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.

Just tell your dc to START THE SENTENCE WITH A 'LY' WORD!!!

• quietly and carefully, the burglar crept into the house.
• gracefully, the skater did a turn on the ice.
• stealthily, the fox eyed up the chicken for dinner.

Much easier. All this 'fronted adverbial' newspeak is a load of bollocks.

I describe conjunctions as a 'joining' word, to join two bits of a sentence.

Why is why it used to make so much sense to call them connectives, as they connected ideas together.

They used to have nice bits in the NC about having time for extended writing and developing a love of reading. I think they were taken out as well!

It is such bollocks and - and dangerous bollocks, because it puts children off reading and writing and taking joy in the written word.

Children (and adults) struggle to understand all this - and when they do get their heads round it is is solely for the purposes of ticking school boxes and they never knowingly use them again. It does not help with learning a foreign language either.

What a waste of their childhoods, learning this unnecessary rubbish. It makes my blood boil - you can probably tell!

How do you get a child to enjoy reading and being at school? - maybe one for whom academic work is a struggle?.......force feed them unnecessary bollocks and put them off for good!

YABU. We didn’t learn a great deal of grammar at school, and I remember how difficult that made it to learn other languages. For example, having to learn the difference between perfect and imperfect tenses before understanding how verbs should be used.

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

Yep, this is the period that I was at school for. I didn't get taught grammar in any formal way in primary and minimal in secondary. I really don't feel that I've suffered from it.

I'm dyslexic and if I was taught in the way kids are taught now I would have been really far behind.

@Letseatgrandma oh I massively agree! And I now do that bit at home with my DC. Like I say, I think the actual concepts can be good - they certainly improve writing style. The way they are taught seems to create confusion, rather than aid writing though (or at least for every child I know). It's a shame.

Teaching grammar helps children to understand how writing is constructed and, through that, how to use the written word more effectively. By itself, knowing the word class doesn't do that but it can if we teach children what it is and how it can be used.

Many of the current generation of primary parents grew up at a time when there was little teaching of grammar. As such, it's easy to understand the resistance to it now. However, when you look out into the world and see the level of grammatical errors made by professionals in business, media and even publishing, it makes sense to try and improve things in the next generation.

Unfortunately, @TeenPlusTwenties is correct: the lack of a fully-developed grammar curriculum in KS3 and KS4 means that the potential benefits are sometimes lost.

It is such bollocks and - and dangerous bollocks, because it puts children off reading and writing and taking joy in the written word.

This. There's so much emphasis on grammar, and while some of it is useful (nouns/adjectives), so of it really isn't (fronted adverbials) and some of it is being taught far too early (DS1 is in y3 and had subordinating conjunctions last week- while I think there's value in teaching this at some point, 7 is simply too early).

And the consequence of all the emphasis on grammar is that it takes the joy out of language and reading and stories. It also crowds out so much else from the curriculum. DS1 spends so little time on history, geography and science. The arts are virtually non-existent. It's so sad. How are they going to love learning when the curriculum is so dry?

@RonObvious

YABU. We didn’t learn a great deal of grammar at school, and I remember how difficult that made it to learn other languages. For example, having to learn the difference between perfect and imperfect tenses before understanding how verbs should be used.

But is this sort of grammar work the solution to that?

I'm the generation where we mostly learned grammar via other languages, and one of the helpful things about that is that you realise grammar is different in different languages. That helps you to understand that grammar isn't set in stone. Yes, it's intellectually demanding to figure that out, but it's also helpful.

English has really odd tenses, for example. French is much, much easier in that respect (even if it doesn't feel like it when you're learning).

I really don't fancy the idea of trying to teach a child the formal terms for each tense in English before setting them loose on a little French or whatever.

I think grammar should be taught however the way the current curriculum prescribes it, is probably more damaging than helpful.
I think it's going to put a whole generation of kids off and we will lose those who could have otherwise fallen in love with language and literature. We do our best to balance it as parents however it's hard going and not everyone is going to have the knowledge, time or inclination to do so, and we shouldn't really have to.

I always think that before they start with all this, they really should focus on making sure that everyone knows the very basic things - like it's "I saw" not "I seen" and "I did", not "I done". So many people everywhere seem to think it's I seen and I done!

