As you probably know, I LOVE sentence diagrams. But having students who can diagram is not my goal. My goal is to help people understand language. If you're a teacher, that's probably your goal too.
Diagrams can be an excellent tool for developing your students' understanding of language, but there is one question you should be asking in order to make sure that your students are gaining a knowledge of grammar and not just the ability to diagram.
Of course, the ability to diagram does indicate some level of understanding, but we want our students to have an understanding that they can put into words.
Some people are excellent at following patterns, and they can diagram sentences without knowing why they are doing what they are doing.
Do your students understand how sentences work? Do they understand the grammatical concepts that you're trying to teach them? Can they explain each word's function and the relationship among the words?
Or are they just following a pattern?
How can you find out? Ask them one simple question: Why?
(If you are studying grammar yourself, make sure to ask yourself this question as you diagram your sentences.)
Look at this diagram. The sentence is diagrammed perfectly, but can the student explain the grammar of the sentence?
The orange leaves slowly fell onto the ground.
Here is an example of what should be going on in the student's mind when he diagrams that sentence:
The orange leaves slowly fell onto the ground.
Since we can't read minds, the next best way to check for comprehension is to ask some WHY questions.
It would be impractical to ask students WHY questions about every sentence that you diagram. However, it's helpful to sprinkle these questions here and there.
Having students fill in charts for each diagram is another way to check for comprehension. Here's one for the above sentence. Students would have to complete the chart after diagramming the sentence.
The orange leaves slowly fell onto the ground. |
sentence |
leaves | |
the | |
orange | |
verb (intransitive complete) | |
adverb | |
onto the ground | |
onto | |
the | |
ground |
The orange leaves slowly fell onto the ground. |
sentence |
leaves | subject (noun) |
the | adjective |
orange | adjective |
fell | verb (intransitive complete) |
slowly | adverb |
onto the ground | prepositional phrase (adverbial) |
onto | preposition |
the | adjective |
ground | object of the preposition (noun) |
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