Grammar Survival for Primary Teachers

A Practical Toolkit

Jo Shackleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351978873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Are you grappling with grammar? Are you perplexed by punctuation? Do you find it a constant challenge to keep your pupils engaged while teaching grammar effectively?

Focusing on what you need to know in the classroom, Grammar Survival for Primary Teachers provides you with all of the knowledge and practical advice you'll need to teach grammar and punctuation effectively. Based on a successful, tried-and-tested format, this new book is designed especially for primary teachers and focuses on the requirements of the English National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2.

This book includes:

• clear explanations and examples of a range of different aspects of grammar and punctuation
• practical advice and teaching ideas for use in the classroom
• a strong focus on building knowledge and applying it to writing.

Accessible and engaging, this new book will be essential reading for busy trainee, newly qualified and practising teachers alike. It is the perfect guide for those looking to improve both their pupils' and their own understanding of grammar.

p.4

Words and their classes

KNOWLEDGE

What you need to know about word classes

This chapter deals with the eight main word classes: nouns, verbs (including verb forms and modal verbs), adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, determiners, conjunctions and pronouns. Some people refer to word classes as ‘parts of speech’, although word class is generally considered to be a more helpful term.

The really important thing to be aware of is that many words can function as more than one word class, so it is often simply not possible to say that X is a noun or Y is an adverb. It all depends on how the word is used in a sentence. This is why we tend to talk about a word’s function.

To see what this looks like in practice, consider the following:

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APPLICATION

Teaching about word classes

Because many words don’t sit neatly in one single word class, it’s important to teach words in context rather than through decontextualised exercises. Wherever possible, it’s best to make use of opportunities to explore the way words are used in high-quality texts as part of the reading curriculum, and in children’s own writing.

Although you won’t necessarily want to interrupt the enjoyment of a good story to explore the use of – say – nouns or adjectives, there’s no problem with pausing every now and then to savour a really good sentence or apt choice of word. Good readers do this intuitively, having internalised the process over time. It’s important that you model this ‘readerly’ behaviour for your pupils, perhaps through shared or guided reading as you explore a text with your class.

Other ways of encouraging pupils to notice the way writers create striking images or telling description through their choice of words include annotating a text with two or three sticky notes, using symbols such as exclamation marks or smiley faces. This has the benefit of not interrupting the flow of the reading, and pupils can return to them later in discussion. Alternatively, you could use a cloze exercise in reverse by giving them a handful of nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs from a text and asking them to predict the theme or storyline before reading it.

When introducing word classes to younger children, you might give them a handful of words, colour-coded according to word class, and ask them to use them to make as many phrases or sentences as they can. Once they’ve done this, ask them what they notice about the words on different coloured card. What do all the words on the green cards do? And what do all the words on the blue cards do? Then you can introduce the terminology, once pupils have an understanding of how the words work in practice. (You can limit or increase the number of words you provide, and give fewer word classes at a time if you wish.)

This type of inductive approach has the benefit of drawing on pupils’ existing (but implicit) knowledge, as well as being very ‘hands-on’ and potentially collaborative. There’s an example in the grid below to give you an idea, but you can make your own. You might want to link it thematically to a topic you’ve been studying or a subject of particular interest to your class.

Some word classes are introduced in Key Stage 1, with others following in lower Key Stage 2. However, there are opportunities to teach older pupils how to build on this knowledge by using nouns for greater precision when writing in a more formal style, or by using adverbs to indicate a writer’s stance.

p.6

KNOWLEDGE

What you need to know about nouns

It’s difficult to give a simple and satisfactory definition of a noun. The idea of a ‘naming’ word is not completely helpful, although it’s true that nouns do help us to name and reference the world around us. Nouns are words that indicate things, including people, places, events, qualities and ideas. They typically have a singular and a plural form.

These are all nouns:

Nouns can be modified by determiners, adjectives, phrases and clauses. They can function as the ‘head’ of a noun phrase (we’ll look at this later in the chapter on phrases).

There are different classes of noun, including the following:

• Proper nouns name specific people, places, events or things, such as Elm Road, Sally Smith or the Atlantic Ocean. The days of the week and months of the year fall into this category, as do brand names. Proper nouns begin with a capital letter and don’t normally take a plural form.

• Concrete nouns are a type of common noun. These name things that can be observed or quantified, such as computers, books, cattle or pictures.

• Abstract nouns are another type of common noun. These denote abstract qualities, ideas or concepts – things that cannot be seen or touched, such as fear, kindness, horror or importance.

There is another type of noun worth mentioning here because of the way it can take a singular or plural verb: ‘human’ collective nouns, such as staff, committee, team and family can take either a plural or a singular verb, depending on whether you want to emphasise the collective group or the individuals within it. The following would all be correct, depending on the writer’s intention:

• The school staff are choosing the furniture for the new staffroom.

• The school staff is choosing the furniture for the new staffroom.

• The class are holding a party.

• The class is holding a party.

There are various suffixes that can be used to form nouns. The national curriculum specifies –er (teacher), –ness (kindness), –ment (enjoyment) and –ation (information), but there are many more, such as –ship (friendship), –hood (motherhood) and –ity (enmity). There are also suffixes that can be added to concrete nouns to signify gender (waiter/waitress, actor/actress) and size (duck/duckling, book/booklet).

p.7

APPLICATION

Teaching about nouns

Help pupils to think about the way nouns function in a text by giving them a piece of ‘nonsense’ text to read. You could use ‘Jabberwocky’ from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, or you could make up your own. (When introducing nouns to younger children, you could create a passage based on a traditional tale.) Ask pupils to decide which ‘nonsense’ words are functioning as nouns, and ask them to explain how they know. Discussion might focus on the determiners and adjectives that precede the nouns, and the use of capital letters to denote proper nouns.

The little brog breeped grappily at the Drablad. It sliggled past the ribbly pladgers and sklattered down the brumbly bopes. It came to a diggly dop when it saw the huge Wiggersnap.

Share sentence cards where the same word functions as a noun and another word class. Give pupils ‘show me’ cards to indicate when the word is used as a noun. Ask them to explain how they know.

Alternatively, you could explore homonyms (words that have the same spelling but di...