The one with all the
GRAMMAR
Spring (2) 2008 / Term 4

Do you teach grammar? Course you do - that's if you spend any time in lessons playing close attention to language, or trying to help your students become better writers. You probably won't be teaching 'functional skills', and you might not even think of it as grammar as such (unless you teach A Level Language) - but that, as the writers in this issue will tell you, is simply because you're not old school.

There's a refreshing consensus in the pieces here. Naming of parts doesn't much matter, as Geoff Barton explains - we want students to be aware of how language works and use the correct terminology, but, says David Crystal, the point at which students can label 'the bits and pieces correctly' is the point where 'the story of grammar is just beginning'. On the other hand, we'll all have taught able students like John Hodgson's Tom, who have got by for years without absorbing or even apparently noticing certain crucial grammatical conventions. How can we help them see the point, he asks, before they reach the end of their university careers? - or indeed before they reach the end of compulsory education? In just a few hundred words, the articles here have the answers.

All the best for a pragmatic Easter.

Katie

Katie Green
www.teachit.co.uk

Being pragmatic about grammar | David Crystal

"What’s this pragmatics approach to grammar all about, then?" I was asked the other day. "It's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to grammar," I replied. They didn’t believe me.

But it’s true. The problem with old-style approaches to grammar was that they spent all their time analysing structures without saying why the structures were being used in the first place. You could get 100 per cent in the old exams by answering such questions as: ‘Underline all the passive constructions in the following paragraph.’ Some people still think like that - that they’ve ‘done grammar’ if they are able to label the bits and pieces correctly. But they haven’t. At that point the story of grammar is only just beginning.

For the important question is: why are there passive constructions there in the first place? Why did the writer choose to use a passive sentence, instead of an active one? After all, an active one is much easier. A pragmatic approach answers this question.

Pragmatics is the study of the choices we make when we use language. It applies to all aspects of language - sounds, vocabulary, grammar... The term shouldn't scare you. It is simply an application of the everyday use of the word ‘pragmatic’. If I’m a pragmatic person, I make my judgements about how to behave based on the circumstances in which I find myself (its opposite is ‘dogmatic’). In other words, I choose how to behave. It’s the same with grammar. Pragmatics asks the question: why did you choose to use construction X instead of construction Y? Any bit of grammar can be studied in this way - and the results are always illuminating.

Let’s follow up the active/passive example. These terms identify two possible sentence types in a language, illustrated by The cat chased the mouse (active) and The mouse is chased by the cat (passive). Grammarians called the first type ‘active’ because the activity is focused at the beginning of the sentence (the cat is actively doing the chasing). They called the second type ‘passive’ because the beginning of the sentence isn’t being active at all - the poor old mouse is minding its own business, and only later in the sentence does it realise that there is a fearsome cat chasing it.

But the two sentences mean the same thing. So the question is: why are there two sentences in a language with no difference of meaning? The answer is that there is a potential difference. In the passive sentence, you can leave out the ‘who did it’ part (technically called the ‘agent’) and have a sentence like this: The mouse was chased. You can't do this with the active one: you can't say *Chased the mouse.

Now we get to the pragmatics bit. Why would anyone ever want to produce a sentence describing an event, without wanting to say who did it? Why is a passive without an agent useful? This is where grammar gets interesting. I’ve sent kids off on a passive-hunt, where they go looking for examples of passives without an agent, and then we discuss why they are there. Here are three examples of the sort of thing they find.

There is a crashing noise, and we see a window with a hole in it and a little boy looking guilty. ‘What’s happened?’ we ask. ‘The window’s broken’, he replies - neatly using a passive form, and thus avoiding having to say who did it! Aware teachers and parents of course know this strategy well, so they then ask for an active construction: ‘I can see that the window's broken, but who broke it!?’

We are walking down a street and we see a news-vendor headline: ‘Four killed’. It puzzles us. How? Killed by what? The headline writer has been very clever, using a passive and omitting the agent. If he had told us who or what had done the killing (‘Four killed by terrorists’) our curiosity is satisfied, and maybe we don’t go in to buy the paper.

We read a report of a science experiment, and it says: The mixture was poured into the test-tube. Why not: Fred poured the mixture into the test-tube? Because the fact that it was Fred who did the pouring is neither here nor there. In science, who did the experiment doesn't matter. It’s the fact that the experiment was done which matters. So we need a way of impersonally describing what happened - without having to say who did it. And that is what the passive allows.

