How to Make Grammar Appealing

In this example from Grammar and Creativity Anubis and the idea of a time-slip story is used to encourage the student to think about the format of plays.

Are Teachers Qualified to Teach Grammar?

So many teachers in the UK (perhaps you can tell me about your experience in your country) were not, themselves, taught grammar explicitly when they were of school age during the 1970s and 80s.  You can understand the reasoning.  Children acquire the rules of English, certainly sufficiently well, simply by listening and joining in.  You will hear evidence of this going on when a child uses a word like drived or sheeps.  Clearly, they have spotted some rules: how to make the past tense and how to make a singular noun plural.  It just so happens that the verb and noun in these particular cases are irregular - they break the rules.

As a result of their own schooling, therefore, during which they felt they got by, teachers might feel cautious about throwing themselves wholeheartedly into teaching grammar.

What, I think, we should not do, however, is turn that caution into a justification and an argument for not teaching grammar.  There are a range of resources and there is support for professional development widely available.  Also, it doesn't have to be dry.  It doesn't have to be learning by rote.  Nor does it have to be in opposition to creative writing.  It should be part of the exciting, colourful landscape children experience along the road of their imagination, on the way to putting the words down on paper.  After all, children up to the age of eleven have to learn all sorts of technical concepts in other subjects: water cycle, condensation, femur, germination, meander, oxbow lake, trapezium, Venn diagram, and so on.

Why not allow children the right to experience a similarly academic approach to their own language.  Nothing is lost.

Grammar and Creativity: Rationale

Standing back and taking an analytical view of language allows you to look at its elements - essential for academic study.  As a practitioner in the classroom, however, you have to deal with both teaching the rules and terminology, and, at the same time, encouraging an enthusiasm for writing.  The only way to do that is to draw upon the child's creativity and value what they have to put down on paper.  This is how the introduction to Grammar and Creativity describes the approach that characterises the four books:

Good writing may start with an exciting idea, but it needs structure to make sense to a reader.  Grammar provides a framework on which to display the imagination.

Writing brings together individual expression and an understanding of the rules that allow our language (any language) to make sense.

This book has been written with the view that grammar and creativity go hand in hand to produce good writing.  Developing children’s understanding of the basics of English will encourage their literary adventures.   The range of activities here has been designed to excite interest as well as guide children and teachers through the rules.

For more information about the series for children aged seven to eleven years, go here: http://www.lcp.co.uk/grammar-and-creativity

Grammar Poster

At the beginning of each section - word, sentence, punctuation and text - in Grammar and Creativity, there is a poster that can be photocopied and glued inside each child's English writing book or enlarged for displaying in the classroom.  In the books, these are in black and white.  On the CDs, they are in colour.  Here is an example from the Year 5 CD:

Grammar and Creativity

My series of four books for primary school teachers of English were launched on Monday.  Very exciting news!  My intention was to combine information on what all the terminology means and how to apply the concepts, along with an open-ended opportunity to write creatively.  Anyway, time will tell how teachers and their students respond to them.

The books are in black and white for easy photocopying, but each edition comes with a CD that replicates the text - only the illustrations are in colour for full impact on an interactive whiteboard.

 

Available from:  http://www.lcp.co.uk/primary-school/literacy/grammar-and-creativity 

Grammar and Creativity

Here is the front cover of my books in the new series on grammar for teachers.  I've illustrated all four books (for Years 3, 4, 5 and 6) in a way that, hopefully, will appeal to children and remove the dryness usually associated with the teaching and learning of the rules of English.  They are published by LCP who, as you probably know already, produce a great range of top-quality teaching resources.  I'd be grateful for any feedback on the cover design.

Aberdeen University Years - Grammar and Creativity

Somehow, I got myself to Aberdeen University.  The route was quite circuitous and doesn't need to be described here.  Coincidentally, having begun a lifetime of drawing with the help of bookmakers' chalk, I was working in Dan Flynn's betting shop when I was accepted on to the undergraduate course, which included English literature, politics and history, but mainly sociology.

