English grammar in primary schools

[jenster1976]

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone had any views or experiences of the teaching of English grammar in primary schools.

I remember very clearly starting secondary and starting French and German and the whole concept of language from a grammar point of view was lost on me. I didn't understand verb conjugation or the concept of regular or irregular verbs, the definite /indefinite article etc. Modal verbs and tenses meant nothing to me , I had never considered how the verb to be works for example...

When I did a TEFL course in my 20s so many things I'd struggled with in foreign languages clicked as I realised how many own language worked.

Therefore my question is, has English teaching moved on? As if not I'm really interested in proposing a fairly basic crash course in English grammar to Yr 6 s within our Academy with the aim of preparing to start properly learning foreign languages at secondary. Eg. Starting to think in terms of I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they and conjugating English verbs etc. etc.

However I really don't want to offend staff by implying they haven't taught something, but I really believe that to effectively learn a foreign language you need to understand how language works. Does anyone agree, is it a daft idea, or am I wrong and this sort of thing is now covered by the curriculum?

Grammar is taught in primary schools and from 2016 Y2 pupils will be tested in grammar and punctuation.

Thanks Mrz, but what sort of grammar? I mean will it effectively help our children to understand what a regular verb does in English or how irregular verbs behave so they can compare when they're asked to learn a list of French verbs? Or how tenses behave, because in my experience, most Englsh speakers can speak perfect English but don't know how/ why things are done.

Or example I just asked my DH how we form the future in English and he had no idea what I was talking about (honestly he is quite bright really!)

The new curriculum starts Sept.
Read the grammar section.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study

Appendix 2 from page 54 gives the year by year statutory teaching requirement.

Year 5's I know have the correct terminology and can, for example, write a sentence containing a modal verb on demand as well as identify them in text.

My Y1s can tell you what a verb, noun, promoun and proper noun, preposition, determiners, adjective and adverb are and they can identify them and use in text

Whilst I'm not against English grammar teaching in primary, it does sound like your chief problem OP is that you (and your DH) had shockingly bad MFL teachers. Given that they were starting from a baseline of no grammatical knowledge, surely they should have made more of an effort to do a decent job in installing the concepts? I know my MFL teachers certainly did.

Thanks everyone, that's really interesting, would seem things have moved on then from the olden days!

and yes they are taught the past, present and futire tenses of regular and irregular verbs.