How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Fuse writing and reading
How to teach grammar
Every text studied in the classroom presents an opportunity for a discussion of grammar. It is just a shame that we place a greater, rather than equal, emphasis on meaning and literary devices. Often the slant of poetry analysis is on the use of literary devices. Or a specific word choice. Let’s look at a poem from a grammatical perspective.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
’My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.7
From a grammatical point of view, this is quite a rich text. How would we use our knowledge to unlock it?
✵ The first sentence is a simple sentence with a relative clause — ’who’.
✵ There are numerous examples of noun phrases — ’vast and trunkless legs’/’shattered visage’
✵ The last sentence starts with a prepositional phrase — ’Round the decay’.
✵ The subject varies from the narrator (’I’) to the statue (’legs of stone’) to its face (’a shattered visage’) to nothing (’Nothing beside remains’) to the desert (’lone and level sands’).
In fact, I’d say that if a student has a good understanding of the choices made by Shelley, then they have a better understanding of the poem than if they can simply regurgitate the knowledge that it is a sonnet. Why? Well, because the grammar points are really structural points. Picking up on a grammatical aspect is examining the skeleton of a text whereas spotting a literary device is only picking at the skin.
✵ Understand the use of relative clauses and you understand the emphasis on what is left and what is lost.
✵ Understand the use of noun phrases and you understand the physical nature of all that has been lost.
✵ Understand the use of the conjunction to start a sentence and you understand that the pedestal is the most important thing left as it identifies who the person was.
Any text should be read with ’grammar goggles’. Students lose their grammatical knowledge if it isn’t explored and talked about repeatedly. And students love rules. Publicly they won’t admit it, but they like a structure to follow. Change the structure of a lesson and students don’t like it. We have a subconscious need for patterns and repetition. Music is repeated patterns. Poetry is repeated patterns. Genres and stories are repeating the same pattern and changing the names. We have morning and evening routines. They get things done. Repeat. Repeat.
Grammar is about patterns too. However, we need to teach students the patterns and work with them regularly so that they become habitualised. Take the use of capital letters. Capitals should be used for proper nouns and at the start of a sentence, and students need to automate their knowledge of these patterns. When they have internalised that pattern, they don’t make too many mistakes with it. Our job is to help them to subsume the more complex patterns of language, and the starting point is for the teacher to be explicit about their existence.
1 For more guidance see: https://www.englishgrammar.org/conjunction-preposition/.
2 If you are struggling, I’d recommend a parsing website. See http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html, for example.
3 A. Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four (Project Gutenberg ebook edition, 2008 [1890]), ch 1. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2097/2097-h/2097-h.htm.
4 Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, ch 1.
5 Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, ch 10.
6 Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, ch 10.
7 P. B. Shelley, ’Ozymandias’, in T. Hutchinson (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume II (Project Gutenberg ebook edition, 2003 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914, poem first published 1818]). Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4798/pg4798-images.html.