From a standing start, having read hardly anything up until that point - I think I finished Black Beauty but gave up on Tom Sawyer - I was obliged to read the entire canon of significant 20th century fiction, as well as important case studies, theories, philosophical underpinnings and the methodologies of sociology.  Quite a task, but it was the perfect time for me to take it on.  (Also, I could do it in between the 'off' at Kempton Park and the results coming in from Uttoxeter.)  And it helped me to develop insights into my coal-mining community background and how people behave in interactions where there is unequal power.  The MA in sociology was followed up by an M.Phil from York University, where Laurie Taylor was the depaertment head.  Gradually, I found myself having clearer thoughts about language and education.

So, after long and varied career changes: a range of office work, university life, some time lecturing, then being a freelance toy designer and maker, children's writer and illustrator, and finally primary school teacher, I now find myself (sadly not being an outstanding rock guitarist) being the author and illustrator of four school books called Grammar and Creativity, published by LCP, with a planned launch date of 25 November 2013.  Yes, in just over two weeks time.

There are a few things I have to say about grammar and creativity, mainly because of misunderstandings on both sides of the traditionalist / romanticist fence.  I'll come to that soon.  Please leave any comments if you have any thoughts of your own.

No Books and no Habit

In a house where the only books available were a medical dictionary and The Encyclopaedia of Dogs, it's no surprise that I didn't develop a reading habit.  I could read of course and the local library was available, but I was more interested in picking up the chalk left by the bookmakers at the greyhound track, squirreling it away under the bed and taking it out to draw caricatures of the neighbours on the pavements of the cul-de-sac where I lived.

Increasingly, having no confidence in the way I spoke, drained my of personal confidence.  Playing with other kids in the street wasn't a problem.  We spoke the same language, but secondary school brought together children from different walks of life and, you might say, a different talking life too.  My parents were the same when they had to meet a teacher or headmaster: completely tongue-tied and unnecessarily and embarrassingly deferential.   But the fun was still to come.  University.

The Story of Grammar Continues.

Language has such power, culturally and personally.  The substance of thought, ideas and beliefs, it can enlighten as well as obscure. The expression of a nation's identity, it carries its history and re-shapes its past with an imagined future in mind.  Through it we're able to share our thoughts and feelings as well as hide them.  With linguistic facility, individuals are able to express their own identity, communicating what they think and who they are with greater or lesser confidence.

Growing up in a place where my first forms of expression (I can't say English was a second language) were seen by me as worthless had the effect of undermining any confidence I might have had in communicating what I thought or who I was.  To begin with, this was a problem only in fairly formal situations; for example, when meeting those who weren't immediate friends or family.  To teachers and headteachers, I must have come across as pretty dumb.  My secondary school headmaster, in fact, suggested in June, after five years there, that I might as well leave the following month as I really didn't do myself or the school proud.  After I left in July and the exam results came through, I found that I had passed them all.  But by then, my own sense of self was hidden, even from me, under a blanket of shyness and embarrassment in social situations.  And this, all because living in the no-man's land between two language registers, because, by the time I was a teenager, I felt uncomfortable using both my home dialect and that more standard version of school.

It was as if teachers had arrived as kindly missionaries with the aim of rescuing us from the dark practices of saying things like: Dinny tich that cause its mines and ah'll gee yi a skelp roond the lug.  Whut's the mitter?  Ah thocht yi wir m pal.

I haven't got to grammar and creativity yet; so there is more.

How does a Scot come to write books on English grammar?

Nobody has asked that question yet, but I'll be ready when they do.  The simple answer has to do with the value the Scots have traditionally placed on education and the democratic escape-route it provided from the harshness of life; in my case, the work of a mining community chipping out the black stuff underneath the grey waters of the Firth of Forth.  Perhaps associated with that is the no-frills, spare rationality of thought associated with Presbyterianism.  Rules are meant to be followed.  Then there is my academic background: the no-nonsense rigours of Kirkcaldy High School, where you were expected to knuckle down and learn given truths rather than develop questioning skills: grammar over creativity.

