Test your grammar - Guardian test

[Feenie]

www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/quiz/2013/feb/04/grammar-punctuation-quiz-test

Am relieved I scored 14 out of 14, since I am a Literacy cordinator!

I only knew what a gerund was because I remembered it from the English Language unit I had to study for my Lit degree - not sure it is of much use to your average 11 year old, really.

dp (with his FIRST in English Lit from a proper MN endorsed university) got five

He did keep muttering 'this isn't fucking English, it's Latin' all the way through.

absolutus

14. Have English as part of my degree though.

13, got gerund wrong. Scottish and a scientist who learnt all my grammar in french lessons at school.

13/14, but only because I'm a foreigner and it took me ages of googling to understand why pride is a collective noun!

13 - just using common sense. I don't see the point of learning English grammar.

My DD who has been taught loads of English grammar only got 6.

12/14. I'm a foreigner.

14/14. I'm a child of the 90s but I can't really remember being taught grammar, besides a couple of lessons on passive and active voice when I was too young to really understand it. A lot of it is common sense, like others have said.

I got 13, but realised at the end I had forgotten the second meaning of pride. Silly of me, because it was obvious that one of the answers was going to be "abstract and collective", from the way the other questions were written.

12. Oh dear! I went to school in the 1960s when the formal teaching of grammar had evidently gone out of fashion, so I was never taught it. I didn't even know what a pronoun was until I started going to French classes in my early 30s and learned French grammar!

14, but only because I work as an editor and studied language as well as literature for my English degree.

I didn't learn much about grammar until university - and then much of it was taught through other languages (eg 'you see how this works in french'). So I'm glad that grammar lessons are back.

I didn't know what a gerund was either. Glad I'm not the only one!

14/14 and another with Latin as a compulsory subject from Lower Fifth to 'O' Level. I am a huge pedant though, so would have been horribly disappointed to get anything below top marks.

10 here and I have an English degree with a creative writing element I also have A* English Language GCSE, my mother was a teacher and I've had quite a lot of my writing published at work!! I'd never even heard of some of the terms mentioned although I puzzled most of them out.

In my defence I was never taught grammar at school past the very basics. I learnt more doing Latin and German. I'm a product of 1980s and 90s school education.

I'll add learning more about grammar to my Things-I-Would-Like-To-Do-Better list, along with brushing up my French, German and crafty stuff. Luckily my understanding of punctuation was good.

11, but partly because I didn't read the first question properly & partly because I assumed some of them were trick questions when I actually knew the right answer! No idea what a gerund is though - but I still got that one right!

14 - but am a journo, editor and huge fusspot!

Agree the collective noun was a bit of a trick question and not strictly a test of grammar.

Have sent the link to Fil, who will thoroughly enjoy both the quiz and the opportunity to bond over lack of proper grammatical instruction in schools today.

I got 13 but in my defence I didn't read the question properly....

I'm studying English language at degree level, and half of these questions would not be out of place in one of my assignments. I didn't know what a gerund is until I started my course - I don't remember going into so much grammatical detail when I was at school (nineties).

I don't know what the current Y6 English curriculum is like, but either my degree is too easy or this is way beyond Y6. I would not have been able to pass this test when I was 15/16.

Having just read back through the thread..... What age is Year 6? When I was at school, Year 6 was the final year of school, i.e. GCSE year. Are they aiming this at 10/11 year olds then? In which case I am

Y6 is fourth/top year juniors SayCool, in old money.

Ah... Thanks Jenai. Now I'm just

So I'm learning the same things at university that 10 year olds are learning??

14/14! I am a primary teacher but maths was always stronger than language for me.

14/14 but only because I teach deaf kids and probably know more about grammar than the average bod.

I scored 14...
but I don't think it's a good test.
While I'm sure it's useful for children to learn the names of parts of speech (gerund, active voice, etc), it's far more important to know how to write correctly. A better test would be to describe a situation ie Last year, we visited my grandmother during the summer holiday then ask which sentence would be a grammatically correct follow-on: a) I am happy to see her; b) I was happy to see her; c) I will be happy to see her. That example is too simple for Y6 but the general idea ie getting students to identify correct grammar would, I think, be a better test than simply knowing that one sentence is present tense and one is past tense, etc...