But I want to just give you a quick overview of where I'm hoping to go with this session. I want to start by looking a little at this idea of you know what?
Why is grammar seen as such a problematic issue in language teaching? And actually, that's true in both first and second language teaching, I think, and then to look a little bit at theoretical perspectives from research around the idea of grammar.
Then I want to present you the way that we as a research team at Exeter, have been approaching the teaching of grammar in a way where we got a quite a lot of research evidence now, but how?
It can work successfully.
Then look at some practical examples so you can see you know in real terms what might this look like in a classroom. And then I hope to pull it all together in a plenary and allow and hopefully about 10 minutes for questions at the end. So I wanted to stress that in the presentation my real focus is on first language teaching and the teaching of writing my own background. This is a secondary English teacher TL1 teaching here.
But the whole idea of reimagining grammar is actually relevant more broadly than that, not just to writing, but to reading in particular.
One of the things we found is the incredible interplay between what we've been doing in improving writing and how it also improves responses to texts and reading comprehension.
Also, in terms of spoken language and in terms of multilingual learners, one of things with all these presentations is it's not just what I'm bringing to you, it's what you bring in your own professional and research context to the presentation.
So all the way through, I hope you draw on your own national experiences, your own research experience. It's in your own expertise to join with what I'm talking about and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. So I want to start by exploring this idea. If you know what is the problem with grammar.
And again, for I think in some ways this has been particularly a problem in Anglophone countries. Although the more I've talked to people who don't where English is not their first language, the more I realise in a lot of the things that are seemed as a problem with grammar recur in those countries too. So I think one of the things is there for a long, long time.
Time grammar is just being regarded as something that we don't do in language teaching and in America, how someone called grammar the skunk at the Garden Party of the Language Arts, which I just think so wonderful metaphor is the bit that you know, it's the bad smell is the bit that no one's really interested in.
And its position very much as a problem becausr it seemed to be no use to have no purpose.
These are for quotes which are often used to argue for why we shouldn't teach children grammar with the idea that it might have a harmful effect on them as writers and negative effect nothing helps you as much as ignoring grammar, and that it's a waste of time and all of this really started in the Anglo phone world in a famous conference in Dartmouth, in America in 1966. This is not a new issue, it's been rumbling on for.
Well over 50 years now, but at that Dartmouth conference which brought together people from Anglo phone countries across the world.
Effectively, grammar was rejected in terms of having a place in the English curriculum, and certainly in England. The teaching of grammar.
Really declined at that point onwards, except in certain schools, independent schools, which is where our most privileged children grow. We had a system, a single grammar school.
I'm.
Two bills in general grammar was abandoned, but for us there's been a real re emphasis on grammar in a curriculum that we've had introduced in 2013, and actually that parallels some similar things that have been happening in Australia with their curriculum, and in some of the States of America. So it's kind of grammar coming full cycle again, but it's certainly been seen as a problem.
And as I say, it isn't just an angler phone problem or an L1 problem, so a second language teaching you can trace the kind of similar story through second language teaching where that value of explicit grammar teaching in a second language context hasbeen very variously considered, and in particular with the advent of communicative language teaching. There was very much of you that you don't really need grammar teaching, because if you're doing a lot of teaching in the target language.
And a lot of communication. Then you acquire the grammar naturally, just as you do in a first language.
And then the other thing is that unlike England, I'm very aware that grammar is routinely taught in many European countries. L1 curriculum. But what I've been discovering by talking to lots and lots of them. Teacher educators in particular, is that although it's talked, it's not always valued that the teachers and the children don't always like the grammar and don't all this always see you know the point in the grammar? So why on Earth do we have such a problem with grammar?
Well, I think a lot of it is due to what I've really thought of as a misalignment that people are not always talking about the same thing when they used the same words.
So you know when you talk about grammar teaching. If you said to me grammar teaching because of the research we've been doing, my idea of what grammar teaching is very different from our education ministers, idea of grammar teaching.
So you have the same phrase, but lots of different meanings in terms of what it is, and different attitudes to it.
Certainly here in the UK many teachers have very negative attitudes towards grammar teaching. In some countries teachers are very positive attitudes towards grammar teaching.
So one phrase, but lots of different meanings and attitudes. Then the other misalignment is you know what's grammar for from a linguistic perspective. And at university level linguistics, which you might say, his grammar is a subject of discipline in its own right, and that linguistic knowledge.
