Grammar - is it still taught/prioritised in Schools?

[lisalisa]

Just reading soemthing about grammar on another thread and it brought to mind issues I've been having with my children's grammar.

I've noticed that grammar as a subject to be learnt has not been introduced yet to dd - she's in year 3. I don't actaully remember learning it myself at School - just sort of picked it up but dd says things like " I beginned to like this mummy". I do correct her and ds ( aged 5 in Year 1) who also comes out with similar whoppers but neither of them really seem to twig.

Is this common and does it sort of fall into place or is this something that should be taught by now? I had in mind learning " I begin, he begins, past tense - they began, it is beginning "etc.

Another one is the verb to run. both dd and ds say " I runned over there mummy". Runned fgs??? Don't you mean ran over there? No mummy, ran is a daddy sheep.

Do your dc's learn grammar or do they also make these mistakes?

DD1 is very bright and ds too ( although he has a few more problems with reading and writing so probably wouldn't have thought twice if it'd been just him).

ks, what you describe as the basics is actually a lot more than many people are familiar with! If grammar lessons covered all that, then stopped, it would be a huge improvement. I think it's children who aren't from bookish homes who suffer, because they then have limited opportunity to pick these nuances up and so usually end up with a lower level of literacy and communication skills than if they'd been taught at least some formal grammar. I'm thinking of school leavers unable to string an accurate sentence together, people who can't use apostrophes, can't tell apart standard from "localised" English, and so on. They are done a disservice by being kept ignorant of these issues, or being told they don't matter "as long as somebody understands you".

"We runned" is certainly showing an innate ability to learn grammatical rules. If no seven year olds were ever corrected, "we ran" would eventually die out and become an anachronism. And another etymological link to German would be lost. I really hate the idea of simplifying spellings (like thru for through) because by doing that, we're losing the link to the history of the language.

Ah, the joy of linguistics! One of the most interesting thing about being a mother is observing linguistic development. But I'm wierd!

I don't know if they'd write it or not ks. It's not a strong accent or dialect here, and obviously they hear 'standard English' from staff at school (mostly!) and on TV, but some things do seem very deeply ingrained.

In some ways though it's admirable ... many struggle with reading, but they know they have to 'make sense' of a sentence, not just sound out a random series of words. In their grammar "we were going out" is not correct, so it can't be right, so they guess/mis-correct it to "we was going out" ...?! (Wish I could remember a better example though.)

I did a bit of linguistics at uni - wish I'd done more - such fascinating stuff!

I quite like the accent and dialect here, but it does cause social barriers, as the educated and the off-comers "talk posh".

Having done some academic linguistics, can I just point out the difference between acquiring grammar and learning about grammar?

Acquiring grammar is something we all do as we learn a language, unless we're language disordered. A child starts out learning the bits of words that get the meanings across ('cat run'; 'drop book'), and then acquires the little extra bits that make those blocks stick together in more sophisticated ways ('Mummy dropped the book'). A child who says 'I runned' has learned (correctly) that the grammatical rule for making the past tense is to add -ed; he just hasn't (yet) learnt that some words are exceptions to this rule and have different plural forms. These kinds of mistakes are a universal phenomenon of language acquisition, and are known as 'overgeneralisations'.

Until a child has internalised each and every grammatical exception (and there are a lot of them, wrt to plural formation, participles etc as well as just past tense) these overgeneralisations will crop up from time to time. You would expect to find them occurring pretty often in 5yo, reducing in frequency as they get older, tho' still cropping up when they're tired or excited. They show that a child is actively learning language, hoovering up all the speech he hears, and inferring rules from it. It's an amazing process, and it's only really the mistakes that show you how dynamic language learning really is.

These little rough edges in the language learning process are completely distinct from what people call "bad grammar", by which they generally mean forms that are considered socially inferior, like 'ain't' or 'didn't see none'. Even these forms aren't the result of a lack of grammar, they're just the result of following grammatical rules that are generally considered to be "non-standard".

Where's "back up North" ks - NW or NE?

