Grammar: why am I talking about it?

1. Some people on twitter assume that I am someone who can't possibly know anything about 'grammar' because a) I write children's books and b) I'm opposed to young children learning much of the 'grammar',  that is in the KS1 and KS2 tests.

2. I hate to do this but as several people have asked:
a) at primary school in the 1950s, we did parts of speech, a bit on relative clauses and comparatives (!) and not much more. They were much more anxious about maths, and verbal reasoning tests.

b) At Grammar school, in English we did 'box analysis' and  'clause analysis' - loads of it ie breaking up sentences into phrases and clauses and putting them back again. In French, Latin and German (which I did) we did conjugations, declensions, tenses, moods much of which we learned by rote.

c) At university I did historical linguistics along with learning Anglo-Saxon (or 'Old English') and then some Middle English.

d) On various occasions, I've voluntarily put myself through mini-courses in the various kinds of grammar available, especially M.A.K. Halliday. I've also read much of David Crystal's work.

e)  I've also immersed myself in other ways of talking and writing and about language - mostly socio-linguistics of various kinds e.g. Labov, Dell Hymes, Trudgill.

f)  Since 1998, I've presented about 20 half-hour programmes a year for BBC Radio 4 on 'language in use' ie a form of descriptive linguistics to describe how people use language.  I'm still presenting that, now alongside linguist Laura Wright.

g) Though it's no formal qualification, my father was an applied linguist and we must have spent hundreds of hours talking about language in literature, education, daily life etc. and I have read most of his work.

f) I have an MA and a Ph.D. in children's literature much of which involved considering how it is we handle language in order to read and write: a combination of 'intertextuality' and 'rhetoric' - both branches of applied linguistics.

3. The result of all this leads me to think that there is absolutely no harm, and perhaps some advantage FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN in knowing the generally shared names for the basic parts of speech and a bit on subject-verb structures. Beyond that for this age of child I think that this particular kind of grammar  involves too much work for too little return to spend time figuring out, learning and spotting such structures as 'determiners', 'fronted adverbials', 'embedded relative clauses', specific names for tenses e.g. 'present perfect progressive'.

4. The kind of 'grammar' on offer in these tests is a) not the only way of describing language and b) not necessarily the best 'knowledge about language' (KAL) to be taught in order to help children write well.

5. This kind of 'grammar' on offer to primary children attempts to describe patterns, conventions and 'rules' derived from 'meaning' and 'function' and then declares these as correct. It cannot and does not explain or explore changes in use, changes in meaning, variations in use, variations in meaning, or indeed use itself. Instead, it takes simplified, 'ideal' sentences or words, takes them out of any context of actual use and demands that children identify features of this non-real language. As a result, children are not invited to explore or understand language as it actually is.

6. This kind of 'grammar' on offer to primary children keeps trying to pin down a perfect or pure or totally correct way to describe a written language feature and give it a name. As a result. in my own lifetime, this terminology has changed many times over and gives rise to many arguments. In fact, more often than not, there isn't a more or less right way of talking about it, because the terminology is constantly being derived from the system itself, without referring outside and back to meaning, context and social function ie how and why is a particular  word/phrase/clause/sentence being used at that particular moment by those particular people. The terms themselves are often opaque and don't refer to meaning and social function - though, mysteriously some of them do, like 'possessive' ie it indicates that we 'possess' things in real life 'out there' and therefore need words to describe and indicate 'possession'. 'Present perfect progressive' doesn't indicate anything of meaning and social function.

7. Let's not forget for a single second: this whole grammar apparatus was not introduced into schools because people in education thought it was a good idea. It was introduced because the Bew Report of 2011 that was set up by Michael Gove to make recommendations about 'assessment and accountability' said that 'Grammar, punctuation and spelling' were a good means by which teaching (not children!) could be assessed because grammar, punctuation and spelling questions have 'right and wrong answers'. In short,  that is an untruth.

One exemplification of that: Schools Minister, Nick Gibb made what was described as a 'mistake' when asked to identify a word in a sentence. In fact, all that he did was give one of two alternatives for that word. It is only this kind of grammar test that calls it a mistake. It's the test that is the mistake, not the man who imposes it!

8. If we started again and wanted to think of how best to talk about language in primary schools we would start with investigation of forms of language in use. And we would do this alongside many forms of playing with and using language that children would enjoy and find interesting and useful for their writing.

9. The 'grammar' that is being taught is being applied artificially to the children's writing as a measure of what is supposedly good writing. In other words, the children are being asked to use things like 'embedded relative clauses' as the criterion. The only reason for this is that it then becomes a measurable, testable quantity. However, that has nothing to do with what makes writing good. Writing is being distorted to fit this particular kind of 'grammar'.

BBC's 'Last White People on Earth', last night

My first quick thoughts were:

a) it's one thing to film people talking about their views of their own situation, the world, what they think of other people - even their theories of how the world should be, but it's quite another to let that drift into their theories about the past.

b) On the matter of their theories about the world and how it could be, you have a choice as a film-maker as to whether you put those theories up against anyone else's. Quite obviously, the film chose not to. So we hardly heard views which contradicted or gave any kind of counter-narrative to those in the film.

c) Both the narration and the people in the film talked about history. There were many distortions and fibs here. The commentary used the word 'thrived' to describe the lives of people in Newham in the 1930s and 40s. Oh please! By ring-fencing 'Newham' (which didn't exist before the 1960s as an entity) it conveniently left out two major earlier migrant 'invasions' - Irish and Jewish. So, the present state of affairs could be presented as 'new', 'unprecedented' etc etc. Even worse, it enabled the people on screen to represent themselves as the 'true' East Enders. Either there is no single 'true' East Ender, or it has to include these two major migrations and many smaller ones. From memory, I don't think Irish migration was mentioned once, and the only Jewish one was when the bloke in the working-men's club said that over there is 'Lou the Jew - he don't mind' (meaning he doesn't mind being called 'Lou the Jew').

d) You'd've thought from the film that Newham was experiencing one single demographic change: 'Asians coming in, whites moving out'. In fact, there is another one which is that with rising house prices, there is and will continue to be an influx of people of all backgrounds - including white - to buy the houses that white working class people are leaving.

e) The film cast as a tragedy (tears etc) that people are moving to Hornchurch and Rayleigh. Oh please! Another way to talk of this is to describe it as embourgeoisement or 'moving up' enabled by the fact that people can sell their houses for sums way higher than any price they could have got 20 years ago. The film described the move as a 'push' but no serious history of migration in and around cities (e.g. the story of Chicago) would limit it to 'push' because a 'new lot' came in. This pattern has been repeated all over the world, many, many times and it most certainly isn't always a history of 'white flight'. What I mean is that there is 'push' but there's also 'pull' and 'rising' as factors too.

f) Beware the film-makers justifying what they did with reference to e.g. the old woman saying goodbye to the Somali family and b) the 'irony' of the boxer talking about crime going up, even though his own dad was in prison. That's how these film-makers talk up what they do.

