Our approach to grammar is to convey the bare bones of it in as simple a form as possible, but by using card games, we give students an active role in discovering rules for themselves. It is necessary to use some very specific terms which may be unfamiliar, but we try to explain them in context. You could describe our approach as a Sentence Method. The practice of teaching the sentence as a unit goes back to George Farnham of Nebraska,
Reading consists - first in gaining the thoughts of an author from written or printed language- second in giving oral expression to these thoughts... The first principle to be observed in teaching written language is that things are cognized as wholes... What is the whole, or what is the unit of expression?
Thoughts… are materials of the mind out of which complex relations are constructed. The thought is the unit of thinking. It follows that the sentence is the unit of expression. We acquire knowledge of the parts of an object by first considering it as a whole. (Farnham, 1887)
Modern English grammars such as those by Scott et al (1968) and Leech and Svartik (2002), have shown how to break down the sentence into its component parts, i.e. clauses. Simple sentences contain only one clause, but complex sentences can contain several clauses. While we begin by dealing with the sentence as a whole, experience in our games of adding clauses to the sentence allows the learner to begin to understand that clauses are parts of the sentence.
Literacy teachers are aware that students who struggle with literacy difficulties are much more familiar with spoken than written discourse. In their English Grammar for Today, looking at the difference between written and spoken English, Leech et al (1982) state that 'spoken grammar is less complex than written grammar,' and after looking at the differences in length and complexity of the two, they go on to say:
…but if we accept that clauses, and stand-alone non-clausal units are the operative units of spoken grammar, then the simplicity of the basic building blocks of speech is not surprising
So I would describe the game essentially as a clause-building method. The game deals with sentence structure and students still have to learn the normal rules of capitalization and punctuation. However, the game's structure is really based on building lexical words into clauses, which is the more natural unit of spoken English.
Our approach has similarities to the much more comprehensive materials introduced by the School Council Programme led by M.A.K. Halliday in the early 1970s called Breakthrough to Literacy which was designed as a whole-school approach and involved multiple sets of small pieces of card-carrying single words, from which children built sentences to copy. In the description of the theory behind Breakthrough, there is some exploration of the difference between grammatical and lexical words (ibid: 96) and the development of awareness of structure. Another comprehensive system is the Oxford Reading Tree (2013), which combined a series of reading books of limited vocabulary and delightful illustrations with flash cards used to copy the sentences in the books.
Besides being designed for very young children, the above methods depend upon the learner having to find every word of her/his sentence in the materials provided, which can be very frustrating. In the Oxford Reading Tree no distinction is made between the functions of different kinds of word in making sentences from the flash cards. Our method consists of packs of playing cards that provide the referential (or lexical) words from which the player builds his own communication. This basic game only requires two cards to form
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