Is it a body of knowledge that in his parallel to say literary knowledge about classical texts, that we might be reading?
So some teachers are talking about grammar. In that sense, a body of knowledge, whereas others are teaching about it as something that's integrated somewhere in an English language curriculum.
And then this up this other misalignment between what do we think grammar does? So there's some people who see grammar as a set of rule.
Rules that by teaching grammar, we're learning the proper way to speak and write, and learning about the rules of the language that we have to conform to, whereas others will be arguing that grammar is not a set of rules.
So we've got real differences in how people think about that word grammar, and we've tried to talk quite a lot about linguistic knowledge, because in some ways we feel it bypasses the grammar.
Problem the other problem with all of this is that the frequently cited studies and it's always the same studies that are cited over the past 50 years, which all show very clearly no impact of teaching grammar on writing quality. All approach, the teaching of grammar separately from the teaching of writing and reading so typically.
A group would be getting grammar lessons on a Thursday and the rest of their language lessons later in the week and in a lot of these studies, not only were the group getting the grammar getting it separately, but the other groups were getting extra writing lessons in those lessons, so there were real bias is inbuilt into those, but you have to ask yourself that fundamental question. Why would knowing what a verb is through being talked it on Thursday make you any better?
How you write next Monday in your language?
In my own experience of being taught grammar in a grammar school in the 60s and 70s was very much like that that we had grammar lessons occasionally where we might look at clauses, or we might look at verbs, or we do some tests on some for various parts of the language, but we never drew on that in any of our other language lessons. It just you know something is just what you did on a Friday or on Thursday.
The other problem with the research is that none of them offer a theoretical rationale for why teaching grammar might benefit writing.
They were much more ideologically driven, almost in the sense of trying to evidence the fact that grammar is a pointless activity, and actually, as with all research and education, that if we're looking at some form of intervention in a classroom in any area, we ought to have some theoretical reason, some theoretical way of explaining a causal relationship between why?
Teaching grammar might benefit children as writers.
So let's just pause at this point to look at the different theoretical perspectives, and these are some of the ones which draw out in a way why there's this sense of misalignment.
When people talk about grammar and that people are often talking about different things or approaching it from a different perspective, and the first one is this idea of prescriptive and descriptive grammar.
Descriptive models of grammar so a prescriptivist theory is really saying that grammar is about telling you how language should be used.
Its about correctness in written expression, and if you think about grammar like that then the view you adopt of grammar is that it's fixed the the way grammar works is fixed, identifiable, repeatable and it's linked to rules compliance and standards language.
And it's learned in in England very quickly slips from educational standards to moral standards, which is a weird way of thinking about grammar.
So in this sense, if that's the view that you adopt teaching grammar, then is principally about teaching rules that need to be obeyed and correcting errors in children's writing, and that is probably being the dominant pedagogical view of grammar in England over the past 50 years or so.
But a descriptivist theory of grammar, which is actually the view that's adopted by many, many linguists. So there's a back to that disciplinary difference between University, Department of Linguistics and what's happening in school.
A descriptive theory of grammar is much more interested in looking at how language is used, and in particular looks at how language is used in different contexts.
So you know if you look at the research on on linguistics and grammar, you'll find huge amounts of exploration of things like.
How does the grammar of spoken English different from the grammar of written English?
So what's the grammar of media communication and multi modal texts? Or what's the grammar of argument text so much more about looking at how it is used?
And of course, that takes into account the idea that grammar changes that the way we use grammar changes, and even what we view as acceptable changes with time.
So it's fundamentally linked not to rules, but to usage and the context and meaning making, and if this is the view of grammar you adopt, then.
Teaching grammar is fundamentally about exploring how language works and finding out how how it works in different contexts.
And obviously, like so many things, these are binary views. Diametrically opposed views. You've got prescriptivist at one end, and descriptivist at the other.
What I did want to say, though, is that pragmatically in a classroom, even if the dominant view of grammar that you hold as a teacher, is descriptivist, there may well always be times when you do a doctor, doctor, prescriptive, miss you because you are looking at particular error or mistake that children have made.
But this also often has quite a strong link to the nature of of the first language.