How to engage an audience? Good conjunctions and suffixes. [Irony alert]

A comment on my Facebook page:

"I observed one of our students teaching a lesson this morning. It was a Year 2 class [6/7 year olds] and the children were asked to write a description of a particular scene they'd been given as a picture. The student asked them what they needed in a descriptive piece of writing to engage the audience. The answers they gave made me feel quite sad... good noun phrases, conjunctions and proper use of a suffix. "



On a technical point here: the reason why this sort of thing is possible is because what the government call 'grammar' is in fact a way of talking about language that leaves out how we use words to mean things in all our social interactions (what I keep calling things like 'full meaning' and 'social function'). The more you narrow down the terminology to what are supposedly pure descriptions of the 'system' of language, the less you engage with what words, phrases, clauses, paragraphs, chapters, books do - and indeed the more you overlook speech, where what we say deviates so much from the neat little packaged systems of 'sentence grammar'.

So, in the above comment, the teacher is asking the children about social function - how to engage an audience. They reply with 'system grammar' as if knowing system grammar engages an audience. That's what SPaG does. It lies about how to be effective.

How SPaG wastes space and wastes the mind.

Q. 38

Write a sentence using the word 'point' as a verb. Do not change the word.

Remember to punctuate your sentence correctly.


Write a sentence using the word 'point' as a noun. Do not change the word.
Remember to punctuate your sentence correctly.



Directions to those people marking this question according to the 'Mark Scheme':

Award 1 mark for a grammatically correct sentence that uses point as a verb and that is correctly punctuated, e.g.

I saw the teacher point at the board.

Do not accept responses that use an inflected ending of point, e.g. Ushma pointed at the book she wanted.

Award 1 mark for a grammatically correct sentence that uses point as a noun and that is correctly punctuated, e.g.

I sharpened my pencil to a fine point.

Do not accept responses that use an inflected ending of point, e.g. The red team scored more points than the blue team. 

----------------------------

In real life, we use some or many or all of the forms of the word 'point' : e.g. points, pointing, pointed.

As the mark scheme says, if, say,  you put 'a' or 'the' in front of it, you could - depending on the use - say, 'point' or 'points'. If you use it with a 'subject' in front of it, you might say, 'She pointed at the chair', or 'They were pointing at the ceiling'. 

But these would be WRONG because the instruction in the question says that you MUST NOT. 

Now, remember that this paper is supposedly about 'grammar'. The grammar point being shown by this question is that the word 'point' is available to be used as a noun or a verb. 

So, if this was really a question about finding out what children know (as opposed to being part of a test to measure teachers' ability to teach this stuff) then those 'inflected endings' would be acceptable if the 'grammar' was right. 

Really, then, what's being tested is a) the ability to use 'point' as a noun and as a verb BUT ONLY IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE QUESTION. In other words, this is as much a test of whether the child reads and understands that pointless (excuse pun) question, as it is of 'getting' that bit of grammar. 

Of course, you could also use 'point' as a command - and therefore a 'verb': as in 'Point!' or 'Point.' I would seriously doubt that the examiners would allow that. 

Why not? Because we are in the crazy SPaG-world of language taken out of context where the word 'word' (!) is easy to talk about as if it is something real and 'point' and 'points' are supposedly different words. When linguists want to talk about words in real use (and not in imaginary SPaG-land), linguists prefer to talk about 'lexemes' to talk about a word like 'point' being used in real sentences as, say,  'points', 'pointing', 'pointed'. 

But in SPaG-land, for no useful reason, 'points', 'pointing' and 'pointed' are WRONG. 

FURTHER:

According to SPaG-land, (and this year's test) the Oxford or 'serial' comma is WRONG. It isn't wrong. It's an alternative use. If you see "I can't find the bats, balls, caps, and stumps' THAT IS OK. SPaG is wrong to say that it's wrong. It's just one way to write it.

FURTHER:

1. According to SPaG-land, the word 'fierce' has a 'true opposite'. Quite simply this is nonsense. No single word, isolated on its own has a single 'true opposite'.  We can never totally predict how a word might be used. In fact, in another part of the school, teachers will be working hard to help children see that in literature, writers use words in ambiguous and fresh ways that deliberately make writing interesting and surprising. In SPaG-land, they isolate a word like 'fierce', pretend that it has one meaning, pretend therefore only words meaning 'e.g. gentle or calm' (see mark scheme) are 'true opposites'. 

How about 'We were taught by Mr Jones. If we talked in lessons, he  got really fierce'? 

Whatever the 'true opposite' of 'fierce' is in this context, it certainly isn't 'gentle' or 'calm'. The sense here is of someone being loud and punishing so if we really want to waste time on opposites, the opposite would be 'quiet' or even 'kind' or 'nice' - words that children use to describe teachers who are not 'fierce'! 

Apart from anything else, all this really has nothing whatsoever to do with grammar, punctuation or spelling. The only reason why children are doing this particular bit of rubbish is because that's what the Victorians did. 

If it's supposed to be a window on semantics (meaning), then it's a useless, irrelevant and misleading way to do it. 

The more we rip language out of context, the more difficult we make it to study how it is really used and how language itself changes. 

2. Remember the only reason why there was a question on the 'subjunctive' is because Michael Gove said there had to be one. No other reason.  

Next week, Jeremy Hunt will tell surgeons what clamps to use when operating on bowel cancer. 

To be or not to be that is the exam question.

"To be or not to be that is the question."

Underline the correct insubordinate conjunction in the sentence above.

In one word say why the sentence above is correct.

What is the correct synonym of 'the'?

Why is the writer?

