I've just had to decline to write an article because I won't use highfalutin' and confusing terms to describe to parents the relationships between sounds and letters in English. Yesterday, I was teaching a ten year old who was confused by the term "connective" used in grammar paper to describe "Because" at the beginning of a sentence, when it patently did not connect anything to anything. Both problems arose from too much influence given by the government to people who have no experience of teaching the subjects - some are university linguists, others have spent their careers in teaching sixth formers - and who have managed to impose obscure, ill-informed and, in the above case, inaccurate terminology on the educational debate.
All grammar is the outcome of human attempts to understand and describe the phenomenon of language. We can only use what we have in this process, and it is understandable that complex, and even obscure, terms have been used in an attempt to reach descriptions that are as accurate and unambiguous as possible. Hence, no doubt the practise of linguists in removing the term "tense" from its origin in the French word for time, and attaching it to cases in which the actual form of a verb is altered. This eliminates the practice of composing tenses, but it may suit their academic purpose of clear definition. They are not concerned with teaching children.
However, what children need to know about grammar and reading can and should be explained to them using plain English words that everyone can understand. Calling a sound a phoneme adds no meaning and dresses a simple idea up in a Greek word. Similarly grapheme, for a letter or group of letters. Calling word building "synthetic" phonics, as if it were a variety of artificial silk, is similar pretentious nonsense, and even worse is the folly of presenting the variations of English spelling that have grown up over centuries as variations on phonics to the exclusion of other influences. The Reading Reform Foundation, for all the work it has done in promoting interest in phonics, is a major offender, as were the previous government's Letters and Sounds materials.
Most children are adaptable enough to make sense of these adult errors. Some are not, and are then subjected to more of the same, sometimes using formulaic "teaching" structures carried out by teaching assistants who don't understand the work themselves.
The teaching set out on this site uses the following terms, among others, to make things clear to learners. All terminology should be transparent as well as accurate, and there is much more to be done to improve this.The term "companion word" for "article" or "determiner" is, however, immediately valuable in teaching European languages as well as English, as it is often the companion word that gives fully reliable information on a word's gender. "Determiner" is arguably the worst term of all from a teaching point of view, as these words frequently determine nothing - one used to be called, more accurately the "indefinite article".
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Obscure terms |
Plain English |
|
phoneme |
sound |
|
grapheme |
letter or group of letters |
|
synthetic phonics |
word-building, blending |
|
connective |
link word |
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subordinator |
link word, starter word |
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determiner/article |
companion word |
|
tense |
time zone |
An afterthought is that no academic should be allowed to advise the government on issues of language unless they can demonstrate that their advice is clear to children and works in the classroom. This should be easy to arrange, and would be instructive for the children, as well as, perhaps, for the professors.