Tips For Teaching Grammar

Sentence Diagramming to Show Phrases and Clauses

Students today have little recognition of sentence segmentation.  They tend to think of a sentence as an ongoing stream, rather than as an assembly of discretely structured pieces. Therefore, it is a good beginning in grammar teaching simply to have the students learn to recognize word clusters as genuine, discrete segments which compose the sentence.  Teach them to see that a sentence consists of definite clusters called clauses and phrases.  Clauses and phrases are closed pieces; they move around the sentence as one complete piece; and you can insert or delete them from the sentence as one piece. If students can learn to see the solid clusters within the sentence, that alone is a significant lesson in grammar.

I have found that these three grammatical structures are a good basis:

• prepositional phrase: always starts on a preposition and goes to the next noun.
• clause conjunction: for every additional clause added to a sentence, there will always be a clause conjunction.
• dependent clause: contains the key subject-verb combination but is not an independent sentence.

I ask students to mark these structures as follows:

    a.  each prepositional phrase in brackets
    b. each clause conjunction in capital letters
    c.  each dependent clause underlined.

Examples:

(In those days,) (in such cases,) men did not think (of germs and infections,) but (of sins.)   {H. G. Wells}

Your mother will never see you again IF you do not marry Mr Collins, AND I will never see you again IF you do.   {Jane Austen}

Jane united a composure (of temper) (with a uniform cheerfulness) (of manner,) WHICH would guard her (from the suspicions) (of the impertinent).   {Jane Austen}

This approach to sentence analysis will take your students from being structurally unaware to being structurally aware.  The approach is an excellent precursor to the study of punctuation errors.

--Robert Einarsson, Grant MacEwan College