Teaching English Language Lessons By Stylisti Simmons

Grammar can be a difficult concept to grasp for many. The English language itself is one of the most difficult languages to learn. There are so many rules as well as correct and incorrect ways to write. It is no shock that when teachers teach about grammar they do it in a way that isn 't fun. Simmons mentions that "many students when asked what their least favorite activity in language arts was, would respond with grammar instruction and practice"(pg. 387). She also says that "many teachers agree about this as well" (Simmons 387). In her article Responsible Grammar Rebels: Using the Hunger Games Trilogy to Teach the Intentional Sentence Fragment, Simmons uses the Hunger Games Trilogy by Collins to teach her students how sentence fragments can be used intentionally as a …show more content…
This is true not only in English language arts but for many other subjects like math, science, and social studies. The way Simmons uses the Hunger Games Trilogy to teach her lesson on the intentional sentence fragment is a way of incorporating trade books into her lesson. Alvermann mentioned the use of trade books by saying that they are "a strategy for using reading as a schema builder" (pg.180). Alvermann also states that "writing is a special kind of thinking and that when students write they must reflect on what they know" (pg. 180). This was very evident when Simmons described examples of her students ' writings. She noticed that after teaching her students about the intentional sentence fragment as a stylistic choice in writing, many of her students began to use it in their writing for various assignments. In order for students to incorporate intentional sentence fragments in their writing they had to really reflect on what they knew about intentional sentence fragments to figure out how to properly use it in their