248: Why grammar instruction stinks, and how we can change that

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast

Jennifer Gonzalez

Education, Teaching, Instruction, Classroommanagement, Educationreform

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Grammar has never been an especially popular area of study, and teaching it has frustrated many English teachers throughout time. It seems like no matter how hard we try, the concepts just don't stick as well as we'd like them to. In this episode, I'm talking to Matthew Johnson, author of the new book Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students, about some truly fresh approaches he takes to grammar instruction (I definitely never tried them!). They have worked so well that his students now say grammar is their favorite part of his class — definitely worth a listen!

Thanks to Zearn and EVERFI for sponsoring this episode.

And to learn more about Grammar Gap Fillers, go to cultofpedagogy.com/grammar.

To read Matt's article and get links to his book, visit cultofpedagogy.com/grammar-stinks/.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is Jennifer Gonzalez, welcoming you to episode 248 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.
0:06.0	In this episode, we're going to talk about why teaching grammar is kind of awful and some really fresh, I have had a lot of conversations about how to teach grammar.
0:30.6	Every school year, at least one of my colleagues would announce that they were starting the year off with a thorough review of the basics, parts of speech,
0:38.5	punctuation, and so on for at least a month. This would be for seventh graders and eighth graders.
0:44.0	They would say things like, they come to me every year not knowing any of this stuff. I mean,
0:48.3	they can't even point out a verb when I ask them to, so we're going to start from scratch.
0:52.7	And I would wince inside every time because I was
0:56.3	pretty confident that the kids would hate it, and no matter how hard they drilled those basics,
1:00.9	none of it would stick. I had read the research that teaching grammar out of context was ineffective,
1:06.6	and I had developed my own approach to working grammar instruction into authentic writing assignments,
1:12.7	a process I outline in episode 74 of this podcast.
1:17.1	I got good enough results from this approach, so I never really went looking for other ways of teaching grammar.
1:24.0	And when I heard that my guest today, Matthew Johnson, had a new book on grammar instruction,
1:29.5	I have to admit that I was a little bit skeptical.
1:32.6	But Matt had already proven that he has some really good ideas about teaching when he joined
1:38.0	me on episode 145 to talk about how to make feedback easier and faster so that teachers
1:43.6	could give more of it.
1:45.6	With that in mind, I took a look at his new book, Good Grammar, Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons that work for more students.
1:53.6	And what I found really was something different.
1:57.2	In the book, Johnson shares how he organizes grammar instruction in a way that I've never heard of, but totally makes sense, and teaches it from a mindset of curiosity, humility, and as the book's title says, Joy.
2:12.1	His methodology works so well that for the last five years on end-of-year surveys, his students say that grammar
2:19.3	is their favorite part of his class. That part really sold me. So I asked Matt to write a blog
	...

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