Understanding and Teaching Grammar in the Primary Classroom

Subject knowledge, ideas and activities

Josh Lury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138948877
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317364009
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Understanding and Teaching Grammar in the Primary Classroom is a practical guide for trainee and practising teachers, with language, and the way we use it to think and communicate, at its heart. Built on a foundation of how powerful, beautiful and thought-provoking language is, this book uses our intuitions about words and language to form a picture of how grammar works, and how even very young children are masters of its patterns.

Each chapter builds from fundamental concepts up to the fine details, providing an introduction to developing grammatical subject knowledge, alongside explanations of key ideas and vocabulary, including:

• Generality – a look at the general structures of sentences that allow us to learn a language at all

• Specifics – a look at the words and modifications that allow us to use this universal tool to pinpoint the specifics of our thoughts and the world around us

• Relationships – looking at how sentences behave in relation to one another, and how they can be merged in such a way that we can show cause and effect in the world

• Humans – focusing on some of the details and idiosyncrasies we are able to give our language

• Language games – examples of language typical of children, and methods to pull this apart and understand how it works.

At its core is the idea that as our language grows, so our understanding grows; grammar is not the study of what to say and how to say it, but of what it is possible to think, feel and express in words.

Illustrated throughout with practical lesson ideas, helpful tips and easy-to-use classroom strategies, Understanding and Teaching Grammar in the Primary Classroom is a must-read guide for all trainee and practising primary teachers.

Part I

Generality

Descriptive vs. prescriptive

There are many people who are irked by certain grammatical ‘mistakes’: less used instead of fewer, would of instead of would have, apostrophes used incorrectly or missed out entirely, their there and they’re interchanged.

This comes from an understanding of grammar as a book of rules that must be followed. Sometimes, these rules come from a sense that meaning needs to be precise and clear. Often, though, the rules seem fussy and old-fashioned. English changes over time, as does what is considered ‘correct’. In modern usage, using the word ‘whom’ has started to sound pretentious and overly-formal in most situations. This approach to grammar, the approach that says what is right and what is wrong is called prescriptive grammar.

Prescriptive grammar tells us how we should write and speak, and tells us what the mistakes are. Prescriptive grammar is about maintaining the current state of the language, and is often more about style than sense.

On the other hand, descriptive grammar looks and listens to the patterns of a language and how it is used, then tries to describe how those patterns work. It’s a little like physics in this respect. Physicists don’t go out into the Universe and tell atoms how they ought to be behaving. Instead, they observe particles as closely as they can, describe them using mathematics and then try to make sense out of it all in words so that the population at large can understand. In fact, it is absurd to imagine a scientist trying to force the world to follow the rules that certain people happen to believe ought to be the way of things. Sadly for people like Galileo, such absurdity was once a reality.

Generality

This part of the book is about noticing and describing the most fundamental patterns of the sentence. Most of the language we use is far more complex than the simple patterns presented here, but that complexity is all based on the foundations described in this part. Once pupils have a sense of the basic pattern that underlies all meaning, then they will start to be able to unpick the infinite complexity of language as it is used every day. The difficulty with grammar for many people is that it can seem so overwhelmingly vast, especially when presented as a giant rulebook to follow and fear.

Chapter 1

Voice and power

Introduction

What do you mean when you say ‘grammar’? Ask people – ask pupils, ask other teachers, ask your friends and family – what is grammar? What are the most likely responses?

• It’s about getting the words right;
• It’s about nouns and adjectives and stuff;
• Grammar is different tenses and when to say less or fewer;
• When you make a mistake with apostrophes or ‘would of’.

Social language

Language is a social tool as well as an internal voice. Some linguists approach the study of language primarily through its use as communication. This is not so straightforward as it might be, because we do not use language purely: we lie, skirt around subjects, mistake our own motivations and prejudices, and half the time do not even say what we mean or want.

“I’m fine”, might very well mean, “I’m not at all fine; you should be able to see that and I’m a bit cross at you for even asking.”

“Do you happen to know where the best place is to buy a newspaper?” isn’t literally an enquiry as to whether you yourself know the best place, as if you might be an expert in judging newspaper sellers and have an interest in ranking them as a sort of league table. It means, “Please tell me where to go to buy a newspaper near here.” The meaning is not purely in the grammar – it’s in the people, the places and the expectations.

Try getting your pupils to make subtitles for what these might actually mean:

• “No thanks. I ate not long ago.”
• “I’m not allowed to.”
• “Is there a toilet near here?”

VOICED PAUSES ACTIVITY

“Yeah no.”