Explain in less than one word what is the correct answer to the question.

Is the writer experiencing an existential crisis?
Yes?
No?
Both?

Which of the following is true? (tick one box only)
a) to be
b) not to be
c) that is the question
d) or.

With close reference to the text, show why the sentence is effective.

Put the word 'to' into your own words.

Would the following line be an improvement?
'To be? Or not to be? Those are the questions.'

Who won the iambic pentameter in the last Olympics?

I am an exam designer stuck in an exam design factory. Help. Get me out of here.

What is real science and how much of it can you teach at GCSE?

A science teacher put this list of things on my Facebook by way of defining what an ideal science education does:

"Doing and learning going hand in hand:
seeing, questioning, predicting, hypothesising, testing, reviewing, exploring: equalling real understanding, to then reapply in other contexts."


Hand on heart, science teachers - AND I'M NOT BLAMING YOU, I KNOW YOU HAVE TO TEACH WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO TEACH - how much of this were you able to do with your GCSE students?

(I'm on twitter and Facebook if you want to reply.)

To those defending this year's GCSE Science exams

I'm beginning to find the Shuttup School of criticism being directed to pupils and parents who are objecting the science GCSE a little tiresome. The point is that Michael Gove deliberately upped the 'knowledge' content of these exams. He was warned by the Select Committee that this didn't make education better and didn't narrow the difference between the lowest scoring pupils and the highest. We now know that what it's also done is squeeze the practical side of science down to a very rudimentary core.


To which I ask, what's 'scientific' about the kind of cramming that I see our daughter doing for these exams? She is simply learning off by heart loads of stuff that she hasn't seen demonstrated let alone had a chance to experiment with it herself. This isn't science. It's the subject known as Learning-off-by-heart. It's what Judi Dench does without the 'perform it well' component. It may or may not be connected to any understanding of what is being learned. It is purely an arbitrary good side effect if it is. It may well not involve any sense of how what is being learned may be applied or how it manifests itself in the real world. It may. Or it may not.

As I say, this is not the science of investigation of, experimentation of, proving and 'reproducing' phenomena.

Those who are defending this stuff might consider what happens to those pupils who are going to fail this stuff? What have they got from the course? Awareness of scientific method and principles? And who's to say that this stuff is going to help create scientists?

16-step programme to make education better. Not.

1. Look across the whole glorious landscape of human wisdom and knowledge.
2. Select from it those parts of it that can be chopped up into 'subjects'.
3. Within these subjects, select those parts of it that you think you can call 'core' or 'essential'.  
4. Order teachers to teach the 'subjects'.
5. Tell examiners to test the subjects in ways that will show that human beings, when measured in terms of their ability to answer questions on the test, are distributed on a graph in the same way every time:  that is, according to what's known as the 'bell curve'. 
6.  Reward examiners for devising tests which do indeed produce the bell curve. 
7. Get people to say that the bell curve is 'natural' or that this shows something important about what defines us as human beings. 
8. Ignore the fact that you have chopped up knowledge in such a way (mostly in little bits which have right/wrong answers) so as to make it precisely the kind that can be measured in this way. 
9. Ignore the fact that there are people in the real world, outside of education, saying that - looking across the whole glorious landscape of human wisdom and knowledge -  there are many, many things, processes, events, ways of inventing, being and interacting that are not included in the self-serving circle of producing chopped-up knowledge for the bell curve, no matter how it is dignified with such names as 'core knowledge'. 
10. Tell teachers to teach children to sit the tests.
11. Tell the public that it's naughty of teachers to teach children to sit the tests. 
12. Take note of the fact that  children do indeed come out in the shape of a bell curve but don't make too much fuss about it in case people cotton on to the fact that the whole thing was set up to produce the bell curve in the first place. 
13. Ensure that sufficient numbers of people running all this call this 'fair', 'sensible', 'reliable' and 'valid'. 
14. Tell the population that this is 'rigorous' because children are learning the 'basics' now. 
15.. Try to obscure from view that the tests have a secondary purpose in terms of forcing conversion of local authority schools to become academies, and academies to become...er....academies in an endless cycle of disruption, stress and pressure. 
16. Say that education is getting better. 

"My kid did fine, so the exam must be fine." Not.

I can see on the comments thread following my outburst about AQA on Facebook quite a few comments that read along the lines of 'my child thought it was fine'.

The problem with that as a critique of an exam or the exam system as a whole, is that it misses the fact that the whole point of the exam system is to engineer a sufficient number of fails. The fact that some kids come home and say, 'It was OK' is because in all probability they're not the 'fails'.

The questions arise then about:

a) why do we have a system of testing that engineers a sufficient number of fails? what is the use of value of such a system?

b) do the examiners know that the people failing fail for the same reasons? If not, then the test may well not be testing what it's supposed to be testing. So, if a 'subject' has 47 topics and you only examine on 11 of them (that's what our daughter calculated), then how do the examiners know if there is or is not some kind of bias on how they have chosen these topics?

c) what was the purpose in teaching 47 topics of the students are only going to be tested on 11 of them? Is it because the other 36 topics are of equal importance in...er...life? or is it really, as some of us suspect, simply slabs of learnable-off-by-heart stuff, with no real scientific principles involved? So really, it might just as well be the subway map of New York City, or the sequence of archbishops of Canterbury.

d) why is it necessary to have one of these kinds of tests at 16, if students now stay on till 18? If it's about choosing preferences for the next 2 years, there are ways of doing this other than plying students with the stress of 'summative' testing.

e) the test is also a race against time. Even summative tests don't have to be. Another model is to have hundreds of questions, a fixed but long length of time. The students are told that no one ever finishes the exam. Just pick the questions you can do. So in the fixed length of time, you show what you can do. Several of my finals papers for my first degree were in effect like that. This meant that at least we could show what we knew rather than examiners playing games with us to find out what we didn't know. After all, we always don't know loads! What's there to prove?!

Why don't they use that model? Because it is 

i) not punitive and authoritarian, and the exam system is based on puritan ethics about achievement being 'good' and failure being a sin (I jest not), 

ii) it may well not produce a nice bell curve and the whole system relies on a belief that we are all distributed on this bell curve when it comes to our abilities - the tests are devised to produce the bell curve not the other way round, that the bell curve so happens to describe what we are like! 

iii) plenty of students who would normally fail would do better and could be shown to have 'attained' something and even understood it and enjoyed doing it,

iv) teachers teaching to such a test would inevitably engage with much more 'formative' assessment, helping students to become knowledgeable about stuff that the students had chosen to study.