These are just three examples. There are several other uses of the passive, and it’s fascinating to explore them all. And any construction can be approached from a pragmatic point of view. In a book written in 2004, Making Sense of Grammar (Longman), I went through all the constructions in English and looked at them pragmatically. It was the most exciting exercise in ‘doing grammar’ I've every done. And when I work with students, from this point of view, I find they enjoy it too.

Playing around with language | Alison Ross

In his books, Philip Pullman creates an extraordinary world of ideas and imagination. He hopes that language will be used in similarly creative and powerful ways in English education. This is how he sees language study:

Fooling about, playing with it, pushing it this way and that, turning it sideways, painting it different colours, looking at it from the back, putting one thing on top of another, asking silly questions, mixing things up, making absurd comparisons, discovering unexpected similarities, making pretty patterns, and all the time saying “Supposing ... I wonder ... What if ...”

And he worries that an obsession with grammar will stifle this potential for playful enquiry. Fear not! Use these tips from the highest reaches of grammar research to reinvigorate your teaching and students’ understanding. They’re explored further in my book Language Knowledge for English Teachers (Heinemann).

Step 1 : To dispel the notion of grammar as the Bogeyman or Wicked Witch of the West, you need to make a fundamental shift in perception. Stop agonising about what an adverb, prepositional phrase, or subordinate clause is. Start asking how it operates. What does it do? Just as you can’t pin down individuals with a simple label, language items can play various roles.

Step 2 : Use these four key concepts for grammatical classification. You can transform the dry, academic names into active tests for students to use.

Step 3 : Start fooling about with language. As Pullman says, ‘Look at it sideways, put one thing on top of another.’ Like this…

Suppose you want to understand more about the grammatical concept adverb.

You need to know: how do adverbs operate? (Note: old-style grammar asked ‘What IS an adverb?’ Old-style answer: ‘An adverb ends with –ly and tells you when, where or how something happened.’)

Job description: adverbs are the most versatile of all the word-classes. Like adjectives, they are optional extras: you can insert or delete them. Try the deletion test on this sentence.

[Now] it will [just] take an [insignificant] effort.

The optional elements function as either adjectives or adverbs. How can you tell which is which? Try substitution, using a store of familiar adjectives and adverbs as your litmus paper. The meaning may be odd, but you should see that it works in a structural sense.

We discover that the common little words ‘now’ and ‘just’ function as adverbs here. Although, you really couldn’t tell just from looking at them.

Phrase level: What works at the level of single words also works at higher levels of grammatical structure. Staying with the adverbial function, notice which phrases are optional (= the deletion test) in this sentence.

[In the morning] I need you to get the shopping [from town] [on your own].

The phrases you can delete all have a similar structure: preposition + noun. So it looks as if prepositional phrases have an adverbial function. Try another test and substitute single word adverbs in their place, such as presently, locally, independently. The case looks convincing. You could check on the familiar definition: do these phrases tell you when, where and how the shopping should be got?

But a really useful test for all sorts of adverbials is transposition. Adverbs are not only optional, but often* moveable elements. See which parts of this sentence can be shifted to another position.

Slowly, silently, now the moon / Walks the night in her silver shoon; / This way, and that, she peers, and sees / Silver fruit upon silver trees.

It’s the opening lines of a poem by Walter de la Mare. Adverbs and adverbial phrases are so versatile, they can be juggled by poets (and advertising copywriters) until the rhythm sounds just right.

Now the moon walks in her silver shoon slowly and silently. She peers this way and that and upon silver trees sees silver fruit. ‘No, that’s all wrong.’

Clause level: What has all this talk about adverbs got to do with subordinate clauses? It’s a little known fact, but most subordinate clauses are adverbial clauses. They can be deleted and moved to other positions; you can substitute a single adverb in their place; they give information about the how, when and where.

Let’s finish with the insertion test: you can add more and more subordinate / adverbial clauses at will, depending on your taste for long, complex sentences. Imagine a management company at work on de la Mare’s language.

Looking as if it were wearing a pair of silver shoes, the moon moves across the night sky in a manner that resembles a person walking at a slow pace, with, perhaps, a touch of menace as it progresses without a discernible sound.

