To find some Primary School teaching a bit pointless?

[Schooll]

Every other day my child brings home homework asking her to identify a new type of pronoun, adjective etc.

My friend is over today too and we both work in fields that require a good standard of English. We cannot understand why we are still stressing children out with things like ‘identify the relative pronoun’, what use is this information?

Genuinely, when will my child ever need to know this and why is she spending so much time stressing over the different types when it’s unlikely to ever be needed again, unless she becomes a primary school teacher?

Am I missing something where this sort of information is actually really useful and we should still be using it to judge children’s intelligence in exams etc?

The best way to learn it is by reading lots. Then it makes sense. Trying to teach them as a separate thing just doesn't stick so is a waste of time. I'm a pretty good writer but I have never been doing a piece of writing and thought hmm...let me write this in the past perfect tense!

Could've written the same thing myself! Former career in writing, as soon as I was plonked in Y6 I had to relearn everything I knew (and not for the better).

As a child I read everything I could get my hands on (old person here)
My spelling and punctuation is good, my vocabulary excellent and my grammar was better than many teachers I worked with. I do credit that to the authors I read. Never had a problem with writing stories or essays. However, I wouldn't know a fronted adverbial if it bit me on the arse. I probably used them happily in my writing as a kid without having the first idea of what they are.

I also got through life up till the age of 30-something without actually knowing what a digraph was and I still don't think that's a vital piece of knowledge for a primary school child.

But if you came across a new word - say ‘noke’ - would you have any idea how to pronounce it? I bet most people would pronounce it to rhyme with joke, because they know that o consonant e makes an /oa/ sound. I learned that as ‘magic e’ at school. Split digraph is just another way of saying magic e really. I find it useful to have the children understand that language - when my 4 year old daughter comes across a word she doesn’t recognise - say ‘joke’ and sounds it out as ‘j-o-k-e…jok-e’ I just say ‘split digraph’ and she she then says ‘j-oa-k…joke’. To me that’s useful language to understand.

That explanation shows a complete lack of understanding of psychology and child development. Teaching isn't like programming a computer. Motivation and engagement come first, otherwise all is lost.

Magic e was fun, engaging and easy to remember.

Split digraphs, much less so.

I went to quite an old fashioned primary school, they taught a lot of grammar. When I got to secondary in a different area, this was noticeably different to classmates from other primaries. I picked up two foreign languages quite quickly. I don't know if I have a natural talent for that, no one else in my family does, or to what extent my knowledge of one grammar system helped me to understand the mechanics of others.

It’s totally pointless.

It's a good foundation for language understanding. The amount of kids who when they get to studying a second language flounder because they barely understand their first, they use it on the basis of imitation/exposure with no grasp of the grammatical principles, is shocking and leaves them totally unable to work out how to apply new grammar rules etc.

For whom?
A politician, maths teacher?
Mt daughter will learn this if she she goes I to that realm.
Schools are all about bums on seats, how to pass tests and being robots

Its a good foundation for developing language skills, we now live in another country, the equivalent of English lessons in first year cover these things, once they’re fairly confidentally understood by the children they start learning a foreign language as they can make a direct comparison and it makes it easier to re-arrange sentence structure in a different language as they can identify where key parts of a sentence belong.

I teach Years 3 & 4 and the amount of grammar we have to throw at them is ridiculous!
There is way too much for them to grasp to the point where even the bright ones have forgotten what a nouns, adjectives & verbs are!!
We're setting them up to fail 😔

Understanding grammar is fundamental to understanding how your own language (as well as others) works.
How else are you supposed to know when to use an apostrophe or not? Or where or were?
Understanding the nature and the function of words in a sentence is pretty fundamental, in the same way that anatomy is a fundamental part of understanding the human body.
And this is why many English people claim to not be "good" at languages: because they have no idea how their own works.

Yes, it totally sucks the joy out of English language. In year 1 (age 5) my child got set the homework ‘Write a story. Next, underline all of the verbs in red, and the adverbs in green’. She could just about spell her own name and write a few words, had a massive meltdown and we gave up. At that age why not just enjoy writing words and stories and build up creative writing skills?! She also complained bitterly about spending ‘national poetry day’ in year 4 analysing poems by highlighting grammatical stuff and annotating them (instead of writing their own poems). During the lockdowns a few years ago, my son was in year 1 and they were doing ‘coordinating and subordinating conjunctions’. Year 1! What’s wrong with ‘joining words’ at that age?

Wait till you get to high school, a lot of it is irrelevant to current life and it needs a total overhaul.
Sixth form is so much better!

