Active and Passive Voicex

The below reflection is on a grammar lesson I taught looking at the active and passive voice in writing.

I was initially unsure about how to incorporate a grammar lesson into my current unit but, in preparation for the CAASPP testing at the end of the month, we have been incorporating grammar lessons into our weekly warm-ups. As we are also working on our summative essay for the unit, I am focusing our grammar to support learning in areas where students have demonstrated difficulty in previous paragraph writing. We are using NoRedInk for our assessments and data collection. This is the first time my resident teacher and I have used NoRedInk but it has proven very helpful for differentiating instruction. We started with an 11th-grade diagnostic assessment through No Red Ink to determine students' base knowledge of grammar. As I predicted, the data showed a majority of the class was struggling with active and passive voice in addition to parallel sentences and misplaced/dangling modifiers. I decided to do a brief lesson on what active and passive voice is and how we recognize them then students would complete assigned practice on active and passive voice through NoRedInk. Students would complete these practice assignments as our warm-up activity for two days and were given fifteen minutes each day to complete. Based on their level of improvement would determine our next course of instruction.

This lesson introduced active voice first and provided examples of active voice used in a sentence. As you can see from my slides, I used colors, italics, and underlining to distinguish the active verb examples. I had students provide me with additional sentences verbally using the active voice. There were two students who provided sentences within the passive voice but this led to an excellent natural transition to our next slides that looked at passive voice. For the passive voice slides, I also used colors, italics, and underlining to distinguish the passive verbs and the subject. I wanted to emphasize that one of the key issues with the passive voice used in writing is it can make sentences too wordy, but it is still grammatically correct. Since many students use passive voice in their writing I didn’t want to teach them that passive voice was wrong. I wanted students to realize the main reason I encourage them to avoid passive voice is that it makes their sentences too wordy. We then practiced identifying active and passive voice with a PearDeck activity. I decided to have all of the examples presented on the slide to give them other examples and allow them to make a more informed decision. The results were a mixed bag. The sentence that many were stuck on was, “A bunch of tree limbs were knocked down in a storm”. I have also commented on their use of passive voice extensively in their last two paragraphs. I am hoping that the combination of these two strategies will help with their learning.

The idea of teaching grammar feels daunting even to veteran teachers. I had a conversation about this topic with other English 11 teachers at our last department meeting and they all said the same thing; they understand the importance and the current lack in teaching grammar but feel they do not have the time to dedicate to a lesson. We continued with the conversation, we realized we find ourselves teaching grammar through our writing feedback than an explicit lesson. Reflecting on the conversation, this lesson, and our in-class readings I think the study conducted on intervention grammar lessons are the most helpful. Myhill et al. found a “strong positive effect of the intervention signals for the first time the potentiality of grammar as an enabling element in writing development and evidences a clearly theorised role for grammar in writing pedagogy” (20). However they point out that these intervention “lessons” only really aid the able writers, students who need more specified learning assistance did not improve equally. I have found this issue with some of my reclassified students whose metalinguistics are not as well developed. While I provide grammatical feedback that is specific to the content they are working on. The study engages in conversations between writing genres and the focus grammar lessons, my feedback is much more specific to the writing that students are producing. When thinking about my future classroom and the potential schedules and departments I will be working with, I am considering more integrated lessons with grammar. Many other studies we have read in class make the point that their study is inconclusive or there is not enough evidence to support the theory that grammar lessons improve students grammar skills. However, I do believe that teaching the basics of grammar and language mechanics in the context of the lesson students are learning will help them improve their writing overall. The battle between providing students all the information they need and the time we have in class has seemed to push out the grammar lesson, or maybe we just need to reevaluate our ideas of what constitutes a grammar lesson.

Student Samples