So in English, in terms of grammar errors, native speakers in English make relatively few grammatical errors. The biggest problem that we have is around that the switching between non standard English and standard English and obviously got lots of regional dialects and so children will often reflect their regional dialects in their writing and from a linguistic point of view that's not about error, it's about how do you learn to use the most appropriate form.
So you didn't want to suggest that error never matters. It's just that in some languages it matters more than in others.
So for example, in French, I know that that the issues of agreement really make the grammatical agreement make a big difference to her students spell in French in a way that just doesn't occur in English, and so in French there may be more emphasis on some rules in order to help children avoid errors, but it's still an important distinction to look at.
In particular, in terms of how you're thinking about the role of grammar.
And then this building on that idea of rules and compliance in England, English was not a subject at university until the end of the 18th cent. 19th century and a new bolt report in 1921, which is conveniently 100 years ago, was the very first educational report that looked at the idea of there being a subject in school called English. There wasn't one up until this point.
And it does a big review of the whole of English, but what's really interesting is how he, in 1921. Some of these issues that were still discussing.
Now we're still really big then so new belt criticises so he's kind of ahead of his time, criticises grammar in school because he says it was regarded as a body of rules governing governing correct speech.
And in many ways, in line with a lot of modern linguistics, he highlights this idea that grammar doesn't teach people how they ought to speak, but how certain people do speak.
Picking up on the idea actually of privilege, and that you know there are powerful ways, powerful discourses in language, and that certain people exercise that power through the nature of their speech.
And he talks about grammar as a science, which is really he's talking about it being a subject rather than grammar.
This legislation grammar is legislating how you should write.
And then you nearly hundred years later, we had a revision of our national curriculum in England in 2013, which has really emphasised reemphasised grammar very heavily in our curriculum. For the first time, really, grandmas been sort of there in every version of the national curriculum, but very light touch. This one has literally pages and pages outlining what grammar terms children must learn, and when it focuses.
In primary school very heavily on this idea of accuracy and understanding.
English in secondary school, there's a slight shift. It echoes that, but there is slightly more emphasis on effectiveness, appropriacy, and choice. And in England we have this strange split in the subject. English L1 English, where in primary school it's really English language, and in secondary school, although it's supposed to be English language and English literature, in practise it's principally about teaching English literature. The dominant thing that's looked at his English literature.
So there's a kind of switch in secondary schools.
And then the other binary says lots of opposites here, around explicit and tacit grammatical knowledge, and this often creates.
We often hear politicians speaking and think actually they haven't fully understood this and you know it's just making this point really that every language user already has substantive, substantive, tacit knowledge of the grammar of their own language.
That they can do things in speech and writing that they can't explain in terms of grammatical rules or grammatical terminology, but they're very competent at doing it, and that's just learnt through social interactions and through reading. And of course, that links across to why communicative language teaching in L2 became popular because the idea was actually L2 learners would develop this tacit knowledge through social interactions and through engagement with the language. And actually most grammar rules real rules.
Our tacit knowledge for L1 learners, so things like in English, formation of tents, or word order L1 speakers very rarely make major errors in those things. But if you're an L2 learner of English, you'll know that word order is a bit of a killer in English, and so I as a L1 speaker, will hear word order, particularly noun phrase, with the order of adjectives before the now.
And I can tell you that it's not correct, but I cannot explain why it's not correct, so it's my tacit knowledge of word order that helps me.
Is it? And of course, if we're teaching grammar were not looking at tacit knowledge, were looking at explicit knowledge with teaching it, so they can name it and use it.
And I think in the classroom and a really important point to make here is that tacit knowledge can only be implemented. So you only you.
Is it an indirect? You don't know you're using it, so you can't correct or explain, but explicit knowledge is accessible.
You can verbalise it and you can use it so from a teaching point of view the explicitness is useful.
Of course, that also raises questions about what then is valuable for children to be explicit about. So again, in English there wouldn't be much point necessarily being explicit about the word order of adjectives if children are already doing that without any prob.
Them so explicit knowledge could be very form focused. For example, things like an adjective provides more information about a noun or very much along the lines of the code of work that we've been trying to do.
It was it we've been looking at. How can we make that explicit knowledge linked to what it's doing? So for example, I used a passive there to foreground that idea.
So we see in our research team that explicit grammatical knowledge is learning knowledge in the classroom. It can be used by teachers to develop a stronger understanding of how we write, not just what to write.
Perhaps the solve writing problems that children have to share are thinking about writing so it's pedagogically important.
