didn’t have time to answer fully in the moment, so I want to speak to it here: 

When we teach about grammar and language, do students really need to know grammatical terminology, or is it better to teach them the skills without the terms, which can be complicated and take both time and resources to learn?

This is such a great question, and my answer is that while I think it can be taught both ways, I’ve found it worth the time and effort in my classes to teach many terms. To better understand why I teach grammar terminology, let’s start with a look at why so many classes avoid grammar terms. 

Why Grammar Terms Are Often Avoided

Grammar terminology can feel for many like it was purposefully designed to confound and obscure. I’ve found that many students struggle to hold onto the meaning of more basic terms like preposition or subject, so is it any wonder that when we start talking about predicates, adverbials, and the subjunctive, many students look at us like we are speaking Greek? And to be fair, we sort of are speaking Greek (or Latin), given the huge number of grammar and language terms that hail back to those languages. 

Further, grammar is just one of many branches of the ELA tree. We have so much to teach, and teaching the terminology takes time and historically didn’t have a high return on investment. Grammar is also rarely taught deeply, even at the university level, meaning that many teachers themselves don’t have as strong of a grasp on it as they could* (I was certainly one of them). Put it all together, and there is a very reasonable case to be made for setting the grammar terms aside to focus on what seem like more pressing issues.  

The Case for Teaching the Terms

The issues discussed above are real, but there is now ample evidence that when grammar is taught in the way I discuss in Good Grammar—in an expansive, in-context, joy-and-opportunity-focused way—it can have a powerful positive effect on student writing. And in my experience, knowing some of the terms is a key part of that.

Every field has specific jargon—jargon that can feel Byzantine at first glance. Jargon exists because having specialized terms allows us to talk about specialized topics with more efficiency and precision. It is what allows us to look at the big picture. Without specific terms, there is a hard cap to how succinct, exact, and expansive we can be, and I have indeed found that you can only go so far into grammar conversations while working around the terminology. 

Even more importantly though, I’ve also found that once students begin to learn and understand the terminology, it can be a massive confidence-booster. Knowing how to do something is one thing, but being able to articulate and name what you are doing helps many students to feel accomplished and knowledgeable. They get to feel like experts when they drop words like appositive or idiolect, and feeling like an expert can act as a potent motivator.

How to Actually Teach the Terms

When it comes to using grammar terms, there are a few key approaches too that can help to make the terms clearer and easier for students to understand and learn:

1. First, I’ve found it important to carefully curate which terms I share so the terminology doesn’t overwhelm. For example, when I’m teaching students how to combine sentences, I teach them the terms “conjunction” or “independent/dependent clause,” as they are really critical to discussing how we can construct sentences. At the same time, I usually pass on the terms “subordinate” or “coordinating” with my freshmen, as you can explain sentence combination well without them pretty well, and I’ve found that including them can cognitively overload many students, thus making the whole lesson harder to understand and retain.
2. Second, there are also rare moments when I substitute more student-friendly terminology** for particularly confusing grammar terms. Staying with sentence combination, I’ve found the traditionally-framed “four types of sentences” to be confusing for reasons I discuss here, so I substitute in what I feel are clearer names: “complex” sentences become “extra information” sentences, “compound” sentences become “combined” sentences, etc.  
3. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, I believe the biggest issue with grammar terms is that we use them so rarely. We talk about predicates or absolute phrases for a day or two, and then we move on and never mention them again. The issue with this is that we forget almost everything we only encounter once or twice. With that in mind, I now have an internal rule: If a grammar term is important enough to discuss, then I need to commit to it and make sure that it becomes a regular part of the language of the classroom that we revisit and retrieve until it becomes second nature. 

---

Why I teach grammar terms might be best exemplified by an interaction I observed last week. Two girls were working on an assignment and one questioned the phrasing of the other. Without missing a beat, the one whose phrasing was questioned, turned to the other and said, “Longer sentences with lots of clauses are just a part of my idiolect!” She then smiled and winked, and both girls broke into giggling, as I marveled at how the words “clause” and “idiolect”—as opposed to causing students to glaze over or flee—had led to peals of confident laughter from these two students. 

Thanks for reading, and if you are interested in hearing more, make sure to tune into the Cult of Pedagogy this week.

Yours in teaching,

Matt

* If this is you and you want to learn more about grammar and language, a good place to start (beyond my book, of course) is Oregon State’s really succinct and thoughtful Guide to Grammar video series.

**Some teachers try to exclusively create their own student-friendly grammar terminology. For example, instead of using the term noun appositive, you could call it “The Renamer,” as appositives essentially rename something. I did try this briefly, but I found the time and effort needed to do it well to be significant, and it came with a rather sizable downside that when the students moved on to a new teacher the next year, the terminology from my class no longer applied.

---

Looking for Quality Professional Learning?

Spring is also the time where a lot of professional learning for the next year is booked. If you are looking for a passionate and knowledgable full-time practicing teacher to lead professional learning, please reach out!

---

If you liked this…

Join my mailing list and you will receive a thoughtful post about finding balance and success as a writing teacher each week along with exciting subscriber-only content. Also, as an additional thank you for signing up, you will also receive a short ebook on how to cut feedback time without cutting feedback quality that is adapted from my book Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster – Without Burning Out from Corwin Literacy.