John Bald/language and literacy

Grammatical termnilogy - verb groups, including so-called "modal" verbs.

This paper on grammatical terminology argued that most had been developed to analyse language rather than teach it. A correction is needed.  Antonio de Nebrija, author of the first Spanish grammar, was asked by Queen Isabella why she needed a grammar, as she already spoke Spanish. The reply was that Spain was about to make huge conquests, and the people she conqured needed to learn Spainish. I still think the main point stands, and that teaching children has too often been based on the way adults understand the language, rathr than children who are in the process of learning it. The main sources of terminolgy were the grammatical studies of the renaissance and twentieth-century linguistics, both of which use language that is obscure, and sometimes unnecessarily compressed, the most celebrated example being the "fronted adverbial", which, expanded, means an adverb, adverbial phrase or adverbial clause, placed before the main clause of a sentence. Otherwise known as a starter. 

The two most important terms when construcitng a sentence are subject and verb. Both are discussed in the paper, and this short posting add some points on verb groups. Chomsky's idea of the "verb phrase" conveys the idea that a verb can consist of more than one word. Verbs are important words, and like people, can be said to have a name, in English beginning with to - to be, to play, to have. Most of th time, when two verbs work together, the second says its name - I like to play foootball, to eat pizza, to go travelling..etc.

Sometimes, when a verb tells us how well or otherwise we do something - I can/can't play the piano - it is so closely joined to the next verb that the "to" is dropped. David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of English, lists just nine - can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, should, must.  There is, fortunately, no interference between the way these verbs work and normal speech, but thee term attached to them - "modal" - is anything but clear. It is a term more often used in German grammar, and David Crystal does not even mention it in his latest book on Grammar, Making Sense. The OED notes it as descending from "mood" 1569, expresing some form of uncertainty, but this does not make sense. Cinderella shall go to the ball expresses something close to certainty rathr than mood, as does "I can't swim". However, the term modal is part of the glossary of the national curriculum, and is included in some SAT testing, so pupils need to know it, whether anyone really knows what it means or not. I would teach the group first, and add the term afterwards, whether or not we can see (modal construction) any point to it. If I had to call these verbs something, it would be "companion verbs". They can't operate on their own - I can, or can't, on its own means nothing, unless we know what it is I can or can't do. The companion may preced the verb, or refer to one in the previous sentence, in a form of tag sentence. You can't do that. Yes, I can.  (Whatever it was.)

David Crystal: Just a Phrase I'm Going Through.

I've always found David Crystal's work illuminating, and have just caught up with his autobiography, published in 2009. I was pleased to see the short shrift he gave to Chomsky and the principle of his Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure, which is to consider the person in front of you and what their needs are. The acronym LARSP is another matter - I still have trouble remembering what it means.

However, a case he cites, of moving a child from a two-word construction - man jump ; see car; red ball - to three, is an interesting demonstration of the relative importance of different parts of speech. Each of these fragments contains a noun, and two out of three a verb. I infer that noun and verb are the main building blocks of language, and other parts subordinate to them. I call them "companion words", adding to the sense of noun (adjective) and verb (adverb), saving time (pronouns) or holding things together (articles/determiners and conjunctions, which I call links). The approach is very similar to what Chomsky called "teaching transformational grammar", an activity he condemned. However, Chomsky is not a teacher, and is wrong once again.
There is a similar insight into the issue of time and tense with verbs. For European linguists, the terms are synonymous. English-speaking linguists reserve the term tense for a change in the form of the verb, and Professor Crystal has used the term "aspect" for other ways of indicating time, such as "He goes to university next week. He is off to university next week. etc." However, in this book he notes the influence of what linguists call "adverbials" - why not just adverbs, with the understanding that they can comprise more than one word - in providing the signpost of time. He may well have made the same point elsewhere and I've missed it, but this time it came across very clearly.

