Have a first from Oxford. Can't do ks2 sats

[TheNext]

In particular the spag. I have never heard of a subordinating conjunction before. It has literally not been a thing that has touched my life. When I googled it, I recognised the thing in the description but I have never had to know the name. I have straight As all the way through secondary education and a good career and this is something I have never needed.

And they are making 10yos memorise this? And adverbials (also had to google). Ye Gods! Why?

Gosh a pet hate of mine. Primary education is all geared towards sats so children in school spend most mornings on maths and english. English being learning technical words for Grammar. And "make a sentence with 1 noun, 2 verbs, 3 adverbs" type tasks.

Really what is the point...

7 year olds homework was "fronted adverbials". I think some of these phrase were invented for sats...

And I don't think they ever use it again!?

I think it was Michael Gove's idea.

Totally agree. My 4 yr old knows a diagraph, split diagraph, triagraph and alliteration. 4, 4! They should be painting, building and playing.

I completely agree... I've got a good job and qualified with a PhD, and have managed just fine without knowing what a "fronted adverbial" is. Although I imagine I manage to use them in reports, emails just fine. (Waits for someone to tell me how I've just used terrible grammar throughout this post)....

Me too. I read English at Oxford, and did an MA in English at another top ten Uni. But I'm completely bamboozled by the SPAG my 10 year old has to learn. What's most frustrating is that she's a really great writer - her teachers tell me how funny and imaginative and clever her stories are - but all the written comments on her work are about her correct use of adverbial clauses and subordinate conjunctions. It's so annoying. It's like teaching kids scales but not music. Makes me sad.

Surely it shouldn't come as a surprise that you don't know this stuff if you were never taught it? U.K. adults often seem to have an irrational gear of grammatical terminology because most of us (unfortunately) weren't really taught any of it. That's one of the reasons we find it pretty hard to learn foreign languages.

Obviously the level and amount of grammar teaching which should be done at various ages is debatable, but I think teaching parts of speech with their proper names is perfectly sensible and no more threatening or difficult than teaching geographical, mathematical or scientific terminology.

A few lessons on proper names yes.
A whole system geared to memorization, multiple choice, underlining bits of sentences. Hour+ a day for 7 years far too young. Er no.

Somewhere between the two would be good imo.

I was at Primary school in the 70's, when I arrived at a Russell Group uni later to do English Lit one of the first things the lecturer did was give us all a Grammar lesson as we were all clueless!!
DS (8) is now doing Grammar at school and despite both having what I suppose you wouid call senior level jobs me and DH have to get dd(12) to help him

xyzandabc The digraphs etc are kind of useful.
The rest are pure Gove.
I'm just hoping they will have gone by the time my Y1 DS gets to Y6.

I don't really have a problem with teaching proper names. But as far as I can tell, "fronted adverbials" is a term specially invented for sats.

And hopping you presumably learnt it in a few lessons - yet at junior school it's being drilled day in day out. Not sure they're learning creative writing/love of stories in the same way when they're underlining extended noun phrases and spotting fronted adverbials.

It sounds difficult it you weren't taught it as a child but to today's children it's just normal stuff they have to learn. They won't think of it in the same way that their parents do.

I don't think it's that bad.
Now children have more time to get used to it than children who had to take test right after curriculum change.
From what I hear from my ds, it seems like those are incorporated well in the lessons, and he seems to use those terms naturally.

As a secondary MFL teacher I love the fact that the kids now come in with some grammar knowledge! It really makes learning other languages much easier if you know how your own language works.

Having said that, fronted adverbials and some other things they get taught in primary are news to me. And, dare I say it, some of the stuff they get taught is just wrong because their teachers' grammar knowledge is shaky at best. I had to teach my son's teacher what a relative clause is.

I think there's probably an idea balance between my complete ignorance of spag (1980s primary education, respectable degree) and the amount that is taught now. I learned what a noun, verb, adjective and adverb are. We had an emergency lesson just before GCSEs with the advice 'if you don't know how to use a semicolon then don't use one'.

I know that DH knows a lot more grammar than me from learning Latin and Greek. And I might have been better at learning German if I'd known some English grammar.

Ds's headteacher cheerfully told me that ds would be okay with the English sats as it's so formulaic he teaches it like maths or reasoning. I agree with other posters that there's room for improvement on 1980s teaching, but I'm not convinced we can pin any problems with economic development, wellbeing or life expectancy down to a lack of grammar teaching. Who knows, perhaps drills on "preposition or subordinating conjunction" will pay dividends in the post-Brexit workforce of the future

I was at Primary school in the 70's, when I arrived at a Russell Group uni later to do English Lit one of the first things the lecturer did was give us all a Grammar lesson as we were all clueless!!

Snap! Also did English at a Russell Group uni and remember a tutor checking we all knew what prepositions etc were!

I love grammar and I'm very pleased it's now taught. I think it's good to raise linguistic awareness.

Yes, English graduate and secondary-trained English teacher here and it's all Greek to me too.

Dc are now in y8 and 9 respectively and haven't had to apply any of this knowledge since leaving primary school.

WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS????

I just don't really understand why schools ever stopped teaching grammar in the first place. Children in other countries learn the grammar of their own languages without suffering terrible trauma - why didn't we? Like a lot of people, most of the grammar I learned was through doing Latin and MFL. How ludicrous that we seemed to need to learn a dead language to help us with our own living one.

Gove was made to parse sentences in Latin and English as a boy at a very traditional private school in Aberdeen. Never did him any harm

Lord Trash, how do you teach ignoring grammar? I find it very useful in teaching punctuation, improving sentence variety in essay writing etc. It's particularly important if you work with any bilingual children.