I’m an English teacher and I agree that they need to know different types of nouns, verb, adjective, adverb. However, the primary curriculum is utterly ridiculous. Drives secondary teachers utterly insane considering half the time they can’t write in paragraphs when they arrive in year 7 but they can tell you about fronted adverbials and how to spell onomatopoeia!

Yes this! DD did SATS this year Yr 6 (State school) and scored 113 for both English papers. In her (Private school) Yr 7 English term assessment she only scored 10/14 because she couldn't remenber how to identify or use adverbs in a paragraph. The reason: they spent so long on the bloody Gove theory crap in Yr 6 that she has forgotten the fundamentals of how to actually use correct grammar in writing. The kids who went to the private prep and never had to know fronted adverbial scored higher because all their English work at prep was about how to use the English language rather than abstract terminology over application.

Alphablocks explains split digraphs nicely in an age appropriate way.

At the start of y1, my 5yo came out of school very excited because his name has a split digraph. It's a shame that he couldn't actually write his name accurately which is a pretty useful skill.

I'm not convinced that it's so essential for children aged 5-11 to learn obscure grammar that I didn't encounter until GCSE and A-level MFL, particularly when most don't encounter competent MFL teaching until y7 anyway. Grammar is useful but most of us learn functional grammar in an intuitive way anyway.

I'd rather see a love of literature being encouraged, neat writing (not specifically cursive- dyslexic cursive is deeply unhelpful as a functional writing style) and encouragement of creativity, not tickbox cram these gramatical points in.

When young people get to secondary into the foundation subjects, many have a lack of general knowledge because the primary curriculum is often heavily taught to the test because of the emphisis on SATS.

It's also difficult getting my dyslexic children to recognise their intelligence and strengths because primary school puts so much time and emphisis on what is so unnatural for them to learn.

Fronted adverbial from the example given by previous poster

I leant about fronted adverbial earlier today.

Earlier today, I meant about fronted adverbials.

The placement matters because it changes the emphasis of the sentence. Sentence 1 - the key part is the learning. Sentence 2 - the time it was learned is given equal importance.

Using the correct terminology is important because it means children can link it. Magic ‘e’ means I only know what to do with the ‘e’
Split digraph means I know What to do with them all.

napody
I wholeheartedly disagree with the idea that teaching had to be ‘motivational and fun’ at every turn. In my opinion that is one of the fundamental failures of modern society’s view on learning. And child psychology doesn’t substantiate it at all. It’s why we have children with absolutely no resilience to anything at all. If it’s hard or requires work, they can’t / won’t do it.
Learning should be challenging. It should take effort.

SPAG becomes pointless because of the obsession with testing it as a separate ‘subject’ and so it is a tick box memory exercise not a writing tool. In most other countries, it’s taught as part of the writing process. That’s the point of it - to understand how it changes meaning and emphasis. And it essential to learning foreign languages but we don’t care about that in this country either as ‘everyone speaks English’

I agree. However, the problem is it goes way beyond this and is completely confusing and pointless.

I help my year 4 child with their English and I have to look up what the meaning because I have no idea!

So much of what is taught in schools is pointless. Naming parts of speech is one example. Lots of the deeply theoretical maths in GCSE that has no practical application in real life is another.

I'm a grammar geek and languages person who did A-Level English. I get annoyed by people misusing apostrophes and when my husband doesn't know what an adverb is. But I STILL think there is way too much grammar being taught in primary schools. Learning to use language well through extensive reading and exposure to different types of texts is so much more important.

Also the posts about this being a state school thing. Mine is at private and they still do all of this crap there!

I was expecting this thread to be more generals - what’s the point of learning a marginal language like French when I’m a few years we will all have a simultaneous-translation headset and my child will never live or work in France? What’s the point of learning IT when AI is going to destroy all jobs as we know them?

As for formal grammar - I’m not a fan of Gove (I detest him) but learning formal grammar has helped my daughter with her grasp of complex sentence construction. She isn’t naturally gifted at English but her standard is far superior to the average year 6 pupil of my equivalent primary school in the 80s. And I do think the focus on grammar genuinely supported this.

And now, when she is pointlessly learning French and Spanish at secondary school, she is finding her grammar skills really handy to help her unlock the different grammars of the languages she is forced to learn.

So I think grammar sits pretty happily amongst all the other pointless crap we are teaching our kids!

I agree with the op

Not to say that it was all better back in the day, but we learnt all this by actually reading

Instead they are teaching the theory instead, which is more tedious

I think we were taught the verb, noun, and adjectives at school, but I didn't really understand it. I looked a complete twit on a German exchange and went to an English class with my German partner, and was asked to identify them in their class reading, I didn't have a clue.
DGSs are taught all of the above mentioned, I don't have a clue what they are talking about.