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?

I don’t think you do need to know all the grammar to have a good standard of written English. I was from the generation that got no English grammar tuition and still managed to get two English degrees and work in a job that required a lot of cogent writing. However, I have struggled to learn foreign languages without having the conscious grasp of linguistic structure and the names for elements of grammar. So I wish I had been taught and I think it does have a use.

YANBU. English was my favourite subject at primary school and I loved writing stories. But I suspect that the focus on shoehorning fronted adverbials and other grammatical features into stories would have killed that enjoyment stone dead.

In late primary school (early 90s), we did learn about the main word classes especially nouns and verbs. I do wish we’d had an introduction to tenses, though. My first real encounter with them was in French lessons at secondary school!

I read English at Cambridge, I have no idea what a fronted adverbial is!

Some of it is bonkers, I agree.

I do think it's important to understand basic rules of grammar though, and punctuation/spelling. Learning to write persuasively is teaching children how to influence readers, which is really important if they're going to have their voices heard.

There's a balance to be struck.

I think the focus on fronted adverbials could actually hinder children’s attempts at writing clearly and concisely, and developing their own writing style.

Imagine if Gove was in charge of a publishing house, insisting that Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan edit their novels to include more relative clauses and fronted adverbials.

I think knowing the correct grammatical terms matters more than being able to draw a number line for 2x - 5 > 13, but I'm in the minority.

I have worked as a language teacher overseas and unfortunately British teachers are infamous for their poor grammatical knowledge (broadly speaking). Those who have mastered this stuff are in high demand .

As someone who has always been hot on grammar, and was very well taught at school, I was totally bemused by ‘fronted adverbials’ for primary children, and still am!

We had to ‘parse’ sentences, but terms were limited to noun (common or proper), verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, etc.

IMO there’s no denying that a good grounding in grammar is very helpful for both native speech and learning foreign languages, but I often think that rather than ‘fronted adverbials’ it might be more useful to teach them where to put an apostrophe, not to mention the difference between it’s/its, your/you’re, there/their/they’re, who’s/whose, etc.
These things really are not difficult, assuming the teacher is clued up of course - sadly not invariably a given nowadays.

I'm 50:50 on this. On the one hand, it does sound a bit much for primary school age. On the other, I'm one of the generation of 80s children who had very little formal grammar teaching. My English is okay, but I write by 'feel' and can't necessarily describe why a sentence is ungrammatical, although I can generally recognise that it is.

We also learned nothing at all about cases, or tenses beyond past, present and future, and that has definitely held me back on foreign language learning. So on the whole, I wish I had been taught grammar young enough that I had it to unconsciously draw upon. Trying to learn it as an adult is tough.

British teachers are infamous for their poor grammatical knowledge (broadly speaking). Those who have mastered this stuff are in high demand

Many of those teachers will be the products of the dopey no grammar theories, I've met many teachers who are unsure of simple things, like apostrophes for example. Our English department criticised us in Maths for expecting words like parallelogram, isosceles to be correctly spelt.
I was once doing supply in a Primary school where the Head berated another supply teacher for teaching multiplication tables and she was his wife! As we were both really High School teachers we just rolled our eyes.

I don’t believe op is referring to nouns and adjectives but rather things like past and present perfect tense etc.

I think grammar is essential to have an understanding of the rules of a language. My knowledge of grammar rules came from studying Latin in secondary school, not primary. I feel you need to know why you use language a certain way, as well as exceptions to the rule. It helped me in my study of a number of languages such as french, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian. The teaching should be done in context though. I also don't understand why you wouldn't teach persuasive techniques. Surely you would want to know if and how someone is trying to influence you? Surely you would want to understand how to persuade others of the validity of your argument?
Disclaimer- retired English teacher here.

Disclaimer-retired English teacher here.

Did you teach/use ‘fronted adverbials of time’?

This resonates as I'm currently trying to revisit and improve my very rusty French and I've been very grateful to have that really ingrained knowledge of direct and indirect objects so I can apply the right pronouns quickly.