We indicate time in English either by a change in verb form, or by context, usually an adverb. "Once upon a time," indicates that something has already happened, and cannot be followed by a present or future verb, any more than "Tomorrow" can be followed by a past one. I call a compound verb, such as I will go a change in form. Ich werde in die Schule gehen is in the future tense in German, just as I will go to school is in English. The term time zone is, as I've argued elsewhere, more useful for teaching purposes than tense, a word that means nothing to anyone who does not have a working knowledge of French etymology.

David Crystal's book reflects much of the history of modern linguistics, with generous and well-merited account of the work of Randolph Quirk, and of modern family and academic life. There are ups and downs, and a shining example of courage, when he left Reading University without a redundancy package to move to the life of an independent scholar in Wales, with a radio studio built into his house. His invaluable Cambridge Encyclopaedias, respectively of Language and English, rescued his finances, and he became an editor of general encyclopaedias, using the experience of classification this provided as a basis for later work in search engine design. His latest (or so I thought...) books on spelling, grammar and punctuation , published after the autobiography, are to me the most valuable, and provide, with Harry Evans' Essential English, an excellent basis for understanding how our current language has developed and works.

Professor Crystal dislikes linguistic purists, and yet, like all others who do so, writes in immaculate standard English throughout. Language changes slowly, and there is no discernable difference between his grammar and that of Dickens and Lewis Carroll. Food for thought throughout, and recommended.

Technical Note. David Crystal and Lindsey Thomas: Making Sense and Teaching Grammar.

David Crystal's series on spelling (Spell It Out), punctuation (Making a Point) and now, grammar (Making Sense) demonstrates his gifts as an intellectual historian as well as a linguist. Unlike most such  historians, who deal with what is seen as the best that has been thought and said, Professor Crystal is more often concerned with exposing follies that have become entrenched across the centuries, and are sustained by force of habit and snobbery. Fortunately, this latest book also contains important ideas for teaching, centred on the Bucks Grammar Project, led by Lindsey Thomas.

Professor Crystal's demolition of the flaws in grammatical thinking is impeccable, and his encyclopaedic knowledge enables him to identify unsung heroes, notably Professor John Wallis FRS (1616-1703), who was the first to write a grammar of English without basing his description on Latin, with which English grammar has very little in common, The real link between English and Latin lies in vocabulary, as it does in all European languages.

Professor Crystal’s key idea is that the sentence is the unit that enables us to make sense of the words we use, hear or read. What constitutes a sentence is a matter of debate, and Professor Crystal offers the useful idea of "minor sentences" such as "Yes.", which do not contain the conventional structure of a subject and main verb. Professor Crystal draws a distinction between this time of sentence and an elliptical sentence, in which something has been left unsaid. To me, though, the idea can be extended to any that do not conform to the conventional structure. If we accept this this view, the single words and verbless sentences at the opening of Bleak House are sentences, beginning with capitals and ending with full stops. In any event, the idea of "minor sentences" allows us to focus on major sentences, which will be used almost all the time, while admitting occasional, deliberate, alternatives. This is one of the best ideas in the book.

Professor Crystal accepts his young daughter’s early, single-word utterances as sentences in their own right, when a great deal of the meaning is left unsaid. This is controversial, as so many children have to learn to add additional words to what they say in order to make and write understandable sentences. I also have trouble with two technical terms. English often requires nouns to be accompanied by what I describe as "companion words", such as my in my book, and a  in a table. Linguistics has coined the word "determiner" to describe these words, even though some of them are indeterminate.  I suggest that my alternative is more accurate and more understandable to children, though it may need further explanation to distinguish these, generally short, words from adjectives. The issue of tense, which I describe in terms of time zones, is another that needs further development, and Professor Crystal’s idea of integrating semantics – meaning – with the study of grammar offers a useful way forward.

The Bucks Grammar Project integrated grammatical teaching into the teaching of spoken and written language in a group of Buckinghamshire primary schools, with one project in a secondary modern school. The work at each stage is carefully matched to children's understanding. They study the construction of sentences, and experiment by varying structures in the course of their work, analysing their effects and improving the range that they use in their writing.  The principles are described in the Appendix to Making Sense, and in a series of free downloads, including over 100 pages of case studies, illustrated with children's work showing consistent evidence of progress.  I recommend these wholeheartedly.  Lindsey Thomas is now working independently, and can be contacted through her site.