*You should be able to move most adverbs. Those that don’t move position have a slightly different function. Adverbs can ‘intensify’ adjectives, in which case they are still optional, but stay immoveably fixed to the adjective.

Sentence variety | Geoff Barton

Prepare for a bombshell. Teaching grammar is less important than we think.

There’s a whole industry out there – academics, consultants and (dare I say it) textbook writers – who pander to our own linguistic inferiority and make us feel that our pupils have to root around in all the dark corners of grammar.

Of course they need to know some grammar, but don’t fall for the suggestion that our pupils need to be trained up to spot a gerund or a split infinitive at 50 metres. Let’s not deceive ourselves, or them, that this will make them better readers, writers or speakers.

Almost 25 years of teaching English has shown me that teaching grammar in a naming-of-parts style (spot the noun, spot the adjective, and so on) doesn’t help pupils in their ability to respond better to texts or to write more accurately.

Of course, for analytical work, the ability to comment on a writer’s use of descriptive language, such as the deployment, say, of certain adjectives and adverbs ensures that the pupil is more likely to get a high grade. It’s a sign of an analytical mind and an awareness of how language works. We want our pupils to use the right terminology, just as they would be expected to in Science or Maths.

But much more important is to teach them the stuff that will make an impact, especially on writing, which remains the Achilles' heel of performance in English at all key stages. In my book, there’s one bit of grammar that is the truly transformational one: knowing about sentence variety.

Our weaker writers will write conversationally, using sentences that are too long, usually gummed together with the conjunctions ‘and’ or ‘but’. This is the Vicky Pollard school of writing: ‘At the start of the play Macbeth is a hero but at the end he is a villain and everyone thinks he is really ambitious and …’. And so these sentences go on, snaking down the page, and sloughing off the coherence of meaning that they might have begun with.

Let’s teach our pupils to have the confidence to start and end paragraphs with simple sentences (sentences with a single subject and a single verb chain): ‘Macbeth begins the play a hero’.

Then let them experiment with compound sentences (which are linked with ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘or’), but keep them under control: ‘Everyone is full of praise for Macbeth and admires his ruthless skills in battle’.

Then encourage them to use complex sentences: ‘Reflecting on what the witches have said, Macbeth gains greater ambition’ / ‘Lady Macbeth, fascinated by her husband’s story, urges him on’ / ‘Although he fears death, Macbeth decides to fight on to the finish’.

Knowing these sentence structures, practising them and experimenting with them, having an armoury of appropriate connectives as an alternative to ‘and’ and ‘but’, these are central to improving pupils’ writing.

And that’s it: if we can relentlessly, remorselessly help all our pupils to grasp and apply the principle of sentence variety, we’ll have helped them to become significantly better writers – and taught them a key principle of grammar in the process.

Teaching Tom | John Hodgson

I give university tutorials on essay writing. Yesterday, Tom, a sociology student, came to see me. ‘I thought I should get myself sorted out,’ he said. ‘I’m in my third year and my marks aren’t that good. And my tutor told me to come and see you because of my formatting.’

I read the essay he gave me, a review of a book by the sociologist Anthony Giddens. He had done a sensible critique, but I couldn’t help laughing out loud at the way the essay had been presented. It had been double spaced, as is customary in university coursework, and every line of the last two pages started with a capital letter. I pointed this out to Tom, who seemed unconcerned at being the source of my amusement. ‘Oh, yeah, I couldn’t stop it doing that,’ he said. He had double-spaced his work by pressing the enter key twice at the end of a line, which had made the word processing program suppose he was starting a new paragraph.

This was not the only ‘formatting’ problem the tutor had complained about. Giddens, the subject of the essay, appeared everywhere as ‘giddens’. ‘How would you feel,’ I asked Tom, ‘if people spelt your name with a small ‘t’?

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Do names always have a capital letter?’

There was something refreshing about Tom’s approach to writing. Until now, he really hadn’t cared about how his work looked, or read. I felt there was something masculine about this. Tom had a regional accent, and his writing similarly seemed an aspect of his identity – why should he accommodate himself to others’ ideas of correctness?

