LITERACY 9-12 GRAMMAR, USAGE, & MECHANICS

This course focuses on reinforcing writing fundamentals at the high school level, including sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, subject-verb agreement, paragraph structure, self-editing, and proofreading. High School Mechanics allows the learner to strengthen their foundational writing skills at a level that recognizes their maturity. The course teaches the basic building blocks of Grammar in writing: the parts and different types of sentences as well as the structure of a paragraph. Students need to master before moving on to paragraphs and then essays.

• Correctly identifying the parts of a sentence
• Understanding complex sentences
• Learning subject-verb agreement
• Differentiating between plural and possessive nouns
• Using pronouns, adjectives and adverbs in sentences
• Identifying and spelling words that often confuse writers
• Correctly using commas, semicolons, and other punctuation
• Proofreading their writing for errors

Learning proper grammar is important because it is the language that makes it possible for us to effectively talk about language. Grammar names the words and word groups that make up sentences not only in English but in almost any language. As humans, we can put sentences together even as children.

Another aspect of grammar that is critical for comprehension is the category of cohesive devices, such as pronouns (e.g., she, they, it) and words acting as connectives (e.g., before, because, although). If their function is appreciated, these can also serve as signals to the reader. For example, a pronoun such as she signals that the reader must make a link to a character in the text:

‘Ruby met up with Billy to walk to school. She was carrying her violin for a music lesson.’

Studies over the years have shown a clear relationship between syntactic or grammatical sophistication and reading comprehension; that is, as students learn to employ more complex sentences in their oral and written language, their ability to make sense of what they read increases, too.