Teaching Grammar: Individualization, or Direct Instruction?

Grammar instruction these days is in one of those pendulum-shift moments. A couple decades back, we decided the old direct instruction was the enemy: teacher-focused, it just doesn't engage students. Better, we decided, to teach grammar in context: pull lessons from class readings and student essays, and adjust based on the needs of the students. Individualize! (The hot concept we espouse without always knowing what it looks like).

I was a disciple from the start of my career. And remembering the seeming arbitrariness of grammatical principles teachers had handed down unto me--never end a sentence with a preposition; always use the Oxford Comma; never use the Oxford Comma; never, ever use contractions or the passive voice--I stood before my first classes and vowed always to justify the rules I enforced. (To meet that promise, I had to learn a whole lot more about English--and about using auto-text to save me from typing the same explanations on their essays over and over).

And then each year pressed on at light speed, and we delved into wonderful texts, exploring theme, characterization, symbolism, irony, etc., etc. And outside my comments on their essays, grammar never really came up. (I never gave it regularly scheduled programming--another post to come).

And students just kept on mixing up plurals and possessives.

And they just kept on confusing there, their, and they're.

And they just kept on using semicolons in the place of commas, commas in the place of semicolons, and the occasional colon whenever they suspected they'd overused the other two.

And so, in 2013, we're back to direct instruction.

But in a flash today, I wondered: by just pasting the auto-text explanation to the student's essay, challenging him to edit the issue away, and rewarding or penalizing the final draft based on whether or not he had--was I ever thoroughly individualizing?

Couldn't there be an intermediate step, a formative assessment on which he could practice the concept without pressure before applying it on the summative final draft?

So here's a new idea:

For each essay I comment on, as often as possible, I want to assign the student one grammatical or stylistic principle to work on.

For each principle, as before, I want to have collected either my own explanation, or a link to a good one on the web.

But furthermore, for each I want to have at least one exercise I can assign to the student, on which he can practice applying the principle before turning back to his essay. And I want to hold the student accountable for handing in that exercise ahead of the essay deadline, and to use that opportunity to confirm he's actually grasped the lesson.

That, I'm reasonably sure, is individualization. (Finally!)