To hate the grammar lessons children are having to do?

[Clawdy]

Trying to help DGS with his work sent from school yesterday. It was co-ordinated conjunctions and subordinate conjunctions, and so confusing. He struggled with fronted adverbials last week, but eventually managed them. I was a primary school teacher years ago, but I found the whole concept difficult. When we finally completed the work, I wondered what on earth was the purpose behind it. How could analysing the difference help with his story- writing? He's eight years old.

Yes, I think it's very Emperor's New Clothes.

I've no issue with teaching children a bit of grammar and a few terms, but this is just pointless nonsense.

I assume it the purposes of the task was to ensure he has a good grasp of the english language and understand how to properly use it. It's a skill that may well be useful in his future academic career.

I completely agree-there is a lot of content in the primary curriculum that is irrelevant. Gove talked of returning to the halcyon days of 1950s schooling, but my parents were at grammar school in the 50s and didn’t get taught half of this.

A lot of it is really missing the point.

Let's keep everyone ignorant and uneducated and slowly watch the English language become mangled to the point we lose all ability to communicate nuance, I always say.

But the alternative to bad grammar teaching isn't keeping everyone ignorant or uneducated.

Those terms do nothing to help the language stay nuanced. They're very clumsy descriptive terms for grammatical constructions most people learn to use just by speaking and reading.

It's a skill that may well be useful in his future academic career.

That is exceptionally unlikely, given that the consensus view of academics who work in English or linguistics seems to be that this stuff is pure bullshit.

I know it’s awful. DS2 has SEN so he really gets stuck on the grammar stuff BUT he is actually very creative, loves to write his own stories and comic books. He had to write a diary entry based on a poem the other week and the live lesson was all about planning the grammar aspect and what they were going to include (which he couldn’t really do and started to get tearful) in the end I just said leave the live lesson and write it however you want. I think he did a great job but I know under normal schooling circumstances he’d be told to change things which he finds quite upsetting and demoralising.

I think this level of technical detail at age 8-11 is pointless as they then don't continue to use it at secondary.
My DD spent a lot of time in primary trying to understand this stuff, which she never managed. She would have been better off focusing more on the basics which she hadn't at that time mastered.
Doing it as extension activities for more able is fine, but your average primary child just does not need it.

@Highfalutinlootin

Let's keep everyone ignorant and uneducated and slowly watch the English language become mangled to the point we lose all ability to communicate nuance, I always say.

Indeed Hifalutinlootin, and where better to start that process of language demolition than inventing a dumb arse term like "fronted adverbial" which , let's face it, did not even exist until some Whitehall numpty in Whitehall invented it specifically for the SATs . Now that's progress.

The issue I have is what does this actually mean, these are just big word for big word sake. How do I explain what this is to my child. I can explain adjectives - it's a describing word and I can give examples but I do not understand what a conjunction is.

I think there is a happy medium between "no grammar" and " co-ordinated conjunctions and subordinate conjunctions for 8yos".

Between about 1990 and 2008 (I think? Open to correction if I have my dates utterly wrong here), primaries in England pretty much stopped teaching grammar altogether. MFL teachers and secondary English teachers were complaining that trying to teach MFL to kids without any grammatical terminology was really hard, and that it is also much easier to teach children how to produce good written English if you can talk to them about what they are doing using grammatical terms.

The government basically responded by, as far as I can tell, grabbing an old fashioned English grammar book off the shelf and tipping the whole contents into the primary curriculum. A bit over-the-top.

There are opportunity costs in curriculum, because time is limited and time spent on one thing is time that cannot be spent on something else. My nephews seem to know a lot of really random and esoteric grammatical terminology, yet their knowledge of geography and history seems so weak. I think some trimming of the grammar stuff and refocus on science, history and geography might be a good idea.

That's such a good post @Kokeshi123.

I saw this on Twitter which I thought was quite apt:

Ask the school what the learning objectives are so you know which part of the work to focus on.

I agree there’s things in the NC that children aren’t going to find helpful later in life, but it has always been that way, it’s nothing new.