And then the other binary that I wanted to drop in and look at this idea is grammar as form or function which has some Connexions with the things I've already been talking about.
So traditional school grammar or prescriptive grammar is very much focused on the form. You know, the identification of different structures and the application of rules and at the moment all 11 year olds in England undergo a national test of grammar, which is due any month anytime now.
Wear, this is exactly what they do. There's a a test where they have to go through and do things like underlying the adverb in this sentence, or rewrite this sentence correctly.
Where is the subject in this sentence? It's very form focused.
Modern linguistics, though, tends to focus both on form and function. What is it and what's it doing? And probably the biggest contributor. The tribute contributor to this idea of the function of grammar is from holiday and systemic functional linguistics, and you know that body of work that holiday has done is done over probably what that 25 know bout 45 years now. It's 1970 Five's first started on this.
I think it's really significant work in looking at grammar and how it functions in different contexts.
There's a table here, but I've put in. It's it's adapted from a colleague in Australia. Beverly Dara Bianca, who worked a lot with holiday where she drew out some of the key differences that you'd see in terms of the pedagogy in terms of the classroom between a form focused approach and a functional approach and what you can see really clearly is that if you take a form focused approach, what you do in the classroom differs quite distinctively.
From what would happen if you do, if you adopt A functional approach, so childrens experience.
Phase of learning about grammar are very different in the form focused approach and the functional approach.
So having thought through those theoretical perspectives, what is this re imagining that we've had about grammar for me? Even the word imagining I like using because we've constantly tried in our research to position words like imagining, imagination and creativity and creative, very close to the word gramme.
Because another binary that we have in England is that grammar is dull and boring and restrictive and narrow, and creativity is liberating.
Expressive, free and wonderful and what we're trying to say is actually they're not as different as you think that the two go together.
So we take a great pleasure in that anything that brings that notion of creativity to the idea of grammar.
So for us, our starting point in terms of grammar has not been necessarily theoretical, theoretical, but pedagogical. The in thinking about grammar and how grammar might work in the classroom. We wanted it to have a purpose because it the purpose for grammar seems to have been very unclear for well at least 100 years from what we saw from the new boat report. So we had these three things and informing how we were thinking about what we were doing.
The idea that we actually have to think more about what learning do we hope to generate through teaching grammar? What is the out?
Of teaching children about grammar, we need to have a rationale for teaching grammar, and we argue that should be theoretically informed.
It should come from theoretical thinking, and if we've got those two things clear then we need to have pedagogical practises for teaching grammar which align with those purposes so that you've got something that has coherence, significance and meaning within a language classroom.
And we have drawn very heavily on holidays functional grammar. Although we haven't drawn on the terminology of systemic functional linguistics because the curriculum we've got doesn't use it.
So that's just a step too far for schools and teachers, but all of the principles of holiday and all of his theoretical ideas we've really drawn on.
And here you can see some of those key things that he said that we've drawn on and notice the number of fact the word meaning comes out in every single bullet point.
But the idea that grammar is not about just about the application of rules that it's about making meaning it's about communication, expression and choice.
So he talks about that grammar is a network of interrelated, meaningful choices. So for us the fundamental emphasis in our pedagogy and in our research has been on this idea of functionally oriented grammar, emphasising meaning and meaning making.
Then the other thing that we've picked up on which is there in holiday, but actually is also being there in other researchers, is this idea that grammar is about choice, that when we write, we have to make decisions about what we write in our texts, and that comes from Kellogg and cognitive psychology.
Now, a lot of those decisions are nothing to do with language. They might be about the ideas or the choice of form you're going to use, but some of those decisions are language choice.
Says uncultured McCarthy, who are British linguists, talk about grammar. Have it as having two strands. Grammar is choice and grammar of structure and the grammar of structure really is the form focused element of it.
How do you label things and how do they work? Whereas the grammar is choices much more, this sense of the choices we make shape how we communicate and express what it is we're trying to write.
Right and left Stein builds on that by talking about the teaching of writing. So Carter, McCarthy, linguists, and Kellogg is a cognitive psychologist, but we bring these together through left Stines pedagogical interest in this idea of enabling again, that word enabling is a power of empowering word to make choices from amongst a range of linguistic resource is and to be aware of the effects of different choices on the rhetorical power of their writing, and so.