(I'm not saying this is ideal, by a long chalk, but in its own way , it's marginally better than the system in place.)

Core knowledge - a riff and some questions

People who have written to the DfE to complain about this year's SATs have received letters back from the DfE which explain that the children were tested on 'core knowledge'.

Let's riff on that one for a moment.

Who decided what was or was not 'core' knowledge? And what is it anyway?

If you've helped your child through the SATs and SPaG tests you'll know what some of these are: being able to fill in a subjunctive into a gap in a single sentence, coming up with the 'antonym' for a word, identifying the name of a tense of a verb, and so on.

Many people have questioned whether this is necessary core knowledge for 10 and 11 year olds. Some of it maybe, but all of it?

Now one key principle lying behind this core is testing. It's not a sideshow or an afterthought. It runs through the idea of core knowledge. In essence, core knowledge is not only core because of its actual or supposed status in our culture(s) but also because it can be tested in standardised tests. How else would governments know that it was being taught and learned? (As I keep saying, this was the justification for including SPaG testing when it was first mooted in the Bew Report of 2011. It was not because it was good, or great or the best. Simply that it could be tested reliably with 'right/wrong' answers.)

Core knowledge can be justified on the basis of very highflown stuff about the 'best that's known' and that sort of thing, but the rather more mundane truth is that knowledge can be as 'best'  as it wants but if it can't be sliced and diced up and put through a test, it won't make the grade as being suitable to be taught.

Take food. That's pretty essential stuff. In and around what's best to know about food are 'facts' about how to prepare it and cook it. If you eat meat, and you eat chicken, and you want to eat chicken, then knowing how long to cook a chicken is pretty good to avoid getting ill or dying.

Another good thing to know is the Heimlich manoeuvre. The design of our windpipes and gullets is not great, because food has to pass over the entrance of our windpipe to get to our gullets. If a bit of food gets stuck in the windpipe, we choke. Slapping someone on the back can well end up with the food getting more stuck. The Heimlich manoeuvre is a safer thing to do.

So, here are two 'facts': the time it takes to cook chicken so as to avoid dying; the thing to do if someone's choking to help them not die.
Rider to the one about chicken - a test to know if the chicken is cooked, is very handy too.

Are these core knowledge? If yes, I'll shuttup - (or think of some other things that might not be core knowledge!)
If no, why not?

One afterthought: if core knowledge is so vital, and testing for core knowledge is so vital, this means that core knowledge goes through the system that distributes 'owners' of core knowledge (pupils) on the basis of a 'bell curve'. In fact the tests for core knowledge ownership must, must, must be distributed on a bell curve or the test will be deemed as not right.

This means that there is a pre-judged set of pupils who will fail to acquire the core knowledge - or deemed to have failed and marked as that.  The justification for core knowledge is that it liberates the disadvantaged.

Who then are these pre-judged fails? What do they get from not getting to own the core knowledge? How is this different from any other knowledge-transmission-and-test systems? How liberated from their disadvantage (if they are indeed largely people deemed as being disadvantaged) are the people pre-judged to be fails?

Transcript of planning meeting at Exams HQ - revealed!

Exam manager: So, Examiner 1, I've been looking at the paper you've written. It's interesting but I think too many children will be able to do it.

Examiner 1: Really, sir? And what's the matter with that?

Exam manager: I don't think you've understood some basic principles here, Examiner 1. The papers we deliver to Off-colour have to guarantee sufficient numbers of fails, otherwise it won't look like education is rigorous.


Examiner 1: But aren't we just trying to find out if the children know the stuff they're being taught?

Exam manager: Don't be a donkey, Examiner 1. We're talking about standards here. We need to show standards by thinking up questions that thousands of children can't do. Anything: trick questions, words that children have never come across before, wording of questions that loads of children won't understand, questions full of references that loads of them won't know...all that will do.

Examiner 1: Right sir. I'll get down to the rewrites, straight away.

Are arts subjects getting squeezed out by the eBacc system? A teacher replies yes, here's how

I asked this question on Facebook and twitter. This is one reply I've received:




"The SLT at my school is trying, I think, to be supportive of the arts, but they seem to see this as some sort of largesse on their behalf. Several important changes have occurred that have a real impact on the uptake and provision of arts subjects at GCSE. 

1. It's all based on the Progress 8 'bucket' system. Buckets 1 and 2 have all the EBACC subjects in and Bucket 3 the rest, which are clearly seen as fripperies or adjuncts. Realistically, this means that the majority of students can only choose ONE subject from the third bucket - PE, art, music, drama, dance, design technology, food technology, etc. This is obviously very restrictive. 

2. Many students are 'encouraged' to take extra EBACC subjects instead of an arts subject from Bucket 3, because this gives them more opportunities to meet the EBACC requirements, i.e. If they fail history, for example, they have geography to fall back on, rather than music, which doesn't count. 

3. By 'encouraged' I mean coerced. They have been withdrawn from lessons for one-to-one meetings, where they have been told, for example, that they won't get into uni if they have a drama GCSE, and that universities require them to have an EBACC. (Not true.) 

4. Students will start their GCSEs in arts subjects in year 9, completing them in year 10. This is, I think, an admirable attempt to ensure we keep a broad (ish) curriculum, but it does of course mean that all students get one year less studying these subjects, and that they take their exams when they are younger and less likely to achieve high marks, thus further devaluing the qualification. 

5. On top of this, the new GCSE specifications mean that a lot of subjects are now more theoretical than practical, e.g. Both drama and PE GCSEs will be assessed with a 30% practical/70% theoretical split. This is obviously part of the same ideological assault on practical subjects, adding to the assumption that only one type of learning is valid/valued. "

This year's Phonics Screening Check - here it is.

I
can
say
all
these
words
on
this
phonics
screening
check
out
loud
but
I
can't
under
stand
them
Nick
Gibb
says
I'm
good
at
read
ing
My
friend
can't
say
all
the
words
right
but
she
tells
me
what
they
mean
Nick
Gibb
says
she's
bad
at
read
ing
We
all
love
Nick
Gibb
very
much

Grammar Lesson - poem

I wrote this a long time ago:



GRAMMAR LESSON
by Michael Rosen


A teacher said:
A noun is a naming word.
What is the naming word in the sentence,
'He named the ship Lusitania'?
'Named', said George.
'WRONG. It's ship.'

