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.

@babybythesea

That was brilliant!!

SPaG is a bit like Lego if the different bits of grammar are represented by the different colours and shaped bricks. You are learning the different ways to combine them. You start by building a simple pattern, you learn that putting it together like this means this bit doesn't fit right and you move on to making more complicated buildings. Academic level grammar is like building the Death Star and I wouldn't fancy doing that either. Knowing the rules means you know how and when to break them. Learning early and repeating and building means in theory more chances for practise. I don't object to them learning it, or even when they start learning it. I object to the fact I am being told to teach it by someone "highly educated" who makes at least 5 stupid spelling mistakes in every email they send. My husband now leaves the room when he sees me open the weekly school email because it is so infuriating. I object to the fact that it is taught but the kids dyslexia is ignored, and two out of three of my kids made it through primary school with none of these professionals noticing they couldn't write their 5 letter names, despite the many hours I have spent helping them practise handwriting. Truth is without the assessments the school promised but didn't do they can't catch up when it comes to writing because they didn't develop the fine motor skills and grip strength they needed. But a lot of this stuff went in and they understand it but someone else has to unlock it by writing it down for them. The boys have both done Modules from the fresh start program at secondary school and it helps but it is too little too late to be really effective.

Children need to know what constitutes a sentence. Probably helpful also to be able to label nouns, verbs etc. and to know that you ideally need to put commas in places that clarify the meaning. [please note the absence of "It is" in this sentence - did it stop you understanding what I meant?]

What else do they need to know that will impinge positively on their lives?

Priority is to not put them off reading and enjoying language.

God help us all if they finish up like Gove - he of the fronted adverbial fame.

God help us all if they finish up like Gove - he of the fronted adverbial fame. Couldn't agree more - he is to blame for much of this.

@lovepickledlimes

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.

It’s a skill many of us acquired more than 50 years ago without this kind of nonsense. The best way to learn how to use language correctly is to read widely and have written work corrected.

I was at primary school late 70s and can remember doing lots of work. Not as many 'fun' activities as nowadays. I was taught grammar properly & in my year probably 10 of us passed 11+ to go to grammar school with 90 places. Obviously not everyone agrees with grammar school, but learning like we did at primary school must have helped. This was in the days before private tuition, we just all took the exam in the school hall one day. It wasn't something we specifically worked for.

I teach languages now and if they can learn this in primary school it's a bonus.

A conjunction is actually quite easy. I think people are getting caught up in saying it's too hard just because they didn't learn it themselves at school.

There's lots of things I learned at school which I have never needed later in life. So I don't understand why people are focusing on English grammar being useless. Lots of other tasks are too. I've never needed algebra - or any secondary school maths for that matter. I've needed mean/average & percentage for my job but that's it.

Other countries expect their students to learn grammar/tines tables etc so I don't see why a big deal is made out of this. Clearly some students might find it more challenging. But lots won't and should have the opportunity to be challenged academically.

I do think standards in grammar needed to improve. I remember doing very little when I was at school. I do, however, disagree that very young children need to be bombarded with all these long and seemingly made-up terms. DS is in year 3 and his teacher was harking on for 40 minutes the other day about parenthesis. They were all repeating it back to her and then had to write down an explanation of it. I get that they need to know how to separate out this information within a sentence, but I can do this without knowing the term. It really felt like most of the lesson was focused on the term, then a small bit on using brackets!

Teachers hate it too.
The way the children are taught to write ends up producing dull and formulaic write.

Haven’t RTFT but learning English grammar and the terminology makes learning foreign languages much much easier. I have learnt a lot of languages and this has been the case for all of them. I particularly remember when I took German A-Level a lot of people struggled with the grammar because they just weren’t familiar with the concepts and it’s a language with very strict grammar/very obvious when you get it wrong.

I very much agree that some grammar teaching is sorely needed. I find it quite worrying when I see posts on social media from people who are completely unable to string a logical sentence together - it must be so disabling being completely unable to express yourself in writing. Then also at work, I regularly see stuff that isn't actually appalling but where the writer has no idea of how to write something that hangs together logically and gets their point over clearly. Good English teaching coupled with a lot of reading would avoid so many of those problem.

What worries me about what is taught at the moment is that it is a highly unnatural use of the language and may put people off both writing and reading. And it particularly worries me in relation to children with dyslexia and other literacy problems, because if you struggle with basic reading and writing none of this stuff is going to make it any easier; so they may go back to the bad old days when perfectly capable children are written off because they can't achieve enough ticks in the standard KS2 English marking scheme.

It's got Goves grubby mits all over it,harking back to when Britain ruled the world. These so called skills,along with handwriting put children off education and creativity.