Again, in our reimagining what we're saying is what we need to.
AIM is to help writers understand how the choices they make an arbitrary or random, but absolutely central to how they communicate their ideas.
And what all of this is about is metalinguistic understanding. How do we develop students metalinguistic understanding that metre, and we know from research, mostly in cognitive psychology, that metacognition that broad concept is a predictor of success in writing. So if children are able to reflect on themselves as writers and what they're doing in their texts.
They tend to be higher, attaining writers and metalinguistic understanding is generally thought of as a subset of metacognition. 1 strand of it. The bit that focuses very much on the language use, and with metalinguistic understanding.
We're looking at language that explicitness not just using language, so metalinguistic understanding can be can be developed if we think about the classrooms that we're developing and how.
How do we create opportunities for learners to explore language and reflect on language?
Both in the texts they read, but also importantly in their own writing, so they're connecting what they read with what they write to build that metalinguistic understanding, and one of the things that we've seen is that this helps young writers to become more independent about the decisions that they make, because they are making decisions informed by understanding of how texts work, rather than simply doing what the teacher has been saying that they might do in this particular lesson, so it's much more independent.
So again then, I'll re imagining of grammar draws on this idea of the explicit teaching of grammar as a meaning making resume.
Course that involves authorial choices and that it develops metalinguistic learning, which Miss Metalinguistic understanding, which is knowledge of their own that children students have themselves rather than shared knowledge from the teacher that they may not fully own, so our reimagining, or re framing of grammar.
Is summarised here. You know functionally oriented, not form oriented descriptive, not prescriptive. Grammar is choice, not grammar. Is compliance, explicit knowledge to complement tacit knowledge. Now that's an important point, because that there's no way you could argue that all the grammatical knowledge that L1 uses have can be made explicit. It would just take far too long, coz there's so much of that knowledge, so the explicit knowledge is specifically targeted.
At where those learners might need to learn something. In our case, CAS were looking at writing about writing.
So it's not explicit knowledge for its own sake. It's explicit knowledge that might help them do something, but they can't currently do successfully.
So in other words, it's not part of their tacit knowledge, and its integrated perfect per purposefully within the teaching of writing.
So no separate lessons on grammar you're teaching, writing, and then there's just spotlights on relevant grammar at points where it's relevant to the learning sequence. So if we develop that just a little more.
The thing about a functionally approach oriented approach to grammar is it is that focus on meaning that how we write is as important as what we write and those of you who who are close to school classrooms will know how.
Very often the emphasis is on what we write. What are the ideas? In fact, even if you think about writing academic articles, I think to start with our emphasis and what am I gonna say in this article?
But how we say it in our academic articles is as important as what we say, because it's how we persuade the reader of our authority.
In what we claim.
And then a descriptive you've grammar opens up possibilities for discussion about how meaning is made and shaped in particular contexts, and then showing learners that the grammatical choices writers make and the grammatical choices they can make themselves as writers, gives a more conscious control of how their writing communicates and that point that we said earlier about explicit knowledge being learning knowledge in a classroom, that you can use it together to develop greater understanding of writing and being a writer.
And the integration is important because it can.
It connects the grammar and learning about perhaps the what the subject is with, why it might be important to know what the subject is in a particular type of writing that you are looking at. So it connects the grammar to the making of meaning.
We often talk about this matter knowledge graphically in this way that you know it. Metacognition we know is important across all aspects of learning, not just language learning.
As I said, research suggests that metacognition in writing is particularly important and you can think about it as splitting between meta cognitive thinking, which is very much about the writing process.
The drafting the generation of ideas. What to do when you get stuck and how you manage it, which is processed, focused, and the metalinguistic which is thinking about the choices and how you shape meaning and text, which is text focused.
And most of our research has been on that metalinguistic side, but we have also looked quite a lot at the writing process at one of the things I wanted to say is that we don't think that the meta cognitive and the writing process is not important.
They all go together, it's just that our researchers is actually focused more on the other. So thinking about what this looks like in the classroom, you know, how do we move from? You know that problem of grammar. Those different theoretical perspectives and that particular binaries around grammar.
Three well re imagined way of thinking about grammar as having a real purpose for learners in the writing class. And what does it look like in the classroom? Well, what we did for teachers and actually these these lead principals have come slightly later in our research we started working on this probably roundabout 2004 and have done 16 or 17 studies.