Two cases of mis-teaching rectified in months.

Misteaching takes many forms, but they all result in failure, frustration and misery. In the English-speaking world, misteaching usually takes the form of hopeful reliance on incidental learning, introduced as a reaction to the teaching typified by Dickens' Mr M'Choakumchild, based on his own experience at school in Camden Town. In much of continental Europe, the old ways persist, with, for example, a heavy emphasis on exercises in English that prevent people from learning to speak the language. The late Francis Holmes, who taught me French, was acutely aware of the problems involved in drill and skill methods, which, he said, prevented "even the bright ones, those who could handle the subjunctive," from learning to speak. His solution was to run supplementary exchanges between schools in Essex and Paris, with lessons in the morning and shared free time in the afternoon. It worked for some of us, but not all, as many of the English pupils kept together in their free time and spoke very little French. We learn from mistakes - on my first trip, I ordered a Perrier, thinking it was Perry, and un exprès, in the fond belief that it was beer.  

What all forms of misteaching have in common is a failure to understand how the human brain functions, and how to develop it. Much progressive education is based on the idea that failure should be eliminated, and that the way to eliminate it is to redefine success, so that academic achievement is no longer its main criterion. Kenneth Clarke's recent memoir, Kind of Blue, has a succinct account of his encounters with progressive officials at the UK's frequently rebranded Department for Education and Science in the nineties. Their centrepiece was mixed ability teaching, which relies above all on incidental learning, as it is impossible for a teacher to focus personally on the range of needs in a class in which some pupils are reading Dickens, while others can't read the texts easily managed by children of six and seven. The grinding approach - M'Choakumchild, unlike Gradgrind, was misguided, rather than vicious - was taken apart by Truffaut in Les Quatre Cent Coups, and I saw it in Germany in the early nineties. I was asked to help a nine year old with his German homework, at which he was failing, largely because he was given endless exercises in German grammar without any explanation of its purposes and function. Unpacking the terminology - he was a German national - enabled him to make sense of the work and begin to succeed. The approach is consistent with current research findings on the formation and extension of neural networks in the brain. Whatever does not promote this process does not work.

The way to correct misteaching, from either source, is very simple - unpack, explain, and practise. 

Two recent cases, with apologies for the clumsy phrasing in the interests of preserving anonymity:

M, in the Spanish school system, had been assessed as dyslexic in England and Spain, and could not read in English at all. She was not dyslexic, but did not know how to adjust her thinking to move from the regular Spanish system of Spelling to the English system, in which the letters tell us most of what we need to know, but not everything. In about half a dozen lessons over the internet, in which she chose to read a book appropriate to her age, rather than a primer, I taught M to adapt to English spelling so that she was pleased when letters helped, but not surprised when they didn't. Whenever she met an irregular or unusual word in a text, I would move to another with the same pattern, explain its origins, practise it, and have her father revisit it between lessons so that she understood. M's father brought the family over from Spain to take my wife and me out to dinner to celebrate, and yesterday he sent me an email saying that P was now doing much better, and didn't need any more help for the moment.

S required an A in a modern languages A level for university entrance, had top grades in other subjects, but had been "taught" the language to GCSE with little or no explanation of the finer points of its grammar, in the spirit of the "tolerance of error" advocated by the late, well-intentioned, Eric Hawkins. This had produced an A* at GCSE, but left S with no preparation for A level. Moving to a new sixth form, S was required to pay attention to things that were beyond his/her understanding, because they had never been explained. The teacher marked work thoroughly, but did not explain why things were as they were. Rectifying this in the months before A level got S the required grade, but after a good deal of anxiety that should have been avoided by accurate teaching in the first instance. A sixteen year old I'm currently teaching has the same problem in German. Approaching GCSE without any introduction to German grammar, the pupil writes what s/he thinks is German, emails it to the teacher, who enters the correct inflections and improves the phrasing. Pupil then learns by heart these, to him/her meaningless collections of letters, and reproduces it in what is known as "controlled assessment", without understanding a word. Once again, the approach is to unpack and explain everything, and pupil is much happier as a result.

