Lindsay Kaye Ohlert

CI 5646 Grammar Lesson Plan, Fall 2009

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Setting and Students

nd
Grade Level: 2 Grade
ESL Program Type: Push-in (Inclusion)
Description of Learners: Of the 22 students in this mainstream classroom, four are monolingual native
English speakers and one is fully English/Spanish bilingual. The rest of the students are or have been
ELLs, several having transitioned out of their official ELL designation but still requiring some
additional language support. The L1s represented include one Vietnamese, one Lao, four Spanish, and
the rest Hmong. Two of the ELLs are beginner-level newcomers, who are pulled out for personalized
tutoring during these lessons and will not be present. The rest range from intermediate to advanced in
their English proficiency. These ELLs are able to communicate very effectively and volubly in spoken
English, but most of them have English vocabulary deficits that interfere with listening and literacy, and
many use a significant number of L1 and interlanguage grammatical constructions in their speech and
writing. All students possess the idea of letter-sound correspondence and are able to decode words
using phonics, but beyond that, literacy levels are widely varied, with some students able to
independently read at or above grade level, and a few needing significant support to read aloud and
comprehend even simple texts. Most students fall somewhere in the middle, reading at or around the 1st-
2nd grade level but requiring assistance with unfamiliar vocabulary, more complex sentence structures,
and cultural references outside their experience. A few students have mild learning disabilities
involving attention deficits or processing difficulties.

Context
During the course of several Readers’ Workshop lessons that touched on self-questioning as a
learning strategy, it became clear that many students struggle with formulating and responding precisely
to questions. The native English speakers have no problem asking questions verbally, but they tend to
make form errors when writing. The ELL students tend to leave out or misplace operators and mix up
the meanings of wh- interrogatives. Although they tend to accurately interpret questions in context,
many find it difficult to formulate their own questions in a grammatically correct manner, or to correctly
interpret the meaning of wh- questions when they are isolated from textual or situational context.
Additionally, several students have difficulty with the word initial /w/ in wh- words, pronouncing it /ʰw/.
As such, it is necessary to plan direct instruction in questioning.
This series of lessons on questioning are to be taught in conjunction with a Readers’ Workshop
unit on informative non-fiction, in preparation for an upcoming Writers’ Workshop unit where the
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students will write their own informative non-fiction “All About” books on topics of their choosing. As
writing an informative text requires both being able to formulate queries for research and anticipate the
audiences’ lines of questioning, developing the students’ grammatical understanding of and practical
proficiency with interrogative sentences is crucial for success. Here I will present two of a series of five
planned mini-lessons on understanding and constructing questions.

Lesson Plans
Monday
Topic: Interrogative Words: Who, What, Where, When, Why, Which, Whose & How

Goals:

 This lesson will enable students to choose appropriate wh- question words to elicit the type of
information desired; students will demonstrate practical understanding of this knowledge by
using it to complete a task.
 This lesson will focus on the meaning of the selected question words.

Objectives:

 Students will be able to choose the correct interrogative word to elicit desired types of
information.
 Students will supply relevant responses to wh- questions.
 Students will pronounce the word initial /w/ correctly.
 Students will understand that question sentences end with a question mark.
 Students will use wh- questions to complete a task correctly.
Time Frame: 30 minutes

Materials Needed: Poster with question-answer pairs (Appendix A), T-chart with categories “Question
Words” and “Information Wanted,” markers, cutouts and photocopied scenes for information gap
activity

Learning Experiences:
Preview

 The teacher asks the students a few easy-to-answer wh- questions (e.g. “What is your
favorite color?” “How many sisters do you have?”), then asks them what they think we
will be working on today.
 The teacher tells the students that this week we will be working on asking questions,
because good readers need to ask themselves questions while they read, and because next
week they will need to ask questions to research the “All About” books they will be
writing.
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Focused Learning

 The class chorally reads the first question-answer pair from the poster.
 The teacher asks the class which sentence is the question and which is the answer, then
asks the students how they can tell that “Where is Phalen Lake Elementary?” is a
question. The teacher reinforces the idea that you can tell this is a question because it
begins with a question word and ends with a question mark. “Where” and the question
mark are circled. Students repeat the word “where” several times, with the teacher
drawing students’ attention to the starting sound.
 The word “where” is written in the left column of the T-chart. Teacher asks the class
what kind of information the questioner is requesting, calling on students and writing
their accurate responses in on the right column of the chart (e.g. “Where something is,”
“a place,” etc.)
 Teacher asks the class to turn knee-to-knee with a neighbor for ten seconds to come up
with two “where” questions.
 Teacher calls on a few students to share their “where” questions.
 Repeat process with the rest of the question-answer pairs. The knee-to-knee phase is not
necessary to include with every question word, only those that students seem more
confused by.
Expansion