The teacher said:
A verb is a doing word.
What is the doing word
In the sentence
'I like doing homework'?
'Doing' said George.
'WRONG - it's like.'

The teacher said:
An adjective is a describing word.
What is a describing word
In the sentence
'Describing sunsets is boring'?
'Describing' said George.
'WRONG - it's boring.'
'I know it is,' said George. 

They say we've politicised the children's stress. No, it's the stress that's political.

When you have high stakes*, summative**, norm-referenced*** testing, (e.g. SATs) you have to have enough questions which a given percentage of people will get wrong. That's because the people who design these tests are told that the results have to come out looking right on a particular kind of graph. This is the so-called 'normal' distribution of children or students doing a given exam. If a test is given and 'too many' children appear to have done well, then the test will be condemned as being 'too easy' and newspaper columnists will say that the country is going to the dogs. 

So, these kinds of tests must have the 'right' proportion of failures. It has to be built-in to the test, and into the lead-up to the tests - in other words into what we call 'education' (!).  

To a certain extent, it really doesn't matter exactly what the knowledge is in these questions, so long as it can produce these failures.  Now, of course, there's a whole lot of bluster and posturing that goes on about 'core knowledge', and the 'knowledge-based curriculum' and 'tradition' and the 'basics' to buttress up the idea that this core knowledge is essential. In fact, the more people in power can get the press to concentrate on this aspect of the matter, the less likely they will notice or care about the failure-machine embedded in such testing. So, all week we've heard Nick Gibb going on about 'standards' and the 'basics' as if knowing what  'fronted adverbial' is, is 'basic'. Whatever it is, it sure ain't 'basic'! But it works: the press buy the idea, and imagine that somehow such tests are 'finally' getting to grip with the 'huge problem' of England's 'low achievement'. This neatly overlooks the fact that any 'low achievement' is in fact constructed or produced by the tests themselves! To repeat: they are an essential part of their design.

The instrument by which the failure is brought about is through chopping up the knowledge (e.g. 'grammar' or e.g. 'maths') in such a way that only questions with right or wrong answers are asked or can be asked. This is a clear example of how the way we chop up knowledge becomes the knowledge itself. So knowledge isn't simply a 'what' or a 'body of facts' but a 'how', in that we are trained to think of knowledge as a series of right/wrong features. 

As I've said before, this was made explicit in the reasoning behind why the SPaG/GPS test came in. Lord Bew in the Bew Report (2011) made clear that this test was suitable and appropriate for making schools 'accountable' precisely because Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar were subjects for which there were 'right and wrong answers'. It can not be repeated often enough: this is not true. The only way it can be made to be true is by squeezing and distorting the 'knowledge-base' (the facts) about grammar, spelling and punctuation in such a way as to make it possible to ask questions which produce right and wrong answers, according to the marking scheme. 

When Nick Gibb fluffed his answer to Martha Kearney on the radio about identifying a word as a 'subordinate conjunction', he wasn't actually wrong in the broadest sense. He found himself in a field of indeterminacy and debate: linguists argue and dispute about how to name bits of grammar.  So, it wasn't actually Gibb who was 'wrong', it was the test! Gibb exemplified exactly why such tests are wrong ie because there isn't a right/wrong answer to that question.  Such a question - the one he was asked - is designed  precisely to produce sufficient numbers of children who will get it 'wrong', even though there is no right or wrong answer. In other words, the knowledge base is distorted by the testing system in order to produce failure. 

So when I've said in the past that these tests are 'about right/wrong', in a way I've over-complicated it. The core purpose is that they're about finding enough children to be  'wrong', to 'fail'.  Any teacher looking at one of these tests knows which questions on them will produce the fails. It happened in yesterday's KS2 Maths, paper 2. Teachers know that though many of the children will have understood the concepts behind the questions, the wording of those questions would have guaranteed failure for many children. 

Now, when you lock this 'fail-safe' system into a restructuring of education, then you have simply hijacked 'assessment' to do the job of changing schools from being local authority schools to academies. Children's guaranteed failure is the instrument through which academisation is done. 

So, if you are a teacher or parent, and you see that look on a child's face, when they look sad, or disappointed or have a sense of 'un-worth' or when they are stressed and upset, these are all 'necessary' parts of a political project. The stress is political. 

It's not us who have 'politicised' this stress. It's a necessary and essential part of a political programme to take schools out of our hands and give them (on 125 year leases) to sponsors - whoever they might be. 

*high stakes - it's useful to use this expression to describe these centrally run, centrally directed mass tests. The question here is whether we think governments have the right to do this in a child's school career once (e.g. at 18), twice, or, as some favour, many times. There is an argument for saying that once you've introduced high stakes testing, then it is inevitable that these will be summative (see below) and norm-referenced (see below). Once that apparatus is in place, and the high stakes tests are frequent, you have in fact determined the curriculum, the nature of teaching, the child's experience of education, teacher-training, parent-expectation. This makes the matter of how often there are high stakes tests absolutely critical. Put another way, how much teacher-pupil contact time (lessons) can be devoted to education that is not immediately or directly in the grip of high stakes testing?

**summative - as the name implies, are tests which supposedly sum up, and test a given chunk of knowledge in a kind of do-or-die sort of a way ie with no correction, debate, dialogue. More often than not, they are not 'diagnostic'. That's to say they are not designed to help the learner to discover how to do better or what's gone wrong, because the test comes at the end of a bit of learning. It's too late for helping the learner. One key alternative to summative testing, is 'formative' testing, which in its various types could or should involve learners and teachers making assessments of how both could improve what they're doing. 

***norm-referenced - this means the kind of test where the results are 'plotted' on a graph against a 'norm'. Either before the children take the test or after a line is drawn across the distribution of marks which says this is the 'norm' - a kind of 'pass-mark', if you like. All marks are then set against this. In other words, your final mark is not about whether you have 'attained' or 'learned a given amount of knowledge' but whether you hit the 'norm' or are above or below it. A key attainment test we all know about is the 'driving test'. Now imagine passing the driving test, and the examiner takes your results back to central office, where they decide that 'too many' people have passed it this month, so it's been decided that you haven't passed! That's norm referencing. The alternative to this is'criterion referencing' which does indeed rest on attainment: has the candidate learned/done what was required of him/her? 