I recommend Rachel Hawkes' Stimmt series of German textbooks as a way of avoiding such problems in the future. The reading problem will not be solved by a textbook, but by improving teachers' understanding of English spelling and how to teach it.

 

 

 

Simple Gifts: Grammar and Spelling for Children and Young Adults. Part 1, Grammar.

"What can be said at all, can be said simply."  Wittgenstein.

"'Tis the gift to be simple."   Simple Gifts, Joseph Brackett.

Three key points.

Sentence. We organise written English in sentences so that readers can understand it from its printed form alone,  without the personal touches and feedback that people exchange when they are talking.  A sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop. 

Verb.     Verbs indicate an action, a feeling or state of mind, or a state of things. Most verbs "do" things, but not all. Some are composed of more than one word - I have done my homework. I am doing my homework. It is essential to take time to practise identifying verbs, particularly the verbs to be - am, are, is, was, were and to have, as they link words or ideas together, but do  not "do" anything.  It is possible to have a sentence without a verb (see the opening paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House), but it is very unusual.  Verbs are the most important words, and there is little or no hope of progress in understanding and using grammar if the learner does not recognise verbs and know how they are used.

Subject. Very nearly all sentences have a subject and verb. This is a tricky idea, as the subject of a sentence is not, as in everyday life, what it is about, but whoever or whatever is doing what the verb does (or feels, or is). Grasping the idea of subject is, for many, the most difficult single element of grammar, and one that needs to be revisited and practised.

It is important because a change in the subject, or even a repetition of it as we are writing, almost always requires us to insert link words or punctuation so that we do not run two sentences together by mistake. It often helps to point out that the subject usually comes immediately before the verb. Questions such as "whodunit?" or "what is it?" can also help identify it 

Grammar on the Menu

1. Main.  Most of us like eating out, and most meals have a main course. In grammar, a main course (or clause)  has a subject and verb.

The dog    barks.

subject     verb.

We don't usually have two mains when we eat out - one parent told her daughter that "Daddy might, if he thought he could get away with it" - and we don't usually have two mains in a sentence. To avoid this as we write, we use a simple technique - when we repeat or change the subject, we add strong punctuation or a link word.

                       The dog barks                 and               it chases the postman.

                                                 using a link word

                                    The dog barks.  It chases the postman.

                           using strong punctuation, in this case a full stop

Strong punctuation contains a dot - . ? !  :  ;  or a dash  - .   A comma is weak punctuation. It can be used to group, or phrase, words within a sentence, but not to end one. Knowing where to use strong punctuation or a link word is the most important single factor in writing an accurate sentence. It can be helpful to have learners think of a punctuation mark as the word it represents - this gives a better sense of its importance than the mark itself.

2. Main + dessert. Link words let us add something to the main, without creating confusion over what comes first or is more important.

                    The postman ran away      because        the dog was barking.

                    The bus can't get through      if             you park there

                    The postman wasn't scared, although    the dog had barked at him.

Link words have different purposes, as we may wish to say different things, and these can be learned later. The most important point at this stage is to learn when they are needed.

 

3. Starter + main. (and the abominable "fronted adverbial".)   We often insert a word or phrase before the subject of a sentence, in order to set the scene. Here are examples:

Today, I got up early.

Because I'm usually late, I'm going to go to bed early tonight.

