Getting It Right: Fresh Approaches to Teaching Grammar, Usage, and Correctness (Theory and Practice)

Decades of research lead to one inescapable conclusion: The old ways of teaching grammar, usage, and correctness just aren't working. If grammar drills, traditional usage exercises, and vigilant error-marking don't make students better writers, what does? In Getting It Right, literacy experts and longtime classroom teachers Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm provide important principles, fresh perspectives, and engaging methods for teaching grammar and usage in the context of students' own writing. Wilhelm and Smith offer detailed advice about how to determine which terms students need to know, what errors to focus on, how to analyze the causes of those errors, and how to teach deeply through activities that help students inquire into the effects of language use and understand that what they're learning matters in the here and now. The book abounds with strategies, examples, lessons, and frameworks for thinking.

MICHAEL W. SMITH, professor in the College of Education at Temple University and former high school teacher for 11 years, has written eight books, including Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature (with Peter Rabinowitz) and Understanding Unreliable Narrators. His previous collaborations with Jeff Wilhelm include Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men and Going with the Flow: How to Engage Boys (and Girls) in Their Literacy Learning. JEFFREY D. WILHELM is the author or coauthor of 15 books for teachers, including Reading Don't Fix No Chevys (winner of the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research) and Improving Comprehension With Think Aloud Strategies. He was a middle and high school teacher for 13 years, and currently serves as professor of English Education at Boise State University and Founding Director of the Boise State Writing Project. He also teaches each year in middle school as part of a professional development school.