Audience

The audience I would like to reach with my paper is primarily prospective English teachers. I think that many education students are uncomfortable with grammar, as evidenced by the course requirements at UWM. As these students approach their new classrooms, this discomfort will manifest itself in how they decide to teach grammar. Some of them actually hate grammar as much as their students.

I would like to offer them evidence that there are effective ways to teach grammar, so that as they begin to formulate lesson plans they can match the skills they want to teach with the population they will serve. Hopefully with a workable strategy for teaching grammar in place they will feel less intimidated by the mechanisms of it.

I think that the examples I provide and the reasons for them will help potential teachers to feel more justified in their reasons for teaching grammar they way they do, and in accessing the tools they need to use them. Instead of viewing grammar as a tedious chore that they have to figure out how to sneak into their lessons, I want them to see grammar as a useful, wonderful thing that will help them reach their students and make them not only better writers but better communicators in general. I want, in essence, to detoxify grammar.

Steps to get there:

Explaining what grammar really is
Providing ways of looking at it so that they can find themselves in the paper
Explaining the different ways it can be taught, and the reasons for them