Note: governments all over the world very rarely openly admit that their high stakes testing is fully and wholeheartedly norm-referenced. For them to do so, would then educate the press and everyone else to the fact that the world's exam systems are in fact designed to produce a percentage of failures who will then be not entitled to more education. What's more, the fact that this is pre-judged before candidates go into the exam halls, detracts from the whole illusion that it's possible for 'everyone' to succeed. So 'anyone might succeed' is inflated into 'everyone can succeed' when quite clearly the system is rigged and sustained on the basis that 'everyone can not and must not succeed.' 

The children's SATs stress is the symptom, not the 'illness' itself

The central problem with the SATs is not actually that our children are finding them hard or distressing. That is more a symptom than the core problem - the illness, if you like.

The core problem stems from the government's claim that the way to raise standards is to make children do high stakes, 'summative' testing. This is not testing to help children progress (known as 'formative'). It is a way of testing teachers and schools - test the child in order to measure the teacher's success in getting the child to know a particular amount of stuff. 

It can only be done if it's supposedly valid for all children and all schools. This requires  the knowledge in the test to be reduced to right/wrong answers. 

If we reduce what children learn to this, it sets up a particular kind of model of  'how children learn' - that is learning without enquiry, investigation, interpretation, invention or co-operation. 

It also sets up the idea that knowledge is not something you have a hand in making for yourself by engaging with other people. It is simply a matter of being a sponge and mugging it up. Ultimately, this is simply a lesson in obedience, not a lesson in how to learn, how to know, or how to understand. 

We can ask: is this the kind of learning that we want our children to be involved in? is this the kind of learning that we want our children to think of as the most important on offer - because it's the 'high stakes' stuff? We can ask do we want knowledge to be reduced to this? And do we want to live in a world in which this is the main or dominant idea about knowledge and learning? Aren't we more than that? Better than that?

People who design tests don't care if the fact is right/wrong - it's the child that has to be!

Letter to me earlier:

"I was involved once in designing educational tests at [xxxx] was even then producing curriculum packages with tests included, but for adult learners in the USA. Users could choose what sort of tests they wanted in terms of what sort of distribution of grades would be acceptable. They were never designed to measure attainment of criteria but to produce a pattern of winners and losers -- you suspect as much, I gather, for school SATs at the moment? But it was all quite explicit in those past examples -- I wonder if Pearson have also offered tests with different distributions of results to the UK Government, and if so, which ones they chose. Would an FoI request be useful, do you think?


The other thing that emerged from [xxx] debates was that test items could still be 'good' even if they did employ faulty reasoning or ambiguity, as long as they helped produce the required distribution. Some [xxx] colleagues argued once that just such an item should be left in the menu of questions offered to students, even though the 'right' answer was actually wrong. "

What we could do with language if we weren't shackled by SPaG

Today I find myself thinking about all the fun things teachers could do with language if they weren't shackled to SATs, SPaG and academisation. I had a vision of sitting with teachers and brainstorming about the things they had done, could do, would have liked to have done in any area of language: history of writing, development of alphabets, pictograms, investigating the differences between signs, ads, non-fiction prose, newspaper headlines, graphic fiction, poems, songs, radio and TV programmes; recording young children's conversations and transcribing them; watching vids of babies learning to talk - bringing in observations of younger brothers and sisters; finding out about 'loan' words (ie words from all over the world in English); doing 'language maps' of your own family; looking at great opening paragraphs in books; great lines from songs - in any language; ...and much more

I bet a group of teachers talking about these things for a day, could devise loads of programmes of work. You could then agree to meet up a term later and share what's been done; and then a term later and share some more...and these sessions could include a speaker or two (linguists, say) who were sympathetic to this investigatory, project-based approach to language to feed in stuff on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather as we do on Radio 4's 'Word of Mouth' in fact!

The 8-point purpose of SPaG

1.Say summative testing necessary.
2.Reduce language to right/wrong.
3.Teachers have to teach it.
4.Children have to learn/don't learn it.
5 Test them with dodgy tests
6. Call it 'standards'.
7. Teachers measured on basis of how well children did in the dodgy tests.
8. If not high enough, convert school to academy.

Today's SPaG paper

Question 1. You could do this one by knowing two and deducing the third. In other words it would be only testing 'grammar' for two-thirds of the time.  Therefore test not testing what it says it's testing.

Question 3. There are three elements for one mark. You could get two right but this wouldn't be acknowledged by the test. Therefore test not testing what it says it's testing.


Question 7 is bizarre because half of what's asked for is not 'grammatical' but purely to do with meaning and 'appropriateness' . It would be possible therefore to be 'right' grammatically and wrong on appropriateness. (Would need to see the mark scheme to be 100% sure about this.)

Question 12 is nothing more than punctuation fetishism - correctness for the sake of it, no ambiguity involved if 'wrong'.

Question 14 is illiterate. In the question the word 'correct' is applied wrongly to the noun (!) in question. Can't be more specific, but it really is a bit of bad writing.

 Question 34 involves a single decontextualised word - in other words, a totally unrealistic language-use.

Question 35. Non-standard forms would be wrong even though that isn't what's being tested. (Would need to check with marking scheme to know if 'wrong' is penalised.)

Question 36 Two out of three could be correct but no mark awarded.

Question 38 is unfair because it asks for the word cited and no other form of it to be used. In other parts of the test that grammatical function is shown to have various forms. 

Question 44 was to all intents and purposes asked by Michael Gove.

Question 45 uses a farcical Ladybird book 1953 sentence.

On this paper,  the words 'correct', 'correctly' or 'incorrectly' are used 19 times. 

This is a prescriptive grammar and punctuation test.

There are 12 punctuation questions - all prescriptive bar one. 

This test is useless.

More importantly, it gives a false impression of what is useful and important to know about language. 

Tests: the more 'reliable', the less 'valid'.

The history of testing is full of examples which show that the more 'reliable' they try to make them, the less 'valid' they become.