And early on we we just thought that if we explain to teacher they need to make Connexions and work with them, that would be enough.
But we realised later on that teachers needed more scaffolding, particularly in the early stages, to be able to implement the pedagogy in a meaningful way. And this is the version that we've come up through working with teachers.
And it's not rigged. It's not intended to be a rigid framework for how you must do something. It's a way of thinking pedagogically and when teachers become more confident with it, they don't need to think about this.
It becomes an organic way of how they approach grammar. But to start with we did find teachers needed more support than we initially gave them, so the lead principals lead is an acronym for those four principals LEAD and that first one which in terms of the.
That re imagining is is fundamental cause. It's about making that connexion making a link.
Between the grammar, introducing and how it's working, the writing you're being taught so will say to teachers. Well, if you're teaching about the past tense and getting children to look at the past tense, what is it that you want them to be able to do in their writing that links to the past tense? So there's always thinking about that connexion between meaning and rhetorical affair.
And then the examples that this principle may actually be one that would be less relevant in different national context because it did, was very grounded in our own curriculum where teachers were feeling very pressured about the need to teach grammar in the new curriculum. They often felt very lacking in confidence themselves, and what we found.
Is that they took the ideas that we were giving them but then got deflected in the middle of a writing lesson into a very extended grammar lesson that got stuck in the middle of it where they were doing.
Things like okay who can find the verb in this sentence? Who knows what a verb is? All we've forgotten what verbs are just deflecting away from the focus on writing back into the grammar.
So we we say to the teachers when you're teaching it in the context of the writing, show the examples in some way and name the examples.
But don't get tangled up in lengthy explanations of the.
Grammar and one of the things that we found, and this is particularly true of our weaker writers, is that we saw that some children were transferring the learning into their writing, even when they couldn't name the grammar concept that they were transferring.
So will be looking in a little while at sentence structure and moving things round in a sentence which you can describe through grammatical terminology.
And when the teacher taught it through examples and got the children playing around with it, we saw children who were altering very effectively the structure of their sentences, but couldn't say what it was they done grammatically.
And you know that this is we are our interest is in improving writing, not necessarily in making sure that they can all name and label everything.
So that may be a particularly English thing. The authentic text, so I think is important because by using published texts that are out there you're modelling how real writers make choices and linking children in classrooms or students in classrooms to that broader community of writers.
You see the choices that real writers make, and one of the things that happens is that you start to become a real magpie.
Well, when you're out, you suddenly notice a text and you end up taking photographs of it to use in the classroom.
Because there's a lot of real world text out there that's incredibly useful. One, for example, I've often used is in museums.
They often art, gallery's or or museums. They often have little blocks of text underneath something that's being displayed, which is a wonderfully concise information text.
And then you can use that in the classroom if you're working on information text to look up what are the characteristics of this information text.
What language choices is this writer?
Need and build on it from there so the authentic text for us is really important and then the discussion.
I'll end this keynote by talking a little bit more about the importance of talk. The discussion is absolutely critical that the teacher generates opportunities for children to discuss and talk about grammar and the rhetorical effects it makes, because that's where we were seeing the real metalinguistic learning coming through rather than the compliance with what the teachers simply.
Said it's the understanding that accompanies that. Again, you'll know if you've been in lots of classrooms. How easy it is for children to repeat back perfectly what the teachers told them, but not necessarily to have the understanding that really underpins there.
So here's one example. This is a passage that's taken from American children's author EB White Children's book called Charlotte's Web, and I've taken out.
Everything is about the setting in this scene, so it's just one paragraph I'll just give you a chance to look at it quickly and think about if you were painting that if you were given the task that you've got to paint a picture of that setting.
What would you paint? So you've got some clues for things that you might paint. Just think about what would you paint. Then I'll move on.
OK, so if you were painting this, you've probably already picked up that there be rain in your picture, coz that recurs a lot and it's a bit gloomy. And there's a lot of rain coz it's.
Dripping steadily and gushing out, and you've probably also picked up the setting is in some way rural because of the sheep and the thistles and pigweed.
So possibly what you've got is some kind of rural seeing. Lots of rain. This awesome pigweed somewhere. I don't know what pigweed actually is.
It's obviously an American plant and sheep somewhere. Now. The actual passage has this additional detail, but if you just look at.
This.
