This quote from former first lady Michelle Obama should encourage and inspire all of those parents who continue to insist that their children should speak and write correctly. It should also belie that ignorant misconception that children of color should be allowed to speak and write in their own dialects instead of being taught how to communicate according to the conventions of English grammar.

"“Our parents had drilled us under the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t “. We were taught to finish off words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, meticulously correcting our grammar and admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness – to inhabit it with pride – and this filtered down to how we spoke.”

To this I say Amen! 

What is the sentence saying? What’s happening in the sentence? What idea or ideas is the writer trying to communicate? These are the critical questions that lead to comprehension.

There are only three basic sentence patterns
The key is to find the subject-verb relationship. Then we must find the word or group of words that completes the idea that starts with the subject-verb relationship. Some words or groups of words that complete the subject-verb relationship are answers to the question: (verb) who or what? These words or groups of words are called completers. When they occur after an action verb they are called objects, but when they occur after a linking verb, they are called subject complements because they either rename or describe the subject directly. Other words or groups of words can complete the idea started by the subject-verb relationship by asking and answering where, when, why, or how about the verb.

The word “that” either begins an adjective clause that answers “who?” or an object clause that answers “what?”

This is one way in which writers can add descriptions, clarification, and definitions to terms and various elements of sentences.

Why we teach reading comprehension and writing skills through grammar and vocabulary at Scholarskills: here is an excerpt from a shocking article about the inability of our students to read and write.

”Of about 78,000 NYC third-graders, they found the number who scored zeroes on three or more written answers doubled from 10,696 (14 percent) in 2012 to 21,464 (28 percent) in 2013, when the state tests were redesigned to fit the tougher Common Core standards.

But in the next three years, city third-graders — who were taught nothing but Common Core curriculum since kindergarten — still racked up zeroes at the same high rate, the study found.

The percentage with three or more zeroes on the ELA exam was still 28 percent in 2014, 29 percent in 2015, and 27 percent in 2016, the last year data was available.
That year, the state eliminated time limits, but the effect on zeroes was slight.

“We can’t say this is just kids getting used to the Common Core curriculum. This is all they’ve ever known,” Jacobowitz said. “It did not get better over time.”

What’s worse, the racial achievement gap widened. In 2013, the number of black kids scoring three or more zeroes was 10 percent higher than white kids. In 2016, the gap grew to 18 percent. The white/Hispanic gap grew from 11 percent to 20.”

Grammar and vocabulary are essential because students need to understand the structural foundations of words and sentences. They need to know how words are created, and how words are organized to create sentences. Morphology (the study of how words are formed) and syntactic analysis (the study of sentence structures) are two of the critical keys to comprehension and effective writing. It is the lack of these skills that leaves intelligent students completely unprepared for exams such as the ACT and SAT, which test a student’s ability to read and respond to complex texts.
#grammar #vocabulary #morphology #sentencestructure #SAT