I learnt it in my first and second language at school, then knowing what is an adverd, modal verb, pronoun, fronted adverbial, modal verb, present vs past progressive was ver useful when I learnt French and English ..

Adverbs and adverbials phrases aren't new or particularly challenging, fronted tells you where in the sentence to put/find it, time tells you what the phrase needs to do (ie when did the sentence take place.)

Before my own kids went through school I was really concerned about the approach to grammar and that it was going to be irretrievably dense and impossible for them (and me!) In reality it's just slightly new terminology for pretty mainstream grammatical concepts.

The fronted adverbial is a cause célèbre based on a pretty clunky term for something fairly straightforward.

Personally I find the structure of language fascinating so I am quite pleased my children are being taught more about it than I was at school.

There are certain aspects of it, like being able to identify clauses within a sentence, that allow you to communicate more clearly and effectively.

I don’t think knowing the names of each structure is essential to effective communication but it is easier to teach something if it has an identity.

Or my personal favourite: ‘split digraphs’ for four year olds! I am also an English teacher btw. This stuff is absolute nonsense

The fronted adverbial is a cause célèbre based on a pretty clunky term for something fairly straightforward.

Indeed, which is what people on this thread are talking about. Nobody here has a problem with teaching a robust understanding of the parts of speech and uses of tenses and punctuation

Using clunky terms for straightforward terms confuses young children and becomes an abstract term that they can’t remember.

What was wrong with connectives, time words and magic e for 4-7 year olds?

There are a lot of people on this thread saying "I didn't learn it and I am doing fine" , and I'm sure they are right, I also write professionally and credit hours spent reading as a child for my ability.

But we only have to look on Facebook to see that the majority in this country cannot communicate correctly in their own language. So clearly they didn't pick up anything useful from reading. Perhaps the bottom two thirds benefit more from this explicit teacing than the top 10% that are probably most of the people responding to this thread.

Phonics is likely similar - people of above average ability learned to read fine using any old method, some books and a bit of encouragement and practice. However as anyone attending a mediocre state school can tell you, back in the 90s there was a high proportion of 12 year olds unable to read aloud fluently. In my mixed ability year 7 class there were only a handful who could read a sentence without stalling. I think the phonics methods used now hopefully mean that all children should be able to learn to read confidently, and not just the more able ones.

It's pointless because it's only taught in primary school and by the time they hit year 9 they've no more idea of what a fronted adverbial is than we have

The standard of written English is appalling in this country - as is comprehension - as is ability to speak foreign languages. So many people struggle through life because of this. What is school for if not to to equip people with life skills? Can't believe so many people are arguing for keeping the old no grammar teaching of the 1980s.

Can't believe so many people are arguing for keeping the old no grammar teaching of the 1980s.

I don’t think a single person on this thread is arguing for that.

You are correct though that some people really struggle with comprehension.

I have an A in Higher English and was a primary school teacher in Scotland for 40 years. Thank goodness Gove's grammar obsession was never made compulsory here. If I'd taught in England I'd have had to learn all this stuff as I have no idea what most of it means.

In 40 years of teaching and 60 years of life, I've never needed it either so it's a pointless heap of shite.

To clarify, split vowel digraphs are taught in year 1 when children are 5/6. I've taught them many times and children generally have no problems understanding them.

Reading is the best teacher of writing.

I mean OP was complaining about relative pronouns, which are a fairly standard and very useful part of speech.

Meanwhile, fronted adverbials aren't taught to 4-7 year olds, they're taught in Year 4 and if Year 4 kids can't figure out the combination of "front", "adverb" and (in the example upthread) "time" then I think we're probably in more trouble than we thought. I'm not fond of it as a mellifluous phrase - the "fronted" gives away where it sprang from really - but it's hardly inaccessible.

As I said, fronted adverbials have become everyone's favourite bogeyman when in reality, we probably don't need these kids to know the grammatical terms by the time they're at GCSE, we need them to have practised them enough earlier to have a degree of familiarity and facility with how they work. Even the kids who aren't the voracious readers. Just like you wouldn't expect kids in secondary to remember the phonics terms from reception and year 1, but they can still read using the skills they picked up back then.