Now,somebody who can fix things in your home and drive a van is where the real skill lies.

I think we definitely need to keep a focus on grammar in primary schools but work to ensure that all pupils have a strong base level of the key ones ‘nouns/adjectives/verbs’ and how sentences are constructed (subject/object).

At the moment, it seems we rush through these skills without really consolidating them (same for timestables) and the focus must be about SAT scores, etc rather than the child’s development of skills and understanding.

I feel in primary as though we have taken the worst aspects of the private sector and built a template out of that without recognising all the foundational things that happen at private schools that actually are crucial to creating success. One school I taught in did this spectacularly and it was telling to me that many of the staff had attended the school as pupils themselves when it was a very poor, working class area. They wanted bright classrooms, glossy brand new books, everything shiny and super clean and visually appealing but there was absolutely zero substance (spelling errors in display headers/factually incorrect information/complete disregard for the elements that are conducive to learning). It is all so superficial now.

What the hell is a fronted adverbial?!!

@Toddlerteaplease

What the hell is a fronted adverbial?!!

Exactly. It sounds vaguely rude.

I did German for GCSE but came completely unstuck when they tried to teach us grammar. Because I had no idea what many of the terms were in English! That was 1996-8

A fronted adverbial is using an adverb or an adverb phrase at the start of a sentence. Adverbs tell when, where, how something happebed.
So a sentence that began " After lunch, we all went to the park"... after lunch is the fronted adverbial.

Or " carefully, we crept into the dark, spooky cave"
Carefully is the fronted adverbial.

It's a deliberate attempt by the Tories to force people to focus on style over substance and to make sure that lower class kids are put off creative reading and writing. It's part and parcel of the way they've stripped critical analysis out of the curriculum. Build an exploitable electorate.

Dark, spooky cave is an expanded noun phrase.
Using adjectives to describe a noun.

Smooth, silky fur
Glittering sapphire eyes

Agree. I had to google 'fronted adverbials' and I communicate for a living!

What drives me nuts is the constant push to add description and make prose flowery. It's painful. I almost sent the teacher a copy of 'Politics and the English language' in the first lockdown.

No wonder I have to spend so much time teaching new grads how to write clearly and succinctly.

An ‘expanded noun phrase’ is a phrase used to unnecessarily confuse six year olds.

I taught Y2 last year and they just couldn’t remember what it meant. Having to explain it by telling them to ‘write some adjectives to describe your thing/person’ seemed faintly ridiculous.

Ending the year at age 7 being secure on what a noun was and what an adjective was and how to recognise and use them in your writing, would have been a far more sensible use of time.

Poor,poor little kids.They should be up to their elbows in mud,not learning this shite to please Miss Smith,who has to ram it into 6 year olds so she can get paid .

I've got a linguistics degree and spent a decade working in the field, and have never heard of a "fronted adverbial" until this post. I can figure out from the name that it must be an adverb or adverb-like phrase at the start of a sentence, but I disagree that the best way to teach it (or any aspect of language) is by giving it a wanky name and trying to describe it to 8 year olds. Children learn the language they are exposed to and "fronted adverbials" are all around us e.g. 'Every day, before school, I feed my dog.' or 'For no reason at all, Gove introduced this meaningless shite into the curriculum.' If kids hear and read constructions like this, they'll start using them.

Also, minor pedantic point: it's not even about good grammar; its about stylistic preference. It's no more grammatically correct to say "Every day I feed my dog" than it is to say "I feed my dog every day".

Italics fail. The fronted adverbials there were Every day , before school , and For no reason at all.

I think it’s good to learn the grammar but not at primary age - their still learning to speak and extend their vocabulary at this age and learning the grammar when your still getting to grips new words is too much for many. You waste so much time in primary trying to instil this grammar to children who just aren’t ready to learn it which if left to secondary probably wouldn’t take that long to teach.

Teachers despise it. I have a literature/linguistics degree so can just about muddle through teaching it but most of my colleagues hate and fear it.

Grammar should be learned, yes. However, this is a naming stuff skill, make no mistake. It doesn't improve children's writing or understanding at all. Usually learning about fronted adverbials etc. means they forget what a noun is and round and round you go.

The spag test is also basically a 'How upper to middle class are you?" test. Children from my class can wing it and working class children find it more difficult because it doesn't reflect their experience of lived language.

The ray of light is that with SATs cancelled this year the whole thing might slide into oblivion. No one will be sorry to see them go, especially the grammar paper. (Although leafy suberb primaries love the spag paper because they top the tables with minimum effort).

Death to subordinate clauses, I say.