 Teacher puts students into pairs. Pairs do an information gap activity where Student A
has a photocopied completed scene and Student B has an envelope of cutout images that
must be arranged to match Student A’s scene. While giving instructions, teacher models
the activity, playing the Student A role and demonstrating how to asking questions –
“Where does the car go?” “How many clouds are in the sky?” Note: the images/scene
used for this activity could be drawn from a content-area class – for example, an
illustration from a Greek myth, as students are discussing ancient Greece in Social
Studies.
 Time permitting, students switch roles, using the same cutouts but a different completed
scene.
Assessment and Feedback:
There are two types of errors students are likely to make during these activities: using the
wrong wh- word and ordering words incorrectly/leaving words out when asking questions. If the
teacher hears a student using the wrong wh- word, s/he should make an explicit correction or
request the student reformulate (e.g. “If you’re asking about a person, do you use “what” or
“who”? That’s right, “who” – please ask the question again”). On the other hand, if students
make mistakes such as incorrectly ordering the words or leaving out the operator, since today’s
focus is meaning, not form, during the focused learning phase the teacher may simply recast.
The teacher can informally assess by listening to students during the expansion phase’s
communication task. At the end of the week, students will take a formal assessment paper-and-
pencil quiz, which will include a section where they match wh- questions with appropriate
factual responses.
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Additional Notes:
To contextualize this new vocabulary and give students the additional repetition required to
internalize it, the teacher should mark occurrences of wh- question words (perhaps with post-its,
so as not to damage the books) in the books used during Readers’ Workshop time – in other
words, “enhance the input” (Larsen-Freeman, 2001). Also, when students are doing their daily
Guided Oral Reading activities, the teacher can have them find examples of wh- questions in
their texts, and ask the students to explain why the author chose that particular question word.

Tuesday
Topic: Word Order in Yes or No Questions

Goals:

 This lesson will enable students to correctly situate the operator when asking selected types of
yes or no questions; students will practice this with the goal of developing automaticity.
 This lesson will focus on form.

Objectives:

 Students will be able to correctly perform subject-operator inversions.

 Students will place question marks at the end of sentences.
 Students will begin sentences with capital letters.
 Students will be able to correct errors in question formation.
Time Frame: 30 minutes

Materials Needed: sentence strips, pocket chart or chalkboard and magnets, envelopes of slips of paper
with individual words and punctuation marks

Learning Experiences:
Preview

 The teacher asks the students some yes or no questions with the word order humorously
mixed-up (e.g. “Put twenty marshmallows in your mouth can you?”), inviting them to
correct him/her.
 The teacher tells the students that today we will be continuing to talk about how to ask
questions, and that today’s lesson is about how to put words in the right order when
asking questions.
Focused Learning

 The teacher displays a declarative sentence (e.g. “The car is blue.”) in the pocket chart.
Each individual word and punctuation mark is on its own piece of sentence strip, and
there are additional components visible in a different pocket, including a lower case “t,”
an upper case “i,” and a question mark. The teacher demonstrates re-arranging this
statement into a question by putting the “is” in front, exchanging a question mark for the
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period, covering the upper case “T” with a lower case “t,” and covering the lower case “i”
with an upper case “I,” reminding students that sentences start with a capital letter.
 The teacher puts up a new, similar declarative sentence, and has the class tell him/her
how to re-arrange the words into a question and correct the punctuation and capitals.
 The teacher puts up another declarative sentence, and invites a student to come up and
transform it into a question. Repeat step several times with several students. If a student
gets stuck, call on a classmate to help him/her.
 The teacher puts a question with the words in the incorrect order in the pocket chart, and
has students tell him/her how to rearrange it so it’s correct.
 The teacher puts up another jumbled question, and invites a student to come up and fix it.
Repeat several times with several students.
Expansion

 Working in pairs, students use the envelope of words and punctuation marks to create
correctly ordered questions and answers. Student A creates a statement, and Student B
re-arranges it into a question. Halfway through the time, students switch roles. Before
students begin the activity, the teacher models it with a volunteer.
Assessment and Feedback:
If students place a word in the wrong place, the teacher should give them a chance to re-
formulate – “Hmm, the word “are” doesn’t go there…where do you think is a better place for
it?” and if they still get it wrong, explicitly correct them. If a student makes a mistake with
capitals or punctuation, a prompt such as “What kind of letter do sentences start with?” should be
enough to elicit a correction.
The students’ performance when called up to the board during the focused learning phase
and in the partner activity of the expansion phase should provide sufficient information for the
teacher to informally assess. For a formal assessment, on the Friday quiz there will be a section
where students must correct questions that are badly punctuated or have the words in the wrong
order.