I use good grammar in my speech, and in my writing. I can write a letter to a professional organisation without any difficulty. I know what basic parts of speech are, but I have no idea what you are talking about, @Clawdy! I don't think it has held me back at all! I don't blame you for hating it.

@FurryGiraffe
And the consequence of all the emphasis on grammar is that it takes the joy out of language and reading and stories. It also crowds out so much else from the curriculum. DS1 spends so little time on history, geography and science. The arts are virtually non-existent. It's so sad. How are they going to love learning when the curriculum is so dry?

Only if the school/teachers choose to let it. Grammar can be taught alongside a language-rich English curriculum with quality shared texts. It doesn't require any loss of the rest of the curriculum. As a Year Six teacher, I deliver three hours of history or geography a week, two hours of science, an hour of music, etc. When it comes to art or design-tech, I'll devote entire days to really get into a project whether that's recreating our own versions of impressionist paintings or learning how to prepare meals from scratch. There is no need to reduce your curriculum in order to teach grammar.

My 9 yo writes really long involved stories with incredible vocabulary and phrasing. She reads all the time. A lesson on this kind of grammar bores her to tears and turns her off English. I teach at secondary level and have 14 year olds with atrocious spelling and punctuation. Let's focus on that and basics like nouns, adjectives, verbs etc rather than these made up nonsense terms. Love the 'ly' words short cut posted above..just teach that.

Coordinating conjunctions and subordinate conjunctions are easy, though, and all children should know what they are. They will help their writing! See www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zwwp8mn/articles/z9wvqhv and www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zwwp8mn/articles/zqk37p3 for easy to understand explanations.

Fronted adverbials are one of Michael Gove's additions to grammar. See www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zwwp8mn/articles/zp937p3

@SarahAndQuack

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.

But "academics" rarely understand the real world, they live in their academia bubbles.

Reference to "academic career" doesn't mean becoming an academic. It means training towards numerous different occupations, professions, etc., many of which require an excellent standard of English.

Learning how to use conjunctions - fine. Spotting them in a sentence - fine. But having to work out whether that word is a co-ordinated conjunction or a subordinate conjunction - ridiculous.

It’s totally pointless to compel children of this age and their teachers to jump through hoops for the sake of it. The government - surprise - are taking the easy route and engaged in a tick box exercise.

@Clawdy

Learning how to use conjunctions - fine. Spotting them in a sentence - fine. But having to work out whether that word is a co-ordinated conjunction or a subordinate conjunction - ridiculous.

Exactly.

@user1497207191, that's utter bollocks on multiple counts.

My 7yo needs to write some 'complex sentences with subordinate clauses'.

She might as well as being speaking Greek... But I don't deny it's making their writing more interesting and increasing their vocabulary. My 9yo is encouraged to use a thesaurus while writing. And thanks to Google, I now understand what she's trying to do.

Hopefully it will soon be Maths. That's straight forward. It's either right or wrong.

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER

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.

Entirely agree. It seems as if grammar is now intended to be confusing for no good reason other than to hang new labels on traditional teaching.

Year 3? We did this yesterday and it was sooooooo booooooring!!!

I swear we did more actual reading and writing as kids, didn't we? All this pointless grammar labelling seems to be taking the shine off the good stuff.

What with that and the utter boredom of Maths Mastery, where my child gets to draw 8 million arrays even though he got the point the first time, which is apparently 'deepening' his understanding (but in reality just boring him to the point of him hating his favourite subject with a passion now) I'm not feeling awfully positive about the primary curriculum right now.

YANBU
It leads to formulaic writing. The children are essentially working to a tick list - or success criteria to use the lingo !
In reality, good writing is often simple. It does not have to include fronted adverbials, relative clauses, subjunctive clauses and a range of conjunctions. How often do we really use semi colons and will it really improve your writing ?
Ironically, many struggle to write in sentences which should be the absolute non negotiable. It’s also not hard to teach so something is clearly going wrong.
It’s a mess.

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.

And there lies the problem. My DP is a teacher. Teenagers these days just don't read books. He says the difference in skill level between those who do and those who don't is enormous.