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?

http://grammarpuss13.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/resource-for-teaching-fronted.html

G1rafe I would add that they are jumping hoops for a test that may not even have been written by people with a linguistic training.

That's shocking.

I think there should be at least a basic knowledge of grammar, such as: nouns, verbs, pronouns, active & passive voices, subordinate clauses... You should learn an understanding of the structure of your language (and any other language you learn.) It's a good thing to have some understanding of how things work.

You should learn what adverbs are. I'm not sure you need to know about fronted adverbials in detail, though, especially not at primary level.

As many of the posters on here have said, there is nothing wrong with teaching age-appropriate relevant grammar to help understand and structure writing. There is however (in my opinion) something very wrong in teaching particular grammatical structures in a right-or-wrong, simplistic way when in most cases it is not so simple. Learning to label nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, main and subordinate clauses and so on is useful. Having to check back over your writing and retrofit semi-colons, colons, parenthetical commas, fronted adverbials and so on is the opposite of useful.

“fronted adverbials” is a term dreamt up to describe an adverb or adverbial phrase used at the beginning of a sentence it’s a bit of a red herring

“There is however (in my opinion) something very wrong in teaching particular grammatical structures in a right-or-wrong, simplistic way when in most cases it is not so simple. “ I would edit this to There is however (in my opinion) something very wrong in testing__ particular grammatical structures in a right-or-wrong, simplistic way when in most cases it is not so simple.

I went to a talk on the new GCSEs and it was interesting that E Lang now includes a creative writing (story) element with which students, apparently, struggle. I think it is very difficult to write purposefully if you are trained to include not only a list of grammatical features, but to include them in the list order - as happens too often in Y6. I have a deep respect for grammar, but fronted adverbials are a blooming joke.

“but fronted adverbials are a blooming joke.” Yet used by many successful authors to great effect.

I'm with Michael Rosen on this. Adverbial is enough.

I am not going to defend the fronted adverbial (which, incidentally, seems to be pretty much the only example trotted out in arguments about this topic) or the specifics of the current SATS. But using either of those complaints to justify a return to not teaching grammar systematically is ridiculous. It's early days, considering that generations of people haven't learnt it. The syllabus will change, as they always do.

Same. Educated to masters level, always a straight A student, a total swot at Latin and Greek in school, read modern languages at uni, but have never heard of half of these KS1 and 2 grammar concepts. 'Noun phrase' or something similar came up the other day and when I googled it it only existed in the context of primary education. They are providing an education in jargon and double speak.

Noun phrase is in both the Cambridge and Oxford English dictionaries and UCL, QMUL and University of Glasgow provide information for students about nouns phrases (quick google I’m sure there are more examples) so perhaps something else?
http://aeo.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/Files/NounPhrases/Noun%20Phrases.html

The university of Illinois http://www.cws.illinois.edu/workshop/writers/verbphrases/ provides a handy grammar guide for students

I learned grammar at primary in the 70s but many others didn't, which really hindered the French and German lessons we had at high school. The teacher spent half the class explaining what an adjective or verb was in English. Shouldn't have been necessary.

Grammatically speaking, there's something about the phrase "fronted adverbial" that just feels wrong. It feels like it should be an adjective not a noun phrase.

That aside, I think the "I couldn't do it and I have XYZ degrees" thing is a complete red herring. I didn't know what a fronted adverbial meant, so I looked it up and then I did know. It's not that it's hard, it's that I was never taught it, let alone using that particular terminology.

I think teaching children to analyse and think about sentence structure is a good thing for their reading and their writing and also for things like coding where the "grammar" of the language is key. Even if the terminology used is slightly over-rigid or not what's used at a later level, if they've learned the skills they can easily pick up a more subtle level of descriptions later.

Encouraging them to think about varied sentence structure strikes me as a good thing. They never talked to us about that at school. You were supposed to pick up good writing by osmosis somehow. "I went to the park. I played on the slide. I met my friend Percy..."

PS I was reading a very interesting book about language the other day that talked about "noun phrases" and the like. So I don't think it's just primary schools.

Hmm. I am not a fan of Michael Gove at all, but I have to say I am pleased to see an increasing focus on core skills in maths and English. My son emerged from junior school without a clue on parsing a sentence, with a consequent deterioration in the structure of his writing. It's good to see my daughter experiencing more focus on grammar and spelling.

They seem to have gone from NO GRAMMAR AT ALL (well... very little) to RIDICULOUSLY HARD AND OTT GRAMMAR. Within the space of about three years.

A more middle-of-the-road common sense policy and a bit more time to embed everything might have been better.

My nephews can name lots of wacky grammar points but have weak spelling. I know which of these two areas I'd prefer them to be spending more time on.

I don't understand what the problem is here. Why are any of you doing your children's homework? It's their homework to do. They will have been explained all these phrases when the homework was handed out to them and in the lesson before.

As I said earlier Grammar was included in the original National Curriculum and the National Literacy Strategy so Gove can’t take credit.

“My nephews can name lots of wacky grammar points but have weak spelling. I know which of these two areas I'd prefer them to be spending more time on.” The S in SPAG stands for spelling

I think there is a benefit but it should be taught alongside other stuff, not as a main focus. Understanding the power of where a verb is in a sentence or how the adverb is being used really helps understand powerful writing and how it has caused emotion to rise, and to write more powerfully yourself. And yes, it is useful in other languages. As others have said I only really began to understand it when I did Latin, and doing Latin was somewhat unexpectedly (to me!) a major bonus to my English lit understanding.... and I could throw it in in history coursework too. So yes, some advantages but not to the point of 4 year olds memorising it all!!

Four year olds don’t have to memorise it.

I'm also educated to masters standard, As in all GCSE levels and 5 A levels and I'd also never heard of any of these terms before doing my eldest's 11+ prep with him last year.

I honestly don't remember doing any of it for English GCSE.

I think most of it is completely OTT

Ds had that too. I got 80% on his Spag. I was very proud of myself. Dh who is a self-confessed grammar geek hadn't heard half the terms.

Is that Spag.com?