Grammar Survival for Secondary Teachers

A Practical Toolkit

Geoff Barton, Jo Shackleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317289500
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This third edition of Grammar Survival brings the content fully up-to-date with the new National Curriculum and GCSEs, making it current and relevant for all secondary school English teachers.

Grammar Survival for Secondary Teachers combines knowledge about grammar with pedagogical approaches. Each left-hand page sets out the knowledge teachers need about different aspects of grammar, incorporating research evidence where appropriate, and each right-hand page offers practical ideas and methods for teaching it, often in the context of authentic texts to show grammar in action.

This book aims to help pupils become more confident readers and writers, able to make conscious and informed choices about the use of grammar, vocabulary and punctuation in their own work. Chapters cover the following:

• 
  
  

• Vocabulary
• Extending knowledge about grammar
• Punctuation
• Levels of formality
• Grammar for reading and writing
• Writing about language use
• Full glossary and further reading recommendations

Completely underpinned by the National Curriculum Programmes of Study for Key Stages 3 and 4, this book supports all secondary school English teachers, regardless of their chosen GCSE specification, and is essential reading for trainee, newly qualified and experienced teachers alike.

Chapter 2

Extending knowledge about grammar

What you need to know about extending knowledge about grammar

There’s a lot of grammar in the primary national curriculum. Pupils are taught about the eight main word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, determiners and conjunctions. They’re taught about different types of phrases (such as noun phrases and preposition phrases) as well as clauses, including co-ordinated, subordinate and relative clauses. They learn about the passive voice and Standard English, as well as formal and informal vocabulary and grammatical structures. They learn about tense, cohesion and even the subjunctive mood!

You might be forgiven for thinking there’s not much left for you to teach at key stages 3 and 4, especially since there’s very little detail in the programmes of study.

Of course you’ll want to build on and extend your pupils’ knowledge about grammar and use it to analyse the texts they’re studying at key stages 3 and 4. And you’ll want them to apply their knowledge about grammar to their own writing too.

But initially, you’ll want to address any gaps in their knowledge, taking care to avoid unnecessary repetition of learning that’s already been secured.

National curriculum tests at the end of key stage 2 use a compensatory (rather than mastery) model so even pupils who achieve a high score could still potentially have gaps in their knowledge and understanding.

So you’ll need to check what they already know and understand. It might be tempting just to give them another test, but far better to use your existing formative assessment methods to check their understanding in the context of their year 7 work.

It’s important to find out what they already know without overly exposing pupils; after all, you want them to be curious about grammar – not wary of it! So try a ‘little and often’ approach and keep it interactive and engaging.

We’ve already seen in the previous chapter how teaching that promotes ‘word consciousness’ – where teachers and pupils regularly talk about words and their meanings, and where ’word play’ is actively encouraged – is more likely to be successful in broadening pupils’ vocabulary. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t apply to language more broadly.

You might give pupils a series of thought-provoking ‘mini-challenges’. For example, ask them to work in pairs to compose sentences that use a given word in different ways. For example:

• Compose a sentence that uses ‘bank’ as a noun.

• Compose a sentence that uses ‘bank’ as a verb.

• Compose a sentence that uses ‘creaking’ twice – as a verb and as an adjective.

• Compose a sentence that uses ‘after’ as a subordinating conjunction.

• Compose a sentence that uses ‘after’ as a preposition.

Or you could play ‘clause consequences’. Write a sentence on the board (it must contain at least one subordinate clause; for example, As I scanned the hillside, I spied a puff of smoke). Then ask pupils to choose from a set of cards, each containing an instruction. For example:

• Change the subject of the sentence

• Change the verb in the subordinate clause

• Embed the subordinate clause within the main clause

• Add a relative clause

You can ask pupils to compose and share orally, or they could write on mini whiteboards.

Alternatively, you could give pupils a set of ‘composition cards’ and ask them to follow the instructions to compose sentences. If you want to check their understanding even further, you could give them the instructions without the accompanying examples. Or you could ask them to match the instructions to the examples.

Another way is to use an investigative approach, which requires pupils to draw on their existing knowledge to surface and seal new learning. Investigative approaches work best when there is one clear rule which pupils can articulate so they can generalise from the examples. Give pupils some sentences that (correctly) use the rule or convention you want to explore (you’ll need enough examples – at least 10–12 – for the rule to be apparent) and ask them to articulate a simple explanation. You’ll find an example of a comma investigation in the next chapter.

A ‘creative imitation’ approach, which enables pupils to borrow from reading and learn from more experienced writers, can be really powerful: this is an apprentice model, whereby young writers internalise the patterns of language, trying them on for size, before adapting and importing them into their own writing. It can be used with longer pieces of text or with a single sentence. For example, you could unpick the sentence below and then ask pupils to borrow the grammar and punctuation to write a sentence of their own. We’ll return to this approach later in the book.

As she glanced around the room, her gaze settled on the scruffy-looking boy in the corner: from that moment, Sam’s fate was sealed.

What you need to know about verb forms and tense

Verbs can take different forms and can be used in the present or the past tense:

• The simple form (She sings/sang in a band).

• The progressive (or continuous) form (I am/was playing in the football tournament).

• The present perfect (We have walked for miles and are exhausted).

• The past perfect (They had walked for miles before they saw the sign).

It’s also possible to combine the progressive and perfect forms (It has/had been raining all week).

Many grammarians refer to the progressive and perfect forms as ‘aspects’ since they indicate the time frame of an action or event – for example, whether it is completely finished, still in progress, or complete but still relevant to the present time.

The historic present tense is generally accepted as the use of the present tense to describe past events, typically in narratives (true or fictional) and usually in speech or more informal writing. It can create a sense of immediacy:

• So she walks into the shop and she pauses at the door and then she says . . .

FINITE AND NON-FINITE VERBS

A finite verb is a verb that has a subject and shows its tense (The cheetah leapt into the air).

In contrast, a non-finite verb doesn’t reveal its tense and is sometimes referred to as a non-tensed verb. Non-finite verbs are formed in one of three ways.

1. The –ed form (sometimes called the past participle or the –ed participle):

Cheered by the crowd, the athletes raced towards the finishing line.

2. The –ing form (sometimes called the present participle or the –ing participle):

He hurried to the bus stop, limping slightly.

3. The infinitive form (the base form of the verb preceded by ‘to’):

To swim the English Channel, she trained every day for a year.

Non-finite verbs introduce non-finite clauses and we’ll look at these later in this chapter.

MODAL VERBS

Modality relates to the way we express attitudes such as possibility, probability, certainty, necessity and ability. This is largely achieved through modal verbs, but some adverbs and their related nouns and adjectives can do this too (probably, in all probability, it is probable that . . .).

There are nine core modal verbs: can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would. Some grammarians also recognise oug...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Grammar Survival for Secondary Teachers
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Vocabulary: Words and Their Meanings
• Extending Knowledge about Grammar
• Punctuation for Meaning and Effect
• Levels of formality
• Grammar for Reading and Writing
• Writing about Language Use
• Glossary
• Further Reading