Try This to Boost Student Test Performance
After you have shared your classroom findings with teachers, it is usually the case that they become aware of how pervasive pronouns are in their instruction. They can help students immediately by doing these three behaviors.
Stop using pronouns entirely in the formulation of questions for students. This requires teachers to be mindful of their own pronoun tendencies. Again, a useful strategy is to begin by eliminating it, and then move on to he, she and they. The next sequence of pronouns to eliminate is this, that, these, and those. By placing each word on a card and placing it prominently on the classroom wall, teachers have a visible reminder of what they are working on.
Students should be asked to cross out pronouns in written questions from texts or other sources and replace those with the correct and grade-appropriate nouns. This is a rapid vocabulary builder for students as well.
Appoint a daily “Pronoun Patrol” in each classroom, a group of five or six students whose job during instruction is to listen for pronouns and to immediately ask aloud this question: “What do you mean by _____? (it, that, these, she, etc.) This makes pronoun replacement an active learning task and involves students in building their own academic language skills.
Pronouns are like Hershey’s Kisses: once you have tasted one, it’s hard to stop eating another and another. And so it is with pronouns. But the effort to replace them with academic nouns is worth it. We have seen many students beam with pride when they respond to a teacher’s question with a sentence full of academic words that sounds like it came from a textbook.