How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

In the beginning was the nouns
How to teach grammar

Grammar has certainly been given a renewed lease of life thanks to recent changes in primary schools; students’ knowledge has increased considerably and this can be an alarming thing as many, if not the majority of, teachers were not explicitly taught it themselves. The explicit teaching of grammar remains a contentious issue.

One of the arguments against is that the rules stifle creativity in students. This is the argument of many a children’s author: writers who were taught the rules and have gone on to be successful by employing them or by deliberately going against them and calling it poetry. Rules are rules. Without rules we’d have chaos and disorder. There is a romantic notion that writing is purely spontaneous, lovely, fluffy and creative. Unless you are at the chalkboard, day in and day out, you can easily have the idea that writing is always wonderful, fun and exploratory. If I didn’t have to worry about students passing exams and succeeding in life, I’d happily put away my planning and get them all to write ungrammatical epic fantasies to outdo The Lord of the Rings. But we are employed to make students better at our subject, and sometimes that involves learning and repeating the rules so that they don’t break them when they are examined. Either that or teach them the rules so that they can be knowingly subversive by breaking them for effect. What the swathes of non-teachers who are against the explicit teaching of grammar don’t get is that you can be creative and still follow the rules — indeed knowing them is a prerequisite to proper creativity. You can be ironic, sardonic and witty and follow the rules of grammar. Grammar forms the backbone of writing. It doesn’t hinder creativity; it scaffolds it.

Over the years, I have seen lots of people start on the path to becoming a teacher. I worked with one who did everything on PowerPoint, including writing the date, and one who believed that the school rules didn’t apply to him or his classes. The kids loved the latter, but not for the reasons he wanted them to. They loved the fact that they could chat all lesson, sit where they wanted and use their mobile phones. Within a term he discovered some boundaries. In fact, I believe he is now an assistant head with responsibility for ensuring the whole school, including the teaching staff, follow the rules. We need rules and boundaries for good reason. Without them, chaos ensues and nothing makes much sense. It takes an understanding of what happens when you don’t follow the rules to know their value. Teachers are, by definition, generally clever people and, when looking at students’ work, they try to make sense of what is written. They try to see past the imperfections. Sadly, life and examiners are not as optimistic or as understanding.

Accuracy with grammar means that written communication is clear, correct and unlikely to cause confusion with vagueness and uncertainty. We learn by making mistakes and if we don’t talk about them, we are not improving. Talk about grammatical errors with colleagues. With students. With parents. Talk is the only thing that is going to address our collective fear, worry and anxiety relating to language use. We can’t all be fortunate enough to have grammar guru David Crystal sat next to us, so we have to use the next best thing — us. Teachers will readily enthuse about how good a novel or poem is yet will refrain from mentioning the metalanguage behind its construction. A grammatical term remains just that — a term — unless we explore it.

Grammar is quite scientific and that’s the beauty of it. A simile can be quite an abstract concept for students to grasp, but a preposition is concrete and functional — it is used to show where the subject is in relation to the object in the sentence or the relationship between (generally speaking) two nouns. Whereas with a simile, you could have billions of nuances and subtle shades of meaning. There’s often a logical framework to grammar. Can what looks like a preposition be something else? Through some logical steps, we can work out if it is a preposition or not.¹ What looks like a simple preposition may in fact be an adverb, conjunction or preposition:

Is it followed by an object? A preposition.

Is it followed by a verb? Not a preposition.

Is it not followed by an object? An adverb.

Is it joining two clauses together? A conjunction.

I have simplified the process, but there are exceptions to the rule. Yes, there are prepositions that don’t need a noun, but then you go back to the rules again.

1. In the beginning was the nouns

There’s quite a lot of terminology associated with language and, often, it is based on context. A word can be a verb in one sentence and an adjective in another. That’s why we need a more thoughtful approach. It might be easy to list definitions for some things, but grammar needs scrutiny and thought before you chuck out an answer. We need thoughtful students and not ones who rush out terminology with little comprehension. We have all been there. We’ve identified a target in a sentence and asked a student to name the word class. There’s panic in their eyes. They reel out a list with the hope of reaching jackpot eventually. ’Is it a verb … a noun … an adjective?’

When exploring word classes, I tend to take a very methodical approach. It goes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and so on. Nouns and verbs are the things students struggle less with, so that makes a good starting point. I’d use these questions to help with the identification:

Is it a word for a thing? Place? Person? It’s a noun.

Is it an action, thought, process or state of being? It’s a verb.

There is some confusion to be had with abstract nouns and the verbs ’to have’ and ’to be’, which should lead to a fruitful discussion with the class. In the following sentence, students usually have no problem spotting that ’teacher’, ’cat’ and ’mat’ are all nouns and ’sat’ is the verb.

The English teacher’s cat sat lazily on the putrid and unclean mat.

Now students have the tent pegs of the sentence. Everything is held up by the verbs and nouns, so when you have these sorted, it is easier for them to spot the adjectives and adverbs, because they are related. I then get students to look at the use of adjectives — either by direct questioning or by simply asking students to pick out adjectives related to the nouns spotted.

What adjectives describe the mat? Putrid and unclean.

For me, the relationship between words is incredibly important. Yes, it might be great that a student can list a number of different adjectives, yet we will have difficulties if a student cannot explain that the writer used an adjective to describe a particular noun in a sentence. That is often the foundation for a lot of comprehension activities.

Once we have identified the adjectives, we go on to adverbs or prepositions.

What word describes how the cat sat? Lazily.

What word shows us where the cat is in relation to the mat? On.

We explore a sentence by focusing on nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Then the rest, if you want to be pedantic. This systematic approach is one students can adopt for all texts. But it does take time. You cannot rush grammar otherwise you get guesses. You can work on isolated word classes, such as spotting abstract and concrete nouns or different types of article; however, my best advice is to keep things focused on real texts. Lists help develop abstract notions of language. A concrete example is better and easier to grasp, from a student’s point of view. When teaching grammar, we have to be careful we don’t give students a warped view of language. It is perhaps easier to notice something when it is removed from context. However, the connectivity of words is missed when you isolate language features. This example could miss out the connection between ’lazily’ and ’putrid and unclean’. There’s a pattern of neglect and disinterest which the adjectives and adverb suggest. Each word connects to the next like dominos and that warrants exploration. How does one word modify our understanding of another? Why use ’the’ English teacher instead of ’an’ English teacher? What makes the ’English’ teacher different to others? Why ’cat’ and not ’dog’?

You could go on and on, exploring the tiny bits of meaning in just one sentence. Each word adds something. A slow exploration and looking at the links between words and meaning is far better than death by terminology.