TEFL Harleyville South Carolina

Learning Grammar (1): The Benefits of Diagramming Sentences Commonly accepted english sentence structure is marked by a subject and a predicate. That is a sentence must have a subject and a predicate in order to be a valid sentence; therefore grammatically correct. The subject tells us who did something and the predicate tells us what that person did. To qualify our statement we can add a direct object to our sentence which tells us what the action was done to. For example, “Mary washed her car.” Mary is the subject, she is the person who did the action; she is ‘the one who did it'. The predicate (action verb) is washed; that is ‘what she did'. Car is the direct object because that is what Mary washed; that is what Mary ‘did it to'. When we explain the parts of the sentence, subject-predicate and direct object, we can present them in the more simple form of the subject is who did it, the predicate is what they did and the direct object is who or what it was done to. We can have our students do a variety of exercises to help them identify the parts of speech used in the sentence. The contemporaneous method of identifying a subject and a predicate (in the US) is one underline for the subject part of the sentence and two underlines for the predicate section. It is helpful but not adequate for learning all the parts of speech in a given sentence. Traditional diagramming helps the student to learn the order of presentation and the relationship of each word used in the sentence to the main subject. Traditional diagramming is thought to be out of educational fashion. Despite the trend of the past 30 years, sentence diagramming is still taught by some teachers across the U.S. in both middle school and in freshman high school english. I suspect it would be very helpful to esl students to learn the accepted composition of an english sentence. Occasionally students complain diagramming sentences is boring; it needn't be so. If we present diagramming sentences as a way to orderly identify the parts of speech in any sentence and use bright colors to accentuate those relevant parts of speech; we should be able to command our students' attention and instill the desire to learn it in them. We should present diagramming sentences as a ‘new kind of crossword puzzle'. Explain the puzzle comes first and the diagram is the solution. There is a PowerPoint/Microsoft Word simple program for teaching english sentence diagramming which allows the student to manipulate the program to diagram his/her own input sentences as well as pre set example sentences. If one is teaching people who are familiar with computers but don't have a lot of access to them, the students might be very interested in simply using that program. One of those free programs is available on this website: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm .The result of teaching students how to diagram an english sentence should be the student will be better able to construct english sentences both verbally and written. It should provide the tefl student with the rudiments of english sentence structure allowing him/her to think in english more clearly, as well. In my experience, sentence diagramming is not taught in the spanish I or II classroom. Native english speakers tend to compose a spanish sentence in the same format they would an english sentence. That is, subject-verb-and direct object. In spanish, however, the verb is often the first word in the sentence and sometimes the last. Although communication will take place when not presented in the proper structure, it may be received oddly by the native spanish speaker. In fact he/she will probably laugh at our attempts. For those of us who learned sentence diagramming in grade and high school, we are able to identify the parts of speech and the expected order of even complex sentences. We can read the complex sentences and fully understand what the author intended in its composition. Eventually our esl students are going to leave the classroom. They will inevitably meet a native english speaker as a tourist, in an english speaking university classroom or perhaps in their job. If we have not taught them how to analyze an english sentence they will have some difficulty understanding formal lectures/discussions with complex sentence structure. One chinese classmate of mine, in the nineties, audio taped every lecture and took lots of notes in english (his second language). I asked him why he took so many notes since he was taping the lecture. He said he had to write down each sentence the teacher said so he could analyze it when he got home. I didn't understand understand what he meant then, but I do now. He was picking apart the sentence to answer the questions: who did it, what did they do and who did they do it to. Citations: http://ms.loganhocking.k12.oh.us/~madame/english/diagrams.html#L1 http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams2/diagrams_frames.htm http://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/ http://www.a-z-worksheets.com/diagramming-sentences.html http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/diagrams/diagrams.htm