Grammar Geek Goodness

Warning: Content may be boring to people not interested in Grammar (please comment with your cries for mercy and pleas for me to NEVER write about grammar again or more may come...)

I am so in love with AsTTle at the moment - a sentiment not shared with many teachers at my school. For the non-teachers among you, AsTTle is a standardised test gives really detailed and specific feedback about your writing and reading levels (at least in English this is what it focuses on). It breaks your writing into 7 separate categories. Firstly the deeper features: Audience Awareness (how much do you write for the needs of your audience and purpose), Content (is what you are writing relevant and useful), Structure (paragraphing, sectioning and also how logically you link and order your writing), Language resources (the sophistication of the vocab, diction and relevant technical words you use). It also examines the surface features of Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling. For each of these categories the writing is put not only into the correct level of the curriculum but also into an appropriate sub-level: Basic, Proficient or Advanced.

It is pretty cool. It means that you can get extremely exact data on a student's strengths and areas needing development. Often in marking the mechanical accuracy (spelling etc) will bring down the overall grade or you might assume that accurate writing is more sophisticated. I love the breaking down of the different aspects of writing and separating out the 'what you write' from the 'how you write'.

It also has the cool nostalgic element of reminding me of level checking English students in Japan. Part of the signing up process involved you assessing the student's ability in both written and spoken English. The process was pretty speedy but you became quite really fast at picking up certain features of different levels in English. For example, if someone could answer basic questions in simple sentences but struggled with verb agreement in present perfect tense, they were a 7b.

As instructors we became pretty gun-ho about throwing around grammar terms and making up silly comments and/or games with them. One day a week I had to work in Shin-yabashira (the suburbs of Chiba) with 2 Canadian guys. In between crass comments about their sex lives or, more frequently, the lack thereof*, we had some random grammar slang and smack talk.

"Your type 2 conditionals are strong but you're weak in the ways of the type 3."

"Dude, I _own_ non-defining relative clauses."

"This is the non-defining relative clause that won't be owned by a *!@#$."

There was also the future perfect progressive tense game. Future perfect progressive tense is the most unnatural tense to try to cram into a conversation, therefore it was fun to see who would run out of FPPT things to say first.

"By the time I finish writing out this lesson feedback, I will have been working for 3 and 1/2 hours."

"By the time you finish writing that, I will have been sitting here for 5 minutes."

"By the time you stop talking, I will have been not listening to you for 6 months."

"By the time you finish that coffee, I will have been spitting in your drink for 6 months."

And so it went. What I have noticed at my school is that the terms for grammar are not consistent - the names change over the years and most of the ones I know are actually the American terms. I also do not think I have ever heard an English teacher make a joke about grammar. I kind of miss it. I like it when people have an awareness of language and enjoy playing with it. I like breaking language down into its different elements and looking at the different ways different people use it. It seems like even most English teachers think grammar is boring or take it seriously. They can't understand why I volunteer to check mark other classes. It just really interests me.

I'm fascinated that you can get thirty kids to write a description about their bedroom and what their dream bedroom would be, and each one will unique, not just in terms of content but also in the way they way they write their descriptions. The way we express ourselves and our ability to communicate through language is truly individual like a fingerprint.

* For some reason if you are a married female friend with a liberal attitude to binge drinking, guys assume you are fine with hearing their locker room drivel that can be pretty damn misogynistic. I guess they don't consider you an available female, so they don't care about being unattractively graphic or disrespectful in their discussion of females. That aside, they were lovely guys and a lot of fun to work with.