If we use a starter word or phrase, we usually insert a comma to mark off the main clause. This is a bit like removing a starter plate before serving the main - we don't actually leave the table and start again. These starters can be single words, or phrases, and there can be more than one of them

Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,  Two starter phrases

I heard a maiden singing in the valley below.   Main

(Interlude) Because a starter word adds some information to the verb - usually telling us when something happened - traditional grammar called them adverbs. Because they could be in the form of a phrase rather than a word, professors of linguistics, aping real scientists, decided to shorten "adverb or adverbial phrase" into "adverbial", saving themselves time, and imposing a layer of confusion on the general public. Because an adverb often follows the verb

Arsenal won easily

Mill Reef won at a canter

they decided to call a starter a "fronted adverbial", as it was placed before the verb. Suits you, sir, but this sesquipedalian verbiage does not help a ten year old.  

4. Starter + main + dessert. The starter plus main can be followed by a dessert using the rules above - that is, we insert strong punctuation or a link word after the main.

There are other ways of extending sentences, which can be added to the learner's personal repertoire as the teacher decides they are ready for them. We can, for example, add a aperitif through two starter phrases, or a coffee, if we don't mind paying the restaurant's markup. These, though, are the main principles of sentence construction, and the overriding one is that we can't have two mains in one sentence.

Time Zones. (draft)

When we speak, time is shared between ourselves and person or people we are talking to, and so is obvious. When we write, the other person is not there, and so we must make issues of time explicit. We do this by means of time zones, each of which gives us a range of options that we can use without moving out of it, and so losing track of time.

The main time zones are the present, the past and the future. As we don't know what will happen in the future, we tend not to stay there for long. As stories tell us what has already happened, they tend to be written in the past ("Rosie the hen went for a walk.").  Much public discussion, including politics and news, comes to us as it happens, in the present.

The old French word for time was le tens. English added e, to give us the word tense. This broke the link with time in normal English usage, and linguistics has taken this further by limiting the word to occasions where it uses a different form, as in the above quotation from Rosie's Walk. Other European languages have kept the link with time - Les temps, Die Zeiten, Los tiempos. We need to restore it, as it is the link between grammar and human experience.

We have three main ways of indicating a time zone.

• A word or phrase related to time.  Once upon a time... 
• The form of a verb - Marley was dead, to begin with. (Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
• Context. O'Dowd goes in command. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair.)

Once we are in a time zone, we can use different forms to indicate shades of meaning. These are the forms that have been given the name of tenses, but if they are simply forms, I suggest staying with that for the moment.

Present.  Simple form                      I play the piano.

              Continuous form                I am playing the piano.

 

Past.        Simple form                      I played the piano

               Composed form                 I have had my breakfast.

               Continuous form                I was playing the piano

               Double  form                     I had played the piano

Future.    Composed form                 I will play the piano later today.

Once we are in a time zone, we need to give our reader a signpost, usually a short phrase, if we move out of it. Remembering the zone we are in, and ways of moving out of it, is an important stage in developing control in writing, and takes practice. Roz Wilson's and Alan Peat's work on sentence construction can be very helpful in this. The main additional features of verbs, the passive voice and forms indicating a degree of uncertainty, can be introduced and explained as the need arises, which it certainly will in the course of writing. Traditional terminology here is only partly helpful. "Conditional" is ok, as "on condition that" can sometimes be substituted for "if".  "Subjunctive" is an obscurity, and rarely used in English outside a command form - "Let it be".

The key point, at each stage, is to explain each form in a way that makes sense to the person learning, and then to have them practise.

Part 2 of Simple Gifts, Slimmed Down Spelling, is here.

 

 

Grammatical terms and language learning - Greek or English?

One of the problems in restoring the place of grammar in the teaching of English has been the choice of terminology. Too often, terms developed by the twentieth century discipline of linguistics have been put straight into the school system without thought as to whether they are the most suitable for young children. Sir Michael Wilshaw compounded the error in a newsletter praising teachers for children's knowledge of the Greek terms phoneme and grapheme to describe sounds, letters and groups of letters. There is no evidence whatever to link the use of these terms with success in reading, and for some children they are a barrier rather than a help.

One of these is a boy of eight, who eight months ago had  severely limited language and no knowledge of reading despite extensive and expensive private tuition. In teaching him, I began by establishing a clear idea of the links between letters and sounds, and how to blend these to read words - phonics.