Here's the latest one I've heard:


"We once did a trial for SATs papers when it was first introduced. It was computer marked and entailed colouring in a small area with a graphite pencil from a choice of four small boxes for each question. One pupil just coloured a pretty pattern down the page without even reading the questions. The results came back showing this particulat pupil above average."

Tell the children to tick one box.

Dear teachers of year 6 wanting to advise your children in ways that don't add stress but in a last ditch effort to avoid forced conversion to academy status:

remember, tell the children doing SPaG tomorrow: 

'If you don't know the answer, guess and tick. For multiple choice questions there'll be a 1 in 4 chance you'll be right."

The government don't want you to say this because it will make the test not valid.

"in tears because they didn't have time to finish..."

"Two very bright Y6 boys in my class were in tears because they didn't have time to finish, despite being good readers. The paper was definitely geared up for children from middle class homes as some of the content was outside the realms of experience for many of my class. The layout and content bore no relation to any practice materials. The only children who were entirely pleased with the content were those who were blissfully unaware that they had missed the point!"

Today's SATs: 'floods of tears"

"I am full of despair! My beautiful, very intelligent year 6 daughter has just come home from school in floods of tears as she feels that she "failed" today's paper!!She has been so upset and thrown herself around the room that she has cut/ bruised herself. What is the government doing to our children and their mental health??? Am beside myself? What can we do??"

Tears during today's SATs

Testimony from someone today:

"I was helping in a school today and a girl I knew came up to me, just soooo worried she had not done well... She, and others in her class, had burst in to tears during the test and loads of them were panicking that they hadn't been able to finish the paper. The school has tried hard to not put pressure on the kids, but they are bright children and are feeling like failures before the papers have been marked. What are we doing to our children? What kind of society will emerge when these children become adults?"

This year's SATs reading test - leaked!

Nicky was a lovely girl who sparkled wheresoever she went.  Her best friend was Nick who knew a lot about everything, like an encyclopedia at the bottom of our garden. One day they went on a safari trip to the moon where they went for a ride on the kind of thing that nice people go for rides on on the moon.  In Tasmania there used to be an animal called the Tasmanian Devil, which died out thanks to human predation. Nicky and Nick are extremely able and clever people who are ultimately responsible for everything that goes on in schools. You are grateful. In a minute you will have some questions. Some of you won't be able to answer them. That's good because this means Nicky and Nick can turn you into an academy with their magic wands. You like academies and you want all schools to be academies, notwithstanding other circumstantial evidence.

1. 'Human predation' means:

a) Human deprivation
b) Human impregnation
c) Human infestation
d) Human redaction

Tick one, or die.

2. What does the word 'sparkled' mean?

Write 23 meanings in the space below.

3. How many times has your father spoken to you about Tasmanian Devils? If none, proceed to the room marked 'unworthy'.

4. Do you have an encyclopedia at the bottom of your garden? If you don't have a garden, ask your parents why not.

5. Do you like Nicky and Nick? Tick 'yes'.

6. The word 'notwithstanding' doesn't mean 'not with standing'.  English: funny old language, eh? But not for you.

7. Give four sentences which explain what this brilliant piece of writing is about.

8. Explain why the people who wrote this test are anonymous.

9.  We're finding it rather hard to think of another question but we have to or Nicky and Nick won't give us another one of these very lucrative contracts. Can you think of a question? No, don't answer that one, because we won't be able to put it through a computer.

10. Ah yes, we forgot the sequence one that Michael Gove said was important. Put the following into the correct sequence:

Nicky.
Notwithstanding
Nick.
Tasmanian Devil
Encylopedia

11. The word 'sparkled' is

metaphorical
hyperbolic
elliptical
sparkly

Tick one.

12. Count the full stops. Divide by 3. Take away the number you first thought of. Use Young's Modulus for Linear Expansion to determine whether any could have been semi-colons.

13. Did you arrive in this country to live any time in the last 2 years? Do you think this test takes into consideration any of the incredible advances you have made in learning to speak, write, read and understand English?
If your answers to these two questions are yes and no, we have at least achieved something.

14. If you have got to the end of the test, please sit quietly looking at the clock. Do not avert your gaze.

15. Avert means:

a small creature called a vert
a big creature called a vert
a green creature called a vert
a word meaning, may the heavens open and take me away from this rubbish?

Today's Reading Comprehension Test - important press release

"For our Reading comprehension test today, we at Top Standards in Examining Everyone All the Time, have ensured that only really feeble, dull, poorly written passages were put in front of children, ideally on subjects that interest very, very, very few children. We tried to ask them the kinds of questions that they themselves would never ask, and tried to narrow these down to ones that only have right and wrong answers. This removed any possibility that the children got the impression that writing and reading are about interesting nuances of meaning, some of which change and shift in a book. We were also on the look out for passages where children of a particular kind of background brought their knowledge to bear on the passage so that really we were testing their parents' level of education, not the children's. Ultimately, we hope that these tests will ensure that a school which is not an academy becomes one. Good night. "

Ads have different 'rules' for how to punctuate. Why pretend they don't?

I travel a lot on the London Underground and walk round the streets; I spend a good deal of time reading ads and signs. When it comes to punctuation, ads are a diy rules zone. It's not just that there are commas and full stops that seem to have gone missing. Like this one, say:

 'This is a residential area please leave carefully' - [no commas or full stops].


but in ad-land you can insert full stops as part of the look: Like this one:

 'Planet. Sized. Brain.'


Or, if you want, you can do that kind of jolly sprinkling of full stops, in amongst traditionally correct ones and in amongst sentences with none at all: Like this this: 

'Mortgages. Courtesy of our savers. 

We approve 9 out of 10 mortgage applications. 

Welcome back to local banking [NO full stop]'

Why tell children that this stuff either doesn't exist or is 'wrong'?

SATs are not the 'basics'.

One of the words we'll hear over and over again this week is the word 'basics': 'children need to know the basics' and 'this government is making sure that children know the basics'.

Many journalists and commentators will recycle this, either because they don't know that what's being asked of teachers and children is much more than 'basics' or because they don't understand that 'education' is not the same as 'testing'. A test does not equal 'what we want education to be and do'. Yes, it shapes how education pans out but these tests are narrowing down education into right/wrong answers, and learning by rote some things that are often at best half-true.

So, to take 'writing' or 'language' as one example.