Additional Notes:
Again, the teacher should contextualize this and offer additional repetition by enhancing the
input of students Readers’ Workshop texts, and by drawing students’ attention to these
constructions when they occur during other activities.

Rationale
Lessons will continue in this vein for the rest of the week, with the teacher giving direct
grammatical instruction during these lessons, and reinforcing the vocabulary and constructions during
other classes such as content area classes, Guided Oral Reading and Readers’ Workshop. On
Wednesday, the class may expand upon Tuesday’s lesson by continuing to work with operators, but
adding tense and number distinctions by focusing on when to use “is,” “are,” “was,” “were” or “will”;
on Thursday the class could do a lesson combining wh- questions and operators, perhaps addressing
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“do/does” as well. Alternatively, if the teacher’s informal assessments reveal that students are
particularly struggling with something, the class could do some remediation. On Friday, the students
should review the weeks’ lessons, then take a formal assessment in the form of a quiz on the questioning
objectives addressed in class, which can be administered aloud to students at lower reading levels to
prevent literacy deficits from making quiz results invalid .
In Monday’s lesson, I chose to focus on the meaning of wh- question words rather than the form
or use, because without meaning, form practice would be empty, and because students are already
getting quite a lot of practice on the academic use of questioning during Readers’ Workshop and other
classes. Also, this group is comfortable with oral communication, and generally uses questions in
socially appropriate manner, given their developmental level – it’s really the specific vocabulary words
that are presenting a stumbling block here. During the “Focused Learning” phase, I chose to present the
meanings of the words inductively (Larsen-Freeman, 2001), both because it is more engaging for the
students, and because I like that doing so required me asking them questions about how to ask questions,
which provided extra modeling of the skill. During the “Expansion” phase, I chose to have students do
an information gap activity using the question words as a way of “input processing,” in order to make
the words more meaningful (Ibid).
In Tuesday’s lesson, I focused on form, because students are already generally comfortable with
the use and meaning of yes/no questions, but the high frequency with which they make mistakes in word
order in questions makes this a priority structure to target (Ranney, 2009). During the “Focused
Learning” and “Expansion” phases, I had the students engage in a text conversion activity – in this case,
turning statements into questions – that was modified to make it age-appropriate (Frodesen, 2001); it
would not have been reasonable to expect 2nd graders to convert blocks of written text, especially
considering that many of them are at the “early reader” level of literacy development (Cappellini, 2005,
pg. 31). I also gave them a chance to engage in some error correction (Frodesen, 2001), in preparation
for doing so when putting their “All About” books through the writing process. The inductive approach
(Larsen-Freeman, 2001) used toward grammar instruction in this lesson allowed students to draw upon
their existing knowledge of English word order – as they all have nearly life-long exposure to some
amount of English, most of them have a good sense of what “sounds right,” even if they don’t
consistently make correct choices in their own speech and writing. Additionally, I had the students work
in pairs, because paired students are often able to help one another work in the “zone of proximal
development” even when an instructor is not directly assisting (Ohta, 2000), and because pairing gives
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the students more opportunities to communicate in the target language, allowing them to engage in
“collaborative dialogue,” where they negotiate meaning and produce higher-quality output (Larsen-
Freeman, 2001).

Works Cited
Cappellini, M. (2005). Balancing Reading and Language Learning. Portland, ME: Stenhouse
Publishers.

Frodesen, J. (2001). Grammar in Writing. In M. Celce-Murcia, Teaching English as a Second or

Foreign Language (pp. 233-248). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2001). Teaching Grammar. In M. Celce-Murcia, Teaching English as a Second or

Foreign Language (pp. 251-265). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Ohta, A. (2000). Rethinking interaction in SLA: Developmentally appropriate assitance in the zone of
proximal development and the acquisition of L2 grammar. In J. Lantolf, Sociocultural Theory and
Second Language Learning (pp. 51-78). New York: Oxford University Press.

Ranney, S. (2009). CI 5646: Understanding and Teaching English Grammar. University of

Minnesota. Lecture notes, 12/2/2009.

Appendix A
Where is Phalen Lake Elementary? Who is the president of the United
Phalen Lake Elementary is in Saint Paul, States?
Minnesota. Barack Obama is the president of the
United States.
What do bears eat?
Bears eat fish and berries. Whose pencil is this?
It is Xiong’s pencil.
When is breakfast?
Breakfast is at 7:50 a.m. Which kind of milk do you want, vanilla or
chocolate?
How do you eat pizza? I want chocolate milk.
I eat pizza with my fingers.
Why do fish have fins?
How many crayons do you have? Fish have fins for swimming.
I have twelve crayons.