I did not use any terminology other than normal English, and never do unless a new word is essential, as in verb. This pupil might have been able to parrot the terms phoneme and grapheme, but they would not have contributed to his understanding. Rugh Miskin's Ditties, as ever, did. There is no irregularity in them, so the new learner can practise with no distractions. What the teacher says, works.

As we move to a book that uses the full range of English spelling, we need to build on this basis by explaining how 26 letters can be used to convey the 600,000 or more words that are used in English. This means adding to the child's knowledge  by showing how groups of letters such as th (the Norman substitute for the Anglo-Saxon thorn,  þ), le(table), and even ough, have been incorporated into the phonic base. The child can then use them as part of his arsenal to read new words. This is not difficult to do, and this brilliant animation of the Bayeux Tapestry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtGoBZ4D4_E   shows clearly the brute force behind the imposition of French words on English. They now amount to almost a third of the total. My pupil and his parents were fascinated by it. If you're interested, there is more on thorn here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7BSAaI7AZk .

The book we chose was Burglar Bill, by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.  Using my explanation of the variation in the way letters interact makes it easy to explain why Janet is not pronounced in the same way as Jane - a difficult if not impossible task if you use the Greek terminology of "split grapheme".  Allan is more difficult.  The ll usually alters the sound of a, as in all, wall, tall etc, so he had to learn that the variation he had worked hard to understand applied usually, but not always. Finally, Ahlberg, German for "Eel mountain" is a further import. It's phonics, but German phonics, just as fruit and biscuit are perfectly regular as French words, but not English ones.

We learned all of these things, and other words in the book, such as the difference between say and says, and the contraction of the voice (vowel) sounds in breakfast,  by explanation, practice and quick flashbacks to establish them in the pupil's memory. Memory has been abused in education for millennia, and still is. This is not a reason not to learn to use it properly, and it is a key element in Hirsch's approach - we only know things if we can remember them (or, occasionally, remember where to find them). As it happened, the pupil had not had a book to practise with over the week, and so I was delighted that he had remembered the variations (eg say, says) that we had worked on, as well as working out new words with increasing confidence. 

The key lies in using the teacher's knowledge of the full range of elements in English spelling to make them clear to the pupil in terms that are easy to understand. This applies in all areas of grammar, where current terminology is an unhappy combination of words developed during the Renaissance ( eg adjective, which is short for the original term "noun adjective", ie unable to stand on its own) and inventions of twentieth century linguistics, such as "determiner", which frequently does not determine anything at all.  Any grammatical terminology is better than none, but the best is both accurate and easily understood by the pupil. This is work in progress, and it is supported by the evidence from brain research on the growth of neural networks. The old educational idea of linking new material to things children already know is entirely consistent with this, and introducing ideas abstracted from things the child does not understand, does not. I discuss the approach I developed for older children who have problems with English in this peer-reviewed journal (not that I hold any brief for peer review in education.)  There is more to be done, but I'm sure we don't need Greek for young children, far less term such as "determiner" which are even less informative and transparent than those they have replaced.

Keep phonics and grammar simple, and cut out the rubbish.

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".  

Obscure terms	Plain English
phoneme	sound
grapheme	letter or group of letters
synthetic phonics	word-building, blending
connective	link word
subordinator	link word, starter word
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.

 

In the zone - teaching children about time and tense.

Teaching children to locate their writing clearly in time can be complicated, as there are several ways to do this.  The most important are:

• A starter word or phrase related to time.  Next week, I am on holiday. Once upon a time, there was... Today is my birthday. 

 

• The form of a verb - Marley was dead, to begin with. (Dickens, A Christmas Carol)

 

• Context. O'Dowd goes in command. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair.)

Very often, the first sentence we write sets a time zone of present or past. Future is less common, as we don't know what will happen in the future and so tend only to visit it briefly.  The zone may be set by the form of the first verb - Jack is, or was, waiting for a bus. It may also be set by a starter word or phrase. Yesterday, for example, puts us in the past zone, Tomorrow in the future. There is usually a comma after the starter word or phrase.

