State To Put More Emphasis On Grammar

HARTFORD (AP) — A group of English teachers is upset over plans by the state Department of Education to place more emphasis on spelling and grammar in the writing section of the Connecticut Mastery Test.

The teachers say the state plan would give too much weight to technical skills like punctuation and not enough to content and clarity.

“What we’re afraid of is that so much focus will be put in classrooms on grammar exercises that the attention will come away from the writing,” said William McCarthy, president of the Connecticut Council of Teachers of English.

The mastery test is given annually to all state fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-graders. It measures reading, writing, and math skills. The next test will be given at the end of this month.

Children’s essays on the test have been graded solely on the clarity, elaboration, and organization of the piece. The technical aspects of writing have been tested separately on an editing portion of the test, which consisted of multiple choice questions where children were asked to identify the mistakes in a piece of writing.

That editing test has not counted toward the writing score, sending a message that grammar and spelling were not valued in the eyes of the state Department of Education, said Tom Murphy, spokesman for the department.

He said critics complained children could bungle the basic rules of grammar and still meet state goals for writing.

“We needed a little more balance. We needed to recognize that spelling does count; sentence structure does count,” Mr Murphy said. “This obviously brings us back to a statement about the value of the basics in writing.”

Under the proposed new scoring method, the essay would count toward 60 percent of the writing score; the editing section would count toward 40 percent. The teachers’ organizations say a more acceptable ratio would be 80-20.

Members of three of the largest statewide groups of language arts teachers – the Connecticut Council of Teachers of English, the Connecticut Writing Project, and the Connecticut Reading Association – met with Education Commissioner Theodore Sergi last week to object to the changes.

“It’s your thoughts that are the most important thing – your organization, your elaboration, getting it down,” said Paula Kuenzler, president of the Connecticut Reading Association, who teaches in the Bloomfield schools.