If I now said to you, I want you to paint this picture, your description would have a lot more particular and specific detail that locates this setting.
Precisely, in one particular place, whereas your other description would have been a more generalised rural picture of sheep in the rain really.
And actually, what's doing that work here? And it isn't always prepositional phrases that do that work, but here it's the choice of prepositional phrases which are providing that detail, which helps the reader visualise.
And it expands the description quite strongly. So if we were doing that in classroom and using those lead principles, the link is looking at that link. Between the way prepositional phrases can be used to establish setting.
And actually, once you've started to notice these things, you notice these things happening in other texts too, so you can pick texts that are relevant to studio.
Its interests and age levels in terms of the examples. If you think back to that previous slide, I said prepositional phrases.
I'd underlined the prepositional phrases, and I'd actually look. The preposition itself was a different colour, but I didn't go into any explanation of what prepositional phrases were, and I think you'll agree that you could at least understand what I'm saying.
And you probably understand prepositional phrases anyway, but you didn't need to understand prepositional phrases to understand the point I was making.
It wasn't authentic text coz it charlottes charlottes web.
And the talk was around the effect of the prepositional phrases, and that strategy are used of taking something out of a text and getting children to think about and discuss something can work really well in this case.
It was discussing how you might paint it, but it could be allsorts of things that you might be discussing, but you you discuss how they work.
I'm going to do another example with you, which I think I'm gonna have time to get in, so this is a different example.
This is looking at sentence structure, so this one is taken from another children's old ortho, the children's laureate. Here Michael Morpurgo or former Childrens laureate and a book he wrote about King Arthur, and this sentence comes from a key.
A key moment in the plot. Now I won't. We won't have time to go through. You actually doing this, but if this is in a class and this is exactly how I would do it.
In a primary school with children aged about 9:00 or 10, probably would be the pitch for this.
Although possibly more coz of the text, than the focus could you could do this. The thing about a lot of this grammar is it can be repeated at different ages when it's needed.
So I'd get the children in pairs to be reading it aloud and thinking about where they emphasised, where the emphasis would go.
Reading aloud as a strategy again, we use a lot because sometimes you hear things when you read writing that you don't get when you just see it, then we get them playing around with possibilities for moving the sentence around.
This can be done sometimes on an Interactive Whiteboard at the front of the class.
Where those chunks the coloured chunks in the black chunks there can be moved around on a whiteboard. Or sometimes you've done it by having the sentence in chunks on card, so they can literally move things round in pairs on the desk and then they discuss well how does moving what you've changed.
How does that very? The emphasis from that original version, and then we give them one possibility. There are quite a lot of different possibilities of how you could move things around in that sentence. So again, now we get into we both sentence is allowed.
And think about how they portray that moment in the plot differently. So really keen that they get that sense that this is about a moment in the plot.
So he's saying if you were a film director and you were given that sentence and you've got to film that scene, how would you film the first sentence? And would it be different in the second set?
Since and in most classes children see a very big difference between the two, it also shows children's good understanding of multimodality and visual communications.
And.
Failed The Walking across the water in the mists behind so same words. No change in vocabulary, no change in anything except the syntactical structure of the sentence, and children can see that difference between the two sentences.
And then we build on that by looking at the grammar of it. So it's specifically discussing the effect of moving the adverbial to different places in the sentence.
That out of missed the beginning and out of the mist at the end and what it did to how they saw that sentence.
But also looking at the subject verb reversal that we've got here in that first version, the figure the subject the figure in flowing green comes after the verb, which in English is an unusual position in English, is normally before the verb, not a rule.
But that's the more standard, more common thing, whereas in the second the subject is before the verb, so they discuss all.
Close again, you can see the examples out of the Mists in green and it's in green in the sentence I've used colour to highlight the examples.
We've used the term adverbial, but nothing about where's the adverbial and likewise the subject verb inversion we've shown through colour and through making the examples clear, and this exemplifies the lead principles.
That we had in the table earlier. Very clearly there's it's an authentic text. There's lots of discussion. A link is made between grammar and meaning, and there are lots of examples, not lots of examples.
Examples are made clear. The focus for discussion is made clear using the grammatical terminology, but not necessarily deviating into a grammar lesson.
And then this one I'm just going to withdraw this very quickly. Can I see that I'm moving on? I wanted those two examples for both from narrow.