There are also more personal reasons for my interest in language, how users select and put chunks of it together, and, as importantly, how it is an expression of who you are and how you are valued in society.

I don't know how it happened, but from a very early age, I learnt to feel ashamed of how I spoke.  I should put it more strongly.  I was taught to feel ashamed of how I spoke.  Part of that feeling came with the territory.  Something to do with poverty.  There were the physical aspect of life.  The unfurnished bedroom, the scruffy, collapsing armchairs, the fraying, hand-me-down clothes meant home life couldn't be a sanctuary. The opposite was the case.  I was happier out in the street with childhood friends where those things didn't matter.  But there was something more insidious that affected lots of us where I lived.  School.  It was there in a primary school, staffed with kindly teachers, that I learnt that the remnants of my local dialect - the words that peppered a more standard English and passed on from my parents' generation - were in some way wrong.  The teachers didn't do this deliberately or knowingly.  They simply used a 'better' form of English.

This might not sound like a big deal, but it had two consequences.  One, it was easier and preferable not to speak at all, rather than expose myself to ridicule I imagined would happen.  And, two, I felt embarrassed to be part of my community, to have the parents I had, and to be me.

Gove and Grammar

It is difficult to say whether Michael Gove, our education minister, has been the cause of the recent resurgence of interest in grammar, or is simply part of a current trend.  Lately, we have seen the publication of Gwynne's Grammar, For Who the Bell Tolls by David Marsh and Harry Ritchie's English for the Natives.

My own series of four books for children of junior school age and their teachers (for many of them in their thirties were never taught garmmar at school) will also be available in a few weeks time.

Unfortunately, Gove's push to get 'back to basics' comes with all sorts of other hazards: the main and perennial issue of emphasising a form of education that can be examined, while discarding the unmeasurable. Concentrating on the measurable will, unfortunately, lead to immeasurable damage to a whole bunch of children.  This is why I've designed the layout of my books in such a way that creativity can sit comfortably alongside the learning of grammar.  It's my belief that the two are bound together.  Artists are hampered if they can't draw.  Skateboarders can't do fancy tricks if they can't stay on the skateboard.  Surfers should learn to swim.  It's the same with grammar and creativity.  It's useful to know the rules, even if you decide deliberately to break them when you're writing that best-seller.

The Delights of the Grammar Monster

I regularly enjoy the traps - some of them unavoidable - left sitting around by the grammar monster.  And, even though I refer to the rules of English as a 'monster', I mean it in a kindly way.  The traps, themselves, are usually camouflaged very meagrely.  Nonetheless, journalists, mailshot designers and shopkeepers frequently fall head-first into them.  My current favourite is the tag-line on the clothes shop sign near where I live.  It reads: Gently used ladies' clothes.  You have to ask yourself who or what has been gently used - the clothes or the ladies?

There are a number of these in the forthcoming teachers' books:

Children make delicious snacks.
My dog smells a lot better than me.
It was at the cricket match that I saw her duck.
If you think that any of our waiters are rude or unhelpful, you ought to see the manager.

I do love collecting these; so if you'd like to leave some, please do.  Thanks.

New Grammar Books for Schools

Four new grammar and creative writing books, full of photocopiable worksheets, will soon be available for teachers of children from 7 - 11 years old.  They will be published by LCP from whom advanced publicity, pre-orders - orders@lcp.co.uk - and discounts can be arranged.  Take a look at their web pages - www. lcp.co uk.  The final proof-reading procedures are almost finished.  I'm very excited about the approach of publication date, as well being delighted with the support and enthusiasm of the publishers throughout.  Jess, my contact there, has been great.

Each of the books is full of my black-and-white illustrations, some of which you can see here.  There will be an accompanying CD, full of coloured illustrations, for use on interactive whiteboards.

This is a completely new blog, but in the future, return regularly to find grammatical tips, howlers and, if you feel inclined, make your own contributions.