English 326: DOL

After reading Crovitz’s points on error analysis I’ve got to say that I agree with the issues being presented. I remember doing similar exercises in my early grammar classes and thinking to myself that while I was able to identify errors when I knew one was present, it was difficult for me to find them in my own writing. The DOL style isn’t realistic. It thrusts students into an environment where they know they are looking for an error, so it is not surprising when students find one (Compound sentence: two independent clauses joined by a “,so”). I think the intention behind DOL is good, and in a way it makes sense: practice makes perfect right? However, in trying to create an isolated environment where errors can be clearly identified, it robs the students of the ability to identify errors in more complexed, and realistic, sentences and works. Additionally, the activity feeds into the general issue of negativity when dealing with grammar. “What is wrong with this sentence?” “How do we fix this sentence.” Etc.. It is an exercise that, in my mind at least, is a good concept but is flawed in its execution.

So how do you fix it? I still like the idea that practice makes perfect, but just as a baseball team doesn’t practice by playing catch for two hours, we cannot expect students to learn when they are placed in a highly simplified environment. To correct this, I believe DOL could still be used, but it should utilize more difficult sentences. Instead of asking students what is wrong with a sentence like:

James go to the store yesterday

Instead pose the question to students, “What, if anything, is wrong with this sentence”:

James, having just witnessed the last BLT be devoured let out a desperate wail.

The sentences need to be more difficult, and should not always have something wrong with them. Perhaps sentences could be taken from novels that the students might be reading, just to increase the relatability. However, the negative approach to learning grammar is still present and the isolation of a sentence is still just as big of an issue.

With this in mind I’d like to get away from DOL, though not completely abandon it, and focus more on creation than destruction. I think it would be effective to teach students and then have them construct sentences that utilize that new concept. Instead of finding what should be and isn’t, students instead get to utilize their knowledge to create something. Hopefully, this will instill in them the same understanding of how and when to utilize a certain grammar tool that DOL hopes to do, without the negativity associated with correcting a sentence. I still think that finding errors in a sentence is important for editing purposes, but I think that through creative learning, supplemented with some more complexed DOL, that goal can be achieved without the simplistic repetition of error analysis.