Tense Times – Why Every Teacher Needs To Care About Grammar
We're all teachers of grammar now, says Catharine Driver – so let's make sure we're speaking the same language
How many times have you picked up a piece of student subject writing and felt it reads more like speech? How hard is it to explain to students why this is not appropriate for exams and how they can improve on it?
The National Curriculum now has a much stronger focus on the quality of written communication including spelling, punctuation and grammar. The KS2 programme of study for English introduces some advanced grammatical resources to younger children, so in the next few years your Y7 students will arrive with a good knowledge about how language works.
The challenge for literacy leaders in secondary schools is to develop all subject staff to extend young people’s knowledge about language and help them apply it to their subject writing.
Subject specific
The National Literacy Trust has developed an approach to embed literacy across the curriculum called Literacy for Life. A programme that aims to narrow the gap between pupils who are eligible for free school meals and their peers, it addresses the language and literacy deficit that many children from disadvantaged backgrounds have when they start secondary school. The programme is being piloted by six schools from the Aldridge Foundation and the Ormiston Academies Trust.
How to teach grammar across the curriculum is a key part of the continued professional development for teachers. The new GCSE subject specifications now assign marks for the quality of written communication in longer writing questions, as well as specifying the need to write with cohesion and coherence in all subjects.
However, coherent writing is not the same in science and technology when compared with history or English. The grammar resources and language features vary considerably across written genres and subject domains.For example, an explanation in science will use causal conjunctions such as ‘therefore’, and ‘as a result’, whereas a historian would also use temporal conjunctions such as ’before’ and ‘after’.
Expanded noun phrases in science writing add precise information about a phenomenon – for example, ‘The increased lung-cancer death rate‘ – whereas a noun phrase in English would include emotive adjectives, such as ‘The agonising sighs of his long, lingering death‘.
Two genres of academic writing where older students might need particular support with grammar include evaluative and analytical writing. This appears in subject areas as diverse as art, music and physical education, as well as the more obvious writing subjects. Teachers need to develop their confidence in modelling how to express certainty through the use of modal verbs, including ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘might’ and ‘should’, or through the use of ‘ hedging words’ such as ‘probably’, ‘possibly’ or ‘perhaps’.
Confidence tricks
Grammar must now be taught by every teacher, even if their specialism is in maths or science. A changing education landscape over recent years means that some teachers of subjects other than English will not have been specifically trained to teach grammar, although many will already be teaching it proficiently. Other teachers may not have studied grammar since they were at school themselves.
A study by the National Literacy Trust called ‘Teachers and Literacy: Their Perceptions, Understanding, Confidence and Awareness‘, found that of 2,326 teachers surveyed, almost all the teaching staff (95.2%) across subject areas said that it is their job to teach and promote literacy.
However, only half (51.7%) of teachers said that they feel a lack of knowledge was a barrier to improving pupils’ literacy in their school, while almost a quarter (23.9%) of teachers said they do not feel confident teaching the literacy set out in the new National Curriculum. What is now certain is that all secondary school teachers need to develop a shared lexicon for ‘Talking about language’ to students as primary school teachers have already done.
A possible starting point would be for schools to give staff training time to secure their own knowledge of what is now taught at KS2, and an opportunity to review their grammar development needs. They might also use departmental time to analyse the grammatical demands of their subject.
National Literacy Trust Network members could use the training resource for secondary school teachers, which has a subject focus on history and models and demonstrates the grammatical features of a chronological report. In the classroom, teachers can support pupils by showing them how to tailor the structure of sentences to different contexts, styles and genres. Through doing this pupils will discover the features of good writing, equipping them with the skills to write like subject experts.
Researchers at Exeter University found that if pupils are explicitly taught grammar they will do better at writing through learning how language works. As Professor Debbie Myhill explains, “The key is using grammar to open children’s eyes to the infinite repertoire of choices which are available to them as writers. Used in this way, grammar helps children understand how language works and how to express themselves with greater craft and creativity.”
Catharine Driver is secondary school adviser at the National Literacy Trust; for more information, visit www.literacytrust.org.uk or follow @literacy_trust