Safe, just wanted to highlight this is workable and allsorts of different texts and this is apart from Barrack Obama's victory speech.
The and it's often called the yes we can speech and you know what? What I often do with teachers when we're doing professional development with teachers on this as we take a text like this and say what can you notice that's happening in this text that contributes to the way it is.
A victory speech and communicates the values in the ideas that Barack Obama wanted to take wanted to make.
So starting by getting the teachers to try and notice.
And we talk about this is about making language choices visible, making it clear. So obviously you would probably pick up on that repetition of yes we can, and even you might talk about it as you know, kind of crescendo and accumulation.
It's once per sentence for each point he makes and then repeated four times through that, that that next bit you might pick up on that repetition of it was that reference to history, but also a kind of.
Statement of truth. The certainty of it was.
And again, that repetition of it creating the coherence through the text you might pick up on the choice of nouns which highlight who it was.
You know what was it that was talking bout said the Creed was the beliefs and then it's all about slaves and abolitionists immigrants. The call of workers instantly tells us something about.
Where Barack Obama stands in relation to these groups and then all the abstract nouns, you know, the high ideals, destiny, freedom, justice, equality, opportunity, prosperity and there's lots of other things that you could pick up on.
But that the point with this is that when we're working with teachers, we often start from the text. And obviously this is a persuasive victory speech full of values.
How did the choices reflect what it is that Barrack Obama was trying to communicate at that particular moment in time?
So pulling this all together.
When we talk about grammar is choice, we're really trying to move teaching away from telling children what they should put into their texts, and fronted adverbial is a particular thing in England at the moment that everybody talks of her because it happens to be in the curriculum and the point is that using a fronted adverbial doesn't make your writing good.
You've got to be clear about why you're using a fronted adverbial and be using it for a purpose, and it's getting that difference between the form focus on the functional focus.
So what we really want is not children saying, oh look, I've used a fronted adverbial. Aren't I clever?
**** hole look. I've used a fronted adverbial here to draw attention to the carefulness of the bfg's action. So you know, these are two examples from the BFG Roald Dahl's BFG about the giant, and in both cases there's a fronted adverbial an actually discuss posters and that they have slightly different purposes.
So the first is linguistic labelling and the 2nd is about understanding the function of that choice. So our research evidence that said we've done quite a sequence of studies and they do show that this way of teaching can improve children's writing and their reading comprehension.
We got some evidence of that too, but of course it isn't evidence that it will work, and I think there are real dangers in some of the simplistic views of research as teaching is complex and nothing.
It's just a quick fix.
Every teacher in every class is different, so you have to really think through how as a teacher are you implementing this?
From our research, what we have got is a lot of evidence about what are the context and capacities which help this approach to succeed.
And likewise, what are the contexts or the capacities of the teacher which may make it less successful and mitigate against success?
There's two I'm going to talk about here and then I'll stop. One is the importance of the metalinguistic.
Talk that what we see very clearly is that this is critical. If the quality of the classroom talk about language choices is high, then children learn much better in this way and some of the things we see are these kinds of inquiry questions that open up thinking so not where's the adverbial, but what's the adverbial, doing, inviting, going back to students responses, and getting into elaborate and explain their answers, inviting them to justify their answers and evidenced their answers.
And challenging students with counterpoint evidence with a different perspective on some.
Think I'm wonder things about Metalinguistic Chuck talk, as it helps verbalise your thinking and that's useful both in crystallising your thinking as a learner.
But also it makes students learning visible to the teacher. The teacher can see what it is they've understood, and if there's some misunderstanding there.
It allows the teacher to help realign it and correct it and then the importance of teacher knowledge in England. Are teachers really lack confidence in grammar because they are. They are nearly all.
Cohorts of teachers in themselves never did grammar at school, so they were lacking in conf.
Patents so that grammatical knowledge both of the grammar itself, but also how texts work, is really important, and their skill in managing classroom talk, which is a generic classroom skill, not just a writing skill, so our conclusions are all about the importance of explicit teaching in developing metalinguistic understanding about writing. This idea of grammar is choice, and the importance of metalinguistic talk in developing independent learning.
And if you want to look a little bit more at any of this, we do have a website that was specifically for teachers. Know that most people here are not teachers, but I know a lot of you work with teach.
And they give a lot of practical examples and resources that help teachers work in this way, and I'll stop there so that we have some time for questions.