Incidentally I speak very non-standard German. I spent a year in very rural Baden-Wuertemberg, and picked up a very strong Schwabian accent. (When I first arrived I couldn't understand a word, despite speaking pretty good German!) Now I can speak 'High German' if I concentrate, but as the beer flows I tend to slip deeper and deeper into dialect ..! It sounds quite funny.

only skimmed this thread so sorry if running off at a tangent - but doesn't it make it a lot easier to learn other languages if you have a basic idea of the general structure of language?

sorry, haven't got time to read all the posts right now so apologies if repeating here. But I think grammar is so, so important. besides, learning a foreign language based around grammar structure gives you the confidence that you are right when using that particular other language.. very useful. I would never say pointless excercises. I didn't realise it is not taucght in schools or there isn't much emphasys on it. a great shame. never mind, I'm sure texting will change the shape of things to come !

Ks, have you read Why Children Can't Read? It was recommended on another mumsnet thread, I really liked it and thought of you.

From a teacher's perspective, it is sooo much easier to teach good writing if a child has a grasp of grammar...then you can teach varied sentence structure without having to say 'See that bit there that has a 'thing' in it, well you need to describe it more and then if you really want to sound grown up, take the chunk of the sentence which has a word which joins the two parts of the sentence and put it at the start then put a comma after the chunk of the sentence that you put at the start'.

Og course, ladies, we are talking about beginning sentences with subordinate clauses....standard Year Six fare!
:)

ks, my answer was aimed at the original post, really.

My DH teaches English at secondary level and is amazed at the lack of undersanding children have regarding grammar. He frequently gets them to learn a poem called "The Parts of Speech" (google "parts of speech" and it comes up under www.macleans.school.nz/etc). My DD will be 9 in March and is given very little work to learn grammar. I remember doing comprehension exercises where we had to recognise quite difficult grammatical constructions at her age. I do think that a child's grammar is influenced by the amount (and substance) of what he/she reads.

I was taught grammar at school and think it is incredibly important. Personally I actually think you can apply the skills of grammar to constructing an argument. In my job I approve a lot of work written by other people and some of it is appalling - I'm afraid that to my mind if you can't construct a proper sentence you're not thinking the issues through properly. (I was once given a document that had a "sentence" with over a hundred words in it) I learnt a foreign language as as adult with an American girl who didn't know what subject and object meant and she found it really tough. My dh wasn't taught grammar though.

I don't remember being taught English grammar at school (in the 70s and 80s). I learned it from reading a lot and learning French.

KS, yes that's the book. Interesting, isn't it? Re the Harry Bartons thing, do you think he sometimes changes his mind about the sentence part way through, so he thinks he will say 'at Harry Barton's" says, 'with' instead and does't correct the next bit? It sounds like the sort of thing you might say if your mind wasn't on what you were saying - ie if you were a kid trying to get your mum off your back I know my ds finds answering my questions about his day pretty tedious sometimes and he just says he can't remember. Little tyke. I am probably quite wrong about your ds though.

Or does he think his name actually is Harry Bartons and you are just wrong??

Popsycal - you've nailed it. Frogs' explanation was wonderful. But it's not enough just to acquire grammar. I teach very very talented law students, many of whom know little more grammar more 'verb is a doing word' etc. Now, when I want to show them that it is better to draft a contract in the active voice because then you can't make the mistake of omitting the agent and thus leaving open just WHO is obliged to perform the act... I simply can't. Because they don't have the grammatical tools to analyse their own writing. I can show them examples, but they have great difficulty recognising it in more complex 'real-life' examples because they don't have the analytical tools. Similarly, I can show them how a sentence has become dangerously ambiguous because the subordinate clause is too far away from the noun to which it refers... And once again they just don't get it. Even basic stuff - like making sure subject and verb are BOTH in plural - can get hard when the syntax is very complex and the two words are separated by phrases or subordinate clauses. They do have great difficulty with this. Given their lack of grammatical instruction, they are in the same position as someone without a musical ear - if they can't 'hear' that it is wrong, then they have NO other way to ensure that what they have written is correct.

My DD is in Year One and has been learning about nouns (subject and object of sentence as well), verbs, adjectives and adverbs. She is also being taught to punctuate correctly - to use full stops and commas and to use speech marks when writing stories. I don't remember learning this till I was about 9 and have been a bit shocked by it. She also brings home spellings every week.

I learned grammar in school in the 70s/80s, but DD didn't. My school was hot on languages (I did French, german, Spanish and Latin) and I think their reasoning was that if you didn't know how English grammar worked, you'd never be able to work out eg German grammar.