Between about 1990 and 2008 (I think? Open to correction if I have my dates utterly wrong here), primaries in England pretty much stopped teaching grammar altogether

I agree there wasn’t much in the 90s when I was at school, but I started teaching with the National Literacy Strategy in 1998 and there was a lot of grammar content in that.

We used to teach things in Ks1/2 that made sense-apart from parts of speech which are important to know (verb, noun, adverb etc) , there were story/sentence openers, connectives (that connected ideas!) and then expanded to time-connectives etc. It all seemed logical.

What exactly is an expanded noun phrase? Isn’t it using adjectives?? It seems to have been made unnecessarily confusing.

I'm interested in this. I too think, oh come off it. What the hell is a fronted adverbial. But then I quite cheerfully accept that my Y3 son should be learning about adjectives (equally long word) and conjunctions - because I did them at school at the same age (so they're familiar to me and I grasped them so obviously it's possible.) So is it the newness that we are resistant to? And we shouldn't assume they are per se too difficult for our DCs to get their heads around? 'Fronted adverbials' is an ugly name for words that used well really do enhance creative writing at a stroke, after all.

I actually have a degree in English but was never taught Grammar like the dc are now. When I started to learn other languages it became clear how lacking my English was when the language teacher referred to a Grammatical term and I had no idea what it was.
DS is 12 and I often have to ask his 16 year old sister to help him with Grammar as she has a better idea of it than me.

yanbu my son is 7 and I entirely agree.
I did mfl at a level and uni and I don't think I learnt any of this until sixth form and that was only because I was doing mfl.
IMO teenagers should be taught this.
Pointless and confusing at 7.

@SarahAndQuack

But the alternative to bad grammar teaching isn't keeping everyone ignorant or uneducated.

Those terms do nothing to help the language stay nuanced. They're very clumsy descriptive terms for grammatical constructions most people learn to use just by speaking and reading.

This

@friskybivalves, I think it's the volume of terminology, not the newness. I'm not even sure an eight year old needs to memorise that the word is 'conjunction' so long as they know what 'and' and 'but' do.

The reason I find the newness a bit dodgy is because this is all rooted in Gove's faux-50s fetish (try saying that three times quickly).

That twitter post is exactly what I'm talking about. A 'fronted adverbial'? - ironically, if you deconstruct that term grammatically, it makes no sense.

The word' adverbial' is used here as a noun, but surely 'adverbial' is an adjective?

The word 'fronted' here is used as an adjective because it describes the noun - which is 'adverbial' - but 'fronted' is NOT an adjective, to the best of my knowledge. It's been invented. The word 'front' is a noun, sometimes a verb.

There you go folks, proof that the SATs grammar boffs in Whitehall honestly are making it up as they go along.

@Desiren I describe conjunctions as a 'joining' word, to join two bits of a sentence. Subordinating joins one stand alone phrase to a phrase that depends on the other, coordinating joins two equally important phrases. I brushed my hair SO THAT it is tidy Vs. I brushed my teeth AND had a wee. The conjunction is a 'joining' word between the two (I think...).

I think the concepts being taught are useful, or certainly can be. The actual terms used though just seem to boggle my DC. They can do it all at home, but they cannot call it by its name in school. I can also do it all at home, but not know what it's called - I'm currently getting firsts in an Eglish degree, so it can't matter too much.

I'm fairly sure fronted is a word in use before all of this? Don't you use it with buildings?

I can’t understand why it needs to be so complicated.

I was taught grammar extremely well, but they stuck with the basic terms - noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, phrase, clause, etc.

Despite having studied several modern languages, inc. Russian, not to mention Latin and Classical Greek, and having taught English As a Foreign Language, I’d really need to do some intensive mugging up on all this, if I needed to help a child with school work.

IMO they’ve gone from one daft extreme (bothering very little with grammar and spelling) to a ridiculous other.

On the one hand I completely agree. I despair at three/ four/ five year olds learning mad grammar terms they seemingly don’t need to know.
That said. I believe it’s far easier to learn foreign languages when there’s a grasp at some of the more complex grammatical terms, so for this reason alone I think it can be beneficial, looking at the long term plan.