But all of this is only possible if teachers can successfully engage students in the learning process.
It can also be a helpful foundation for students to understand new languages. While immersion and imitation of a language can produce strong speakers and writers, a basic understanding of grammatical structures can be a powerful writing tool. But then the voice of the skeptics emerged, arguing that sentence diagramming is a useless practice that hinders rather than aids students in their process of learning the English language and claiming that students best learn through imitation and immersion. Diagramming sentences: is it helpful?įor decades, educators have been debating whether sentence diagramming helps students learn to read and write.Īfter it was invented in the late nineteenth century, sentence diagramming flourished in the American classroom for about fifty years, alongside other structured grammar-teaching tactics. Now I wonder if there was a better way to help me retain what I learned and get students who weren’t connecting with the material more involved. My classmates would return, confused, to find a board covered in a seemingly nonsensical mess of colorful lines and scribbled words. Bergen, to practice diagramming “challenge sentences” on the whiteboard. I would stay in the classroom during recess with my friend Maria and my teacher, Ms. I was one of the few students in my class who thoroughly enjoyed diagramming sentences, especially when they were complex. Then come the modifiers, hanging diagonally off of the original line, and… well, it only gets more complicated from there. Do you remember when you were in 6th grade and learned all about sentence diagramming? Most kids are taught to draw a horizontal line and split it into two parts, with the sentence subject on the left and the predicate on the right.