“Y’know”

“Well, you see”

“I guess”

People have a number of short phrases that they drop into conversation. They aren’t really part of the meaning, but fill some time. They are referred to as ‘voiced pauses’. Do you recognise any of the ones above? Perhaps you use one or some or all of them yourself? Pupils might recognise them, or have an example that they often hear their friends or family use.

Are these grammatical, or are they just noise?

Language patterns

We speak language in patterns of words and phrases that twist and intertwine around one another, to create meaning: to describe how to get to the hospital, to suggest you don’t really like someone’s taste in music but you don’t want them to feel bad about it, to vent your anger, to soothe a child with a grazed knee. We are all incredibly adept at manipulating these patterns without having to bat an eyelid. We barely ever have to ‘think before we speak’, no matter how many times we’re told we ought to. Language even enters our dreams.

Grammar is the pattern, and to understand grammar is to notice those patterns, and to see how they intertwine.

Chapter 2

Ping pung – The importance of noticing

Grammatical ‘mistakes’

“I had an elastic band over my fingers and as I was trying to explain about quadrilaterals the band pung across the room.”

The teacher who described this to me suddenly fell about, not because of the unruly elastic band, but because he had used the word pung before his brain had the chance to select a more appropriate past tense for ping.

Let’s try and imagine what his brain had been up to. In the moment of opening his lips to express the thought, he had perhaps an image in his mind, blurred around the edges but in full-colour, of the elastic band in flight, and he was in the business of transmitting that image from his mind into mine. On reaching the main verb of the final clause, without any pause, his brain scanned the unusual verb to ping and decided that pinged seemed somehow wrong, and it formed pung instead. Try saying pinged and pung, and notice how different the jaw movement is, how the cheeks pull back into a kind of grimace for one, and for the other the jaw drops into open-mouthed astonishment. The mouth has formed differently for the p, knowing it has to move into position ready for the next sound, like a tennis player who has started to move into position for the next shot before they have even struck the ball.

The brain is making lightning decisions at a minute level, scanning ahead, juggling word endings, making fine adjustments to the muscles of lip and tongue, finding appropriate moments to take a breath, judging the response of the audience, dredging up language patterns absorbed from books, television, conversations from tens of years ago, grandmothers’ nursery rhymes.

WHERE HAS THIS MISTAKE COME FROM?

Spend time discussing mistakes, not just to learn how to correct them, but so that pupils get into the habit of noticing language, and noticing how the brain is working while language is happening. Discussion of these ‘mistakes’ can lead down many different paths, but there are some common areas that you can help pupils notice:

• Pattern – is the mistake to do with a different pattern? Here, perhaps ping into pung comes from sing into sung. What other words follow this pattern? Fling flung? Ring rung? Bring brung? Think thunk? Sink sunk?
• Intuition – does something about it give you a slightly uncomfortable feeling, does it sound wrong? What is it about pinged that seems awkward?
• Rules – is there a rule that we think is true in this case? Does it ever break down? Is this a rule with exceptions? In the case of pinged, there is a rule about making the past tense by adding ed, but there are many exceptions. Which words follow the rule, and which don’t? Can we talk in the past tense without using ed at all?
• Experience – what experiences of language might have led to the mistake? Many ‘mistakes’ might come from having different dialects, different ways of speaking with family and friends, from mishearing words, from the brain filling in gaps incorrectly (think of filling in song lyrics with plausible but incorrect words).
• Confusion – is there any ambiguity caused by the mistake? Why might it matter that the correct version is used? Is there anything wrong with pinged or pung? Might some misunderstanding change the destiny of the Universe if one is used over another?

There are any number of things that we don’t really notice until they go wrong: fridges, vacuum cleaners, computers. How often do you notice the mechanism of the lock on your car boot before the day it jams and you can’t retrieve your bags of shopping? Standing ankle deep in water, it is difficult to see a blocked waste-pipe as an opportunity to learn more about how the plumbing works, but in class we might make the most of mistakes to boost learning and focus attention.

There are common errors in emerging writers:

• Repetitious use of conjunctions or adverbials: and … and … so … so … and … then … then …
• Comma splice: The cat sat on the mat, it was tired.
• Inconsistent tenses: The cat sat on the mat because it is tired.
• Homophones inter-changed: their they’re there
• Apostrophes in plurals: a bag of apple’s
• Dialogue streams: I said whats that a cat she said get off the mat meow the cat ran out good riddance leave it alone poor cat.
• Random use of full stops or. capital lEtters

DISCUSSION

What errors creep up again and again in your pupils’ work? Do you have any that particularly irk you? Are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction – The grammar paradox
• Part I Generality
• Part II Being specific
• Part III Relationships, clauses and commas
• Part IV Humans
• Part V Words, words, words
• Bibliography
• Index