An interactive method for helping learners to understand how
sentences are structured Freda Davis Freda qualified as a teacher in 1963 and worked for some years in primary education before gaining a degree in English at Lancaster University in 1974. After volunteering in adult literacy, Freda created a grammar teaching card game and marketed it as Write-it through teacher centres in the 1970s. Publishers at the time said there was no market for literacy materials. After a mixed career in both teaching and voluntary organisations, Freda took up the game again, renamed Buddenbuk, on retirement and is exploring its value in teaching literacy and grammar skills. The push for Functional Skills in literacy brings these two areas together. Freda presented a workshop at the conference where around 15 participants had the opportunity to play the sentence-making games and discuss matters of sentence structure and grammatical words. Freda can be contacted on
freda247davis@gmail.com
Making implicit knowledge explicit I would like to talk briefly about the requirement to look at English grammar within Functional Skills, and the challenge faced by those who need to explain it. I will give an outline of what I see as some of the key grammatical principles of English grammar, and then follow with a description of our grammar teaching game, and how it addresses these principles.
In the government document National Literacy Strategy Grammar for Writing, the authors say in the introduction:
All pupils have extensive grammatical knowledge. Much of this is implicit, but they are able to generalise and improvise from this knowledge. Teaching which focuses on grammar helps to make this knowledge explicit, extend children's range and develop more confident and versatile language use.
…the purpose of teaching grammar…is about making children aware of key grammatical principles and their effects, to increase the range of choices open to them when they write. (DfEE, 2000)
At the workshop, we began by asking what relationship people felt they had to grammar. There was a heavy silence, and then one brave participant put up her hand and admitted that probably like most people present, she was terrified by it. Others seemed to agree. This comment revealed a difficulty for literacy teachers with regard to the expectations of the DfEE. The teaching of grammar had not been a priority in many schools, and even in many university English departments for a long time.
Another difficulty is the perceived excessive detail of grammar books and their elevated price. How do you find your way through this forest of words? There are good courses for teaching English, and useful grammars, but not everyone has the opportunity to access them.
On the other hand, if you speak English, you have, as the DfEE puts it, an implicit knowledge of the subject. How hard can it be to explain? But if we believe that students learn through experience, we need to give them opportunities to explore the language and work out how it works. This needs open-ended, discovery-style and hands-on materials which allow students to find things out for themselves.
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