Correcting Other People’s Grammar Makes you a Racist, Ableist, Jerk
No really. It does.
Storytelling is a communicative medium that is inherently social. Whether orally or in writing, it has existed throughout all of human history. We are social creatures, and the stories that we tell reflect this. Obviously, it is much more common for young children to tell their stories orally before they learn to write. This semester, I have been studying different kinds of stories and the things that they all have in common. I have also analyzed deeper meanings behind the stories that children tell. As we have discussed many times in class, the main purpose of storytelling is to find one’s place in and make sense of the world around us. With this knowledge, we have explored morality, friendships, gender, race, aggression, and many other facets of the human social experience.
Caretakers and adults in general often have the urge or desire to correct children’s grammar or use of language in storytelling. I do not doubt that their intent is genuine and kind, but their impact is actually just the opposite: the child feels shut down and discouraged as I did when I was younger. Language development will occur at the pace that is right for the child, so it isn’t helpful for adults (teachers, parents, etc) to correct them.
This is partly because it ruins the purpose of storytelling which is to find your place in the world around you and to make sense of it. Childhood development occurs regardless of output. It’s obnoxious to correct kids grammar: children learn at their own pace, correcting them is rude, unhelpful, hurtful, disrespectful, disrupts the very process and purpose of storytelling.
When I was a camp counselor for a group of three and four year old children in the summer of 2020, I worked particularly closely with a little boy. Let’s call him Bobby. For several weeks, he and I had been working on respect: he would often forget to say please or thank you when asking for things or during meal and snack times, and he would sometimes say mean things to the other campers when they did something he didn’t like.
One morning while we were changing after swim time, Bobby told me a story. He said
“This weekend, mommy maked cookies and I ated them. They were super yummy!”
Of course, I now had two options: I could either respond to the content of what Bobby said or I could correct his grammar. I chose to do the former.
The intention of the story is to convey that “mommy shows her love for me by baking” and “I love the food that she makes for me.”
As we can see, there is clearly no added value to correcting the tense that he uses. He is not seeking validation or assistance in learning language, but is just communicating something to me. Therefore, it would be rude and almost harmful to respond to something so far out of rapport with him by correcting his grammar. The kid was trying to convey his connection to the world and what he holds value in: his mom and her cooking.
In class, we talked a lot about conflict. No conflict was present in this story, unlike the stories that we’ve discussed in class. There isn’t conflict and he still felt that it was worth sharing/expressing. He didn’t assume that I knew that his mom made cookies for him and he wanted to share his understanding of a bonding moment between him and his family.
Let us explore morality for a moment and what this story is potentially telling us about what in Bobby’s life has moral value.
From his story, I can infer that Bobby wants to be a good son, his mom has raised him to believe that certain things have moral value. For example, he has learned that lying makes him a bad son, and being honest or telling the truth makes him a good son. His experiences of the world around him have taught him that being a good son means enjoying his mother’s cooking (his schema: mom, school, media, etc.). To take this idea one step further, and hopefully without overestimating my role in shaping his perspective and/or his behavior, the work I did with him influenced his understanding of respect and kindness as well as his outlook on socialization with peers/other students.
The way that he told this story would be different from the way that he would tell another counselor because he was contextualizing it for me and the behaviors/values that I modeled/taught him throughout our time together. As I mentioned above, we had been working on respect and politeness, so I noticed that he didn’t mention saying thank you for the cookies, but the yummy nature of the cookies showed his appreciation for his mother’s gesture.
Subliminally or overtly telling students that their use of language is wrong or bad does not teach them the “right” way to speak, but it teaches them to be ashamed of the way they speak and communicate as a whole. This is especially true for academic writing where linguistic dialectical differences in schools become more relevant and more significant.
It is more important for teachers to correct content over grammar. If grammar is essential to correct, there are more productive and kinder ways to go about it than shaming the child which will have serious consequences and ramifications in numerous areas: their self esteem as well as their participation in class will most likely drop, and they will feel discouraged and unenthusiastic to complete schoolwork. There are also important elements of racism and ableism at play here. Policing the way people speak is a notoriously effective way of maintaining power dynamics and oppressing people of color and disabled people for centuries.
So listen to the story, not the grammar. Or be a jerk. You choose.
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