Grammar: Or, Why Students Don’t Know How To Use a Dictionary

Yesterday during the regular monthly meeting of the Language Department, the topic of students and their ability, or, lack thereof, to use a bilingual dictionary effectively, came up. Specifically, when students look up words, they typically make one of the following mistakes: 1. They use a noun as a verb; 2. They don’t read far enough into the definition of the word, and therefore often make the wrong word choice; and 3. They look for such words as”broken”, expecting them to be listed, when in fact they need to recognize the verb from which the participle emerges.

One of my colleagues believes that it is because students need to learn how to properly use a bilingual dictionary. While this is true, it is only part of the solution. The students’ inability to correctly use a bilingual dictionary, in my view, comes from the fact that there are generations of students who have not been provided with a firm grammatical base in their early educational years. I’m talking about U.S. born students; I tend to find that students who were educated in other countries during their formative years have a good-to-excellent mastery of grammar.

In the decades consumed by/with whole language and invented spelling, teaching grammar was viewed in the way we view the Anti-Christ. Without this firm grammatical base in the native language, the ability to make the proper grammatical connections in the second language to correctly recognize and identify parts of speech become s a real challenge.This lack of a firm grammatical foundation in the native language is also the reason why students learning a second language have such a difficult time learning to conjugate verbs. They don’t understand the concept of a subject, i.e. subject pronoun, noun, proper noun, but especially a subject pronoun. There are students who are intuitive, and who make the connections on their own. But, for the majority of students, they struggle.

Bring back sentence diagramming!