A good way of teaching this may be to put it in the context of Ros Wilson's and Alan Peat's work on sentence construction. Ros Wilson's idea that "If they can't say it, they can't write it," can be used to have children construct sentences in the past tense - variations on Alan Peat's "exciting sentences", and to use starters/time phrases (dubbed, confusingly, "adverbials" by academic linguists) to move from one zone to another. Straying out of zone without one of these signposts causes the reader to lose track of time, and so causes confusion.

I'm happy to collaborate with any teachers interested in developing the approach, in English or in other languages.

Churchill's Grammarian: Robert Somervell

The Churchill Centre has a splendid biography of Robert Somervell, who taught the great man English grammar at Harrow, and who lived to read this:

[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell--a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great--was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing--namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. 

Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence--which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greekepigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English, and I would whip them hard for that. 

Mr Somervell's inks are a good idea, but grammar needs a Churchill to make its big ideas clear to people in terms they can understand.  As Wittgenstein' said, "What can be said at all can be said simply."  Churchill's tribute makes excellent use of short words and short sentences. Grammarians should do likewise.

Lost in a Fog: how not to teach languages. Updated 19th June

To SOAS for the ALL London branch's excellent morning conference - certainly the best forum for London languages teachers to meet, and great value at £15 for members. The main theme was using the new (aka "target") language in the classroom. There were lots of good ideas for doing this, but I found myself disagreeing with this quote from Keith Johnson's Language Teaching and Skill Learning (1996):

One learns to land in fog by landing in fog, not by landing in clear skies.

Anyone sending a novice pilot to land in fog should advise them to write their will first. 

In teaching terms, there are at least two paths here. The path of the toolkits on this site, and of Michel Thomas with adults, is to make the early stages of learning very clear indeed to learners by linking them to what they know already, and by making each adjustment in thinking very easy in itself. The skies are as clear as the teacher can make them.  

The second established path is to "expose" them to language, in the hope that a lot of practice and encouragement will enable them to use it. There has to date been no attempt to compare one approach directly with another, but all I can say from experience is that the second results at best in short exclamations, and does not achieve the goal of enabling the learner to express their thoughts clearly - if with the mistakes we all make when we are learning - in the new language. For a fuller discussion of the issues, Dr Colin Christie's PhD thesis is downloadable here.

It does not do to underestimate the importance of these two alternatives. In order to speak in a new language, we need to be able to call up the words we need, and put them together in a way a native speaker can understand, in real time. This is demanding, and is not generally achieved in school language learning. Michel Thomas approached the challenge with adults by beginning with slow and accurate sentence formation, using shared words (aka cognates) for vocabulary, a very few verbs in a wide range of tenses, and pronouns instead of nouns wherever possible, so that pupils could focus all of their attention on grammatical structures rather than learning vocabulary. The approach set out in Dr Christie's thesis does not explain grammatical structures. The examples of pupils' language that he gives are almost all short, formulaic exclamations such as "Changez le prof", and there is some evidence of a small number of pupils dominating the exchanges. There is no hiding the contrast and even conflict between this approach and the full understanding which I see, and the late Michel Thomas saw, as essential.  

In his talk on Saturday, Dr Christie mentioned a Year 9 pupil, who said he could do nothing in French. Dr Christie said that what the pupil meant was that he could not say what he wanted to in French. The pupil was right, and he was wrong - if we are not teaching people to say what they want to say, we are not enabling them to communicate. Dr Christie's path leads to failure, frustration and ignorance. It is a scandal that it remains a key element of teacher training. 

PS. In a conversation after the Reading conference, reported below, Professor Theodoris Marinis told me that he had been able to detect differences in brain functioning after learning new languages by means of brain scans. Further details as soon as the work is published, but this appears to be the first time that the idea that learning languages changes brain functioning has been demonstrated directly.