He had a habit of marking subordinate clauses as sentences. The main clause would end with a full stop. While a subordinate clause would follow. I pointed out that this often made the meaning unclear, especially when it was hard to see whether the secondary clause belonged to the preceding or succeeding main clause. He looked concerned.

As Tom’s essay had suggested, he was intelligent and learned quickly. He began to see why and how he needed to change the way he wrote, in order to communicate. I told him that I saw some merit in his cavalier approach. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not in this situation.’

Tom resembles many of our students, particularly boys, who are unimpressed by our attempts to teach language and grammar in terms of ‘functional skills’. They feel they don’t need any more skills, when they cope perfectly well with those they have. Until (I’m using a Tom-like construction here) they find they need to find the style and usage for a situation. The skills Tom needed weren’t only grammatical or stylistic matters; he also needed to learn how to use a word processor.

How can we make our grammar and language teaching what James Paul Gee would call situated, so that the Toms we teach will see the point before they get to the end of their university careers?

John Hodgson is NATE's Research Officer.

Effective writing | Harry Dodds

Does the teaching of grammar – the system of rules governing the formation and arrangement of words to create meaning – help writers become more effective? I very much doubt it and I have been unable to find any convincing research to say that it does. Furthermore, the demands of parents and employers for the teaching of grammar are usually about helping pupils observe the conventions of spelling and punctuation, not about grammar at all. Most school ‘grammar’ textbooks address the same areas; the proper study of grammar (in English, rather than in MFL) doesn’t really feature until students begin A Level Language courses.

If we accept that children have, by the age of four (some say six), acquired the structures that will enable them to make any possible sentence, then we may feel that we’re trying to teach something that doesn’t need to be taught. We can, of course, help make explicit the extensive knowledge about language that pupils bring to the classroom, and give them the terminology and conceptual understanding they need to articulate it. The danger is that we may thereby be led into a kind of ‘reverse engineering’ as a strategy for improving writing. The Framework and the APP materials, which have their uses, encourage this approach. Because they have atomised a body of knowledge about language, they lead us to assume that asking pupils to deploy individual, atomised features of language will lead to better writing. For example, if you ask a pupil what she thinks she needs to do to take her writing up a level, she may say, ‘Miss says I need to use more adverbs’. That may help her hit a target expressed in a levelling grid, but it won’t make her a more effective writer. (See any page of J. K. Rowling for examples of adverb abuse.)

Effective use of language grows from:

(Try giving a KS3 level to the first four paragraphs of Bleak House – that Dickens chap can’t even write proper sentences.)

Theoretical knowledge has its place. In the English classroom, it comes second to confidence and experience in using language.

Matt is sitting in a cat | Andrew Buckton

Webwatch | Rhiannon Glover

There are lots and lots of free online resources to help make grammar groovy. Younger students will enjoy www.funbrain.com where the Grammar Gorillas need help to identify parts of speech (the spelling quizzes on this site are also quite addictive!). At the other end of the scale, the BBC’s Skillswise site aims to help adults improve their reading, writing and maths skills. Targeted at Level 1 of the adult Basic Skills Literacy Curricula for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (though certainly suitable for students at secondary and A Level), its grammar pages include wonderfully clear and simple fact sheets, worksheets, quizzes and games on every aspect of grammar.

By signing up to www.dailygrammar.com you or your students will be emailed with a free grammar lesson daily. After every five lessons, a review quiz will be sent. This promises to be ‘A great instructional tool for all ages and skill levels’ which will ‘transform you into a grammar pro'!

There are many resources aimed at students of English as a foreign language which could also support students of English Language or English Language and Literature at A Level or could even be adapted for students grappling with grammar at GCSE. Englishclub and Activities for ESL students are good examples.

OWL, brought to you by the Purdue University Online Writing Lab offers handouts and exercises on grammar, spelling, and punctuation and has a section of handouts and resources for English as a Second Language learners that might also prove useful.

More grammar games are to be found on the British Council website.

Finally, while many of the sites above provide valuable information about grammar and quizzes and games which would make useful lesson starters, some of Geoff Barton’s resources focus on showing teachers and students how knowing about grammar can actually help students write more interestingly and achieve better grades especially at GCSE. Look, particularly, at the worksheets on ‘Sentence Variety’ and ‘Qualities of Grade A’ under Student Resources and the PowerPoint presentations on grammar in the Teacher Resources pages of the site.

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