My Dog Smells Better Than Me

You could learn to make a chair by trial and error or by watching an older craftsman at work.  The master craftsman could make a sample and communicate what he or she is doing by asking for the ‘spiky, cutting thing’ or describing a mortise and tenon joint as ‘how one piece of wood slots snugly into another usually at an angle of ninety degrees’, but, in a way, this is just a renaming of two commonly-used ideas: saw and mortise and tenon joint.  Teaching carpentry includes naming the tools, techniques and how to avoid embarrassing or dangerous mistakes.  But if it stopped there, it wouldn't be a successful course of study.  A successful teacher would encourage the student to explore how to use his or her imagination in the application of the techniques they've learnt.

 

Those primary teachers of a certain age, who went through the school system at a time when grammar wasn't taught explicitly, have had to resort to the ‘spiky, cutting thing’ technique of teaching the rules of English.  Not knowing the terminology, wary of entering the apparently esoteric world of grammar, or possibly discouraged to do so because it was seen to stifle creativity, they invented their own concepts.  They resorted to other strategies when communicating to pupils, parents and other teachers.

So, instead of conjunctions, relative pronouns and adverbs used in particular cases, teachers coined the term connective.  Adverbial phrases at the start of a sentence are described as openers.  Words may have been described very helpfully in terms of their functions: naming words, doing and being words, describing words in place of nouns, verbs and adjectives, often without progression on to more precise terms.  In practice, this can work reasonably well.  It certainly contains the essential idea that the role of a word in a sentence is important.  But you can see its lack of precision and potential for confusion: verbs are very descriptive, adverbs can describe a verb, an adjective or another adverb. 

Similarly, I've heard many teachers explain the use of a comma in terms of its being a place where you take a breath when reading a sentence.  That’s fine for reading, but that’s not why they’re there, and doesn’t help the writer; for example: “When it saw the dog our – breath – cat Lucy jumped up – breath –  the tree and stayed there for the – breath –  whole day.”

This suggests there is a need for grammar terminology as a shared language in which teacher and student can discuss and evaluate the student’s work.  It isn’t necessary to pile it on to children before they can cope with it, but they do cope well with a range of concepts in other subjects.  They are used to talking, for example, about gravity, evaporation and habitat in science; meander, coastal erosion and magma in geography; pitch, volume and dynamics in music, and so on.  Part and parcel of our teaching any subject is the introduction of relevant concepts as we go along.  Why make an exception for a language about language?  As I said, the grammar that is taught will necessarily have to be tailored to the needs of the children.  It may not be important to teach the difference between, say, dependent and independent clauses, or talk about copular verbs; but it’s useful to know the function of words in sentences and how those functions plus punctuation is essential to meaning. 

This doesn’t mean that the teaching of English has to be dry and humourless.  Including examples of the fun you can have with English help to stop your junior school class using their rulers to saw their rubbers in half.  Getting them to discuss the ambiguities of My dog smells better than me or If you think any of our waiters are rude, you ought to see the manager will introduce the kind of detached playfulness that is part of creative writing.