Kendall Shultz

UTL640 Professor Haug

Reader Response 9
Institutional pressures such s testing mandates force teachers to emphasize grammar. The
continual assault of the battery of standardized tests assess students knowledge of the minutiae
of grammar knowledge, requiring teachers to teach the superficial correction skills so abhorred
by just about everyone except policy makers and test designers (161)
People make errors, she reasoned, when trying something new, and they will rarely try
something new if they will be penalized for their errors. She hoped to accomplish two goals
simultaneously: to encourage her students to experiment with new sentence structures and
syntaxes and to educate them about textbook English over time.