AVOIDING THE GRAMMAR TRAP
Sue Palmer, Times Education Supplement, 2004
“Welcome to the art class. This colour is known as ‘red’. I’m going to hand out
copies of a coloured picture, and your job is to underline all the red bits.”
Why is it that in art, science, maths and every other subject, we teach technical
terminology for one reason and one reason only: so that we can use it, in context, to
help children do the subject? Yet, in English, the minute we start teaching grammar
out come the pointless worksheets.
Partly, I suppose, it’s because grammatical terminology, practically proscribed in
primary education for a quarter of a century, is unfamiliar not only to pupils but to
teachers. Until terms like verb, conjunction and clause are common currency, they’ll
have a scary ring about them, and worksheets seem a safe haven. Partly also, it’s due
to a lingering folk memory of what ‘grammar lessons’ were like in the past: teachers
assume grammar is about ‘naming of parts’, and that it’s meant to be meaningless
drudgery. And partly, of course, it’s because educational publishers – quick to spot
any area of insecurity – have flooded schools with worksheets, thus ensuring
‘coverage’ without anyone learning anything particularly useful.
The National Literacy Strategy didn’t help. While its Grammar for Writing training
course for teachers contended that the purpose of teaching grammar is to help children
become more competent users of the language, the accompanying book made a
enormous meal of terminology and covered far more grammatical ground than any
child could need. Insecure teachers ended up more frightened than ever.
The trouble is that the more of a meal one makes of grammar, the less helpful it is to
all concerned. Endless exercises bore children, waste valuable time and contribute
nothing to standards of reading and writing. Now that most teachers have had time to
familiarise themselves with the terminology, they can avoid the grammar trap by
sticking to a few simple rules:
 Introduce the terminology when it is relevant to what you are doing at text level,
preferably via a fun, concrete activity. Avoid too much talk about it – use words,
clauses and phrases on card and point to or manipulate them to make the point.
 Follow up by immediately using this terminology in context, to talk about the texts
you’re reading and writing, and encourage the children to use it too.
 In subsequent lessons, if children need reminding about the term and what it means,
display a poster summing up the main points to remember and point to it. Then just
use the term in context again.
 At all times, use visual, oral and kinaesthetic approaches to grammar teaching
rather than talk – the more you try to explain grammatical concepts the more
impenetrable they become. And as soon as you see the children’s eyes glaze over,
stop.
Talking about verbs
Once the term verb has been introduced it can be used (along with other relevant
grammatical vocabulary) to help children with their real-life reading and writing.
There are innumerable occasions when it helps to be able to talk about verbs, for
instance, to help children
 avoid “weak” overworked verbs like went and got
 improve their stories and poems – to lift any piece of creative writing ‘go for the
verbs’ and make them more powerful
 improve their cross-curricular writing – collect and use verbs which are appropriate
to the subject matter
 understand spelling rules about adding the endings -ed and -ing, as well as
irregular past tense spelling patterns
 ensure their use of tense is consistent and appropriate to the writing task
 help avoid non-standard English like “She done it” and “We was going”
 recognise formulae for turning nouns to verbs (e.g. custom - customise) and verbs
into nouns (e.g. direct - direction), etc.
 recognise the difference between commonly confused homophones like it’s/its,
you’re/your, past/passed, practice/practise
 determine whether a group of words is a clause (with subject and verb), which may
affect the use of punctuation (e.g. in avoiding the “comma splice”)
 make sense of a long complex sentence by identifying the main clause, and
working out how other clauses are linked to it.