How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Modelling sentences
How to teach grammar
The danger with teaching grammar is in its decontextualisation into a single unit. In reality, every lesson is an opportunity to model and explore sentence structure. You’ll recall Alan Peat’s approach — inventing names for certain sentence structures. For example:
’The more … the more …’
The more I read, the more I feel that the world is a wonderful and rich place.
Naming and identifying structures of writing helps students to recreate sentences and build their own. But it also has merit in exploring grammar. In a way, students create their own language for structuring language. Yes, we could talk about simple, complex and compound sentences, but they can be less than useful when analysing structure. Using terminology like ’prepositional phrase’ or ’relative phrase’ helps more.
Let’s go back to The Sign of the Four by Conan Doyle.
We were fairly after her now. The furnaces roared, and the powerful engines whizzed and clanked, like a great metallic heart. Her sharp, steep prow cut through the river-water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of the pace at which she was going. We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. Voices hailed us out of the darkness, but still the Aurora thundered on, and still we followed close upon her track.6
How would students describe some of the sentences in this passage? How would they name them?
The furnaces roared, and the powerful engines whizzed and clanked, like a great metallic heart.
Student: It’s a ’three sounds and a simile’ sentence.
We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other.
Student: It’s a ’list of things followed by their positions’ sentence.
The great thing is that at this stage students have a model to work with and they can create their own versions.
The cars screeched, screamed and bellowed, like an angry child.
I walked past men, women and children, behind, near, next to me.
When students have studied the sentence and explored the structure, it becomes easier for us, as teachers, to bridge the gap between the student’s language and the metalanguage we want. It’s quite an exploratory method, but it allows us to teach grammar terminology and let the students take the lead, at least in part.
The furnaces roared, and the powerful engines whizzed and clanked, like a great metallic heart.
Student: It’s a ’three sounds and a simile’ sentence.
Teacher: The sentence has a parenthetical clause and this, by definition, makes it a complex sentence. What happens to the sentence if you remove the clause?
We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other.
Student: It’s a ’list of things of followed by their positions’ sentence.
Teacher: This is a simple sentence followed by three prepositional phrases.
The teacher can then extend and develop the student’s grammatical knowledge and understanding of the text.
When students explore the grammar of a text, they are likely to get it wrong and right. It is just that they usually don’t get it right enough. This approach allows students to explore and work out the puzzle of the sentence for themselves. The teacher doesn’t comment on whether the student is right or wrong, but further explores the underlying grammar, helping them understand the rules of a particular sentence. They are articulating the structure and grammar of the sentence in a safe way, allowing students more opportunities to offer ideas and a greater chance of getting it correct.