How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

To clause or not to clause
How to teach grammar

Simple and compound sentences are pretty straightforward and easy to spot and discuss. When we get to complex sentences, things get a little vaguer in the minds of some students and their sentence construction can get pretty clunky. The building of a sentence is not just about adding words together, but about the position of them, their arrangement into clauses and the use of punctuation. There’s more to think about with a complex sentence. They take more time, care and effort to teach.

I find that teaching clauses is incredibly useful when exploring texts and when students want to extend a sentence. However, it is often reduced to the simple use of specific words. Add ’although’ to the end and write a bit more to make it a complex sentence. For me, teaching students how to use a subordinate clause is much more effective if the different parts are taught in isolation. Start with your weakest element first, then add your strongest. We know students can write main clauses because they have mastered simple and compound sentences from an early age, yet the majority struggle to use subordinate clauses effectively.

Typically, I start with a conditional clause — other types are available.

If I hadn’t said something

I ask students, how could we turn this into a complete sentence? At this point, we might get into a healthy discussion about how the phrase on its own might be acceptable for speech and dialogue but not so for writing. It’s important to highlight the differences between spoken and written modes — an area that students easily blur.

Then we get something like this:

If I hadn’t said something, it would have killed me.

If I hadn’t said something, nobody would have noticed it was gone.

Next, we play around with the position of the clause. What would happen if we moved things around?

It would have killed me if I hadn’t said something.

Nobody would have noticed it was gone if I hadn’t said something.

At this point, it makes sense to remind students that a comma isn’t needed in a complex sentence when the main clause is at the beginning.

The great thing is that students can then see how the subordinate clause works in relation to the main clause and how you can organise the sentence in different ways. The conditional clause offers a sense of mystery when positioned at the start; we get a sense of the person’s thinking and that they put their thoughts and feelings first. Overall, this approach helps students to structure their thinking better. They have the ideas and understanding clauses helps them to communicate the ideas effectively.