Bøger af Rebecca S. Wheeler

NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar provides this much-needed resource for K-college teachers who wonder what to do about grammar-how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what they themselves were never taught. Grammar Alive! offers teachers ways to negotiate the often conflicting goals of testing, confident writing, the culturally inclusive classroom, and the teaching of Standard English while also honoring other varieties of English. This hands-on approach to grammar in the classroom includes numerous examples and practical vignettes describing real teachers' real classroom experiences with specific grammar lessons-including ESL issues-as well as a review of grammar basics.

Wheeler and Swords show K-6 teachers how to use code-switching and contrastive analysis to help students use prior knowledge to translate vernacular English into Standard English. When African American students write or say "Mama jeep is out of gas" or "The Earth revolve around the sun," many teachers--labeling this usage poor English or bad grammar--assume that their students have problems with possession or don't know how to make subjects and verbs agree. Forty years of linguistic research, however, demonstrates that the student is not making errors in Standard English--the child is writing or speaking correctly in the language patterns of the home and of the community. Building on the linguistic knowledge that children bring to school becomes the focus of this book, which advocates the use of "code-switching" to enable students to add another linguistic code--Standard English--to their linguistic toolbox. Rather than drill the idea of "Standard English" into students by labeling their home language as "wrong," the authors recommend teaching students to recognize the grammatical differences between home speech and school speech so that they are then able to choose the language style most appropriate to the time, place, audience, and communicative purpose. University researcher Rebecca Wheeler and urban elementary teacher Rachel Swords offer a practical, hands-on guide to code-switching, providing teachers with step-by-step instructions and numerous code-switching charts that can be reproduced for classroom use. The success of Wheeler's presentations in urban school districts and the positive results that Swords has observed in her own classroom speak to the effectiveness of the research and of this approach. While the book focuses on language use in the elementary classroom, the procedures and materials introduced can be easily adapted for middle and high school students.

Freed from scowling linguistic admonitions, students develop a careful eye in exploring the patterns of our living language in its myriad manifestations, from speaking, writing, reading literature, and finally, in our language reference works.

Eminent linguists tell the real stories behind prescriptivism, dialects, American Sign Language, the English-Only movement, language and politics, media communication, and other topics concerning language in society.