Children see many kinds of writing. It is an untruth to keep telling children that there is only one kind of writing - that is, writing sentences in a particular way. Children see and read: ads, online material, headlines, fiction, non-fiction, notices, poetry, song lyrics. These are different systems of writing and require different systems of description. To take one example: the full stop - in standard non-fiction in books, you can say that there is a restricted use of full stops that corresponds to what children are told. In all the other examples on my little list there, the full stop 'rule' does not always apply. People alter when, why and how they use full stops. Children see these examples every day.

Now, let's imagine a SATs-free lesson on full stops. Might we not show many examples of writing in different situations and talk about when, why and how people use or don't use full stops in modern everyday English. In fact, a walk round a school looking at notices and in books, would show just that! Would scientists think it's ok to teach that you only find squirrels in Europe and when a child said, 'Well, actually they live in other parts of the world too', the scientist would say, 'But we'll learn about that when we're older,'?

It is only because there is a requirement by government that teachers need to be tested, that tests were devised that provided right/wrong answers, that we've been swallowed up by this narrowing of language down to such over-simplified and untrue categories and 'rules'.

Ironically, the 'basics' being learned here is that when education chiefs talk about 'basics', they may well mean 'untruths'.

Please share my birthday message

SATs are tests of 

how well teachers get children to score highly on SATs. 

Nothing more, nothing less.

Education has to be better

than this. 

David Crystal talks about 'traditional grammar'

"All too often, in the traditional grammars, insufficient reasons were given for making a particular sentence analysis. As a consequence, it was common to find children learning analyses and definitions off by heart, without any real understanding of what was going on. In particular, they had to master the cumbersome Latin-based terminology as an end in it itself...and apply it to examples of language that were either artificially constructed, or taken from abstruse language.


It was all at a considerable remove from the child's real language world, as found in conversation or the media. Little attempt was made to demonstrate the practical usefulness of grammatical analysis in the child's daily life, whether in school or outside."

('How Language Works' David Crystal 2005)

Notes for media people re testing and 'grammar'

Here are 17 tweets I put up on twitter as a guide to media people who haven't understood what's at stake here. Apols they're in the wrong order. It's just a cut and paste job.

Notes for media people:

17. Gibb said primary school children need 'grammar' so they can write essays at university. Could be taught when they're older, then.

16. One powerful way of learning how to write is through imitation, not through naming of parts.


15. If you don't believe there are different versions of grammar, just try 'phrase' and 'clause' ‪#‎fuzzyterms‬

14. There isn't one way to write English. There many kinds of writing.

13 Native speakers of English know most of the 'rules' or patterns of English by the time they are 4.

12. This grammar testing has been hijacked for pupils to have 'summative' testing. 'Formative' testing better for this

11. Even if some of this 'grammar' is helpful,much is only really understood by older pupils.

10. There are much better ways to teach children 'knowledge about language' using 'investigation' and 'interpretation'

9. The stress that some children are going through is not imagined.

8. The terms are being used so children have to include examples of them to write 'well'. This is nonsense.

7. Many of the terms in the tests are not needed or useful for anyone in order to write well.

6. No harm in children knowing a small amount of this stuff. Part of the problem is that there's so much of it.

5. This 'grammar' was selected for tests because supposedly it gives 'right/wrong answers'. Gibb proves that wrong.

4. Linguists themselves disagree over the terms.That's why Nick Gibb got his answer 'wrong'. For some it was 'right'

3. This grammar is not 'the 3 Rs'. It's a set of specific terminology about language.

2. The grammar being tested is not 'the' grammar', or the only grammar. There are different versions.

1. It's not really the children being tested. Their results are being used to test the teachers and the schools.

Comment on education and testing from Facebook

''"testing" is only one form of assessment. If you really wanted to advance learning you would need to advance other forms which can often rely on teacher skill in observation,questioning and recording. You can't do this because national testing is about judging teachers and schools and therefore you cannot rely on the professional judgement of teachers as too much hinges on it for the schools and individuals. Instead you need to pursue the falsehood that there is some clean, discerning and fair national test, if only we can get the right people to develop one. It results in the nonsense of not allowing a pre published test to be used because the children would get the right answers- which is what you set out to achieve.'

Govt pretends this morning that there is only kind of testing. Untrue.

I don't have time to elaborate on this this morning but part of the government's propaganda about testing is to shield from people outside education the fact that broadly speaking there are two kinds of testing: one is called 'summative' - like GCSEs - at the end point of a chunk of learning, a be-all and end-all determiner of what has been learned; and 'formative' which involves (or should) a dialogue between teacher and learner and is itself part of learning, part of learning how to self-identify as a 'learner':

Here's wikipedia on 'formative assessment'. Please read so that at the very least, the government can't get away with claiming that their testing is the only possible testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formative_assessment

My bottom line is that I don't think summative assessment is appropriate for primary aged children. It diverts learning away from investigation, interpretation, invention and co-operation.

This morning's 4 false arguments in defence of the SATs and SPaG/GPS

This morning's DfE defences of the SATs include:
1. This is the 'knowledge' you need in order to progress, otherwise the children 'fall behind'.

This seems to be saying that the tests themselves are 'the knowledge'. Even if we all agreed that this is the knowledge that the children need, (which I don't) why would you reduce this to being 'the test'. The shape and nature of the tests is reducing learning to right/wrong. We want children to be investigating and discussing and experimenting with language. We want children to learn how to be learners not for them to be told that they are simply receptacles whose job is simply to recycle what they've just been told.

2. Other countries do grammar so we should too.

The problem with this one is that assumes that just because children in some other countries are taught 'grammar' that they all get it or know it. It's being described as if French 7 year old are all walking around talking about nouns and adverbs and that this has made them all brilliant at literacy.

First of all, most languages other than English are 'inflected' - that's to say they vary much more than ours depending on whether things are 'masculine or feminine', singular or plural, the subject or object of a sentence, does or does not come after a 'preposition' and with verbs varying across several tenses,  across I, you, she/he/it, we, you(plural) and they. This means that they are ideal for making children chant these like times tables. English varies a bit on some of these but not a great deal. Simply putting say a European template over English doesn't reflect what kind of language English is.

Secondly, it has to be shown that children in European countries are not only taught grammar but know it. And knowing it, makes them 'better' writers. If you speak another language other than English, go on to a chat room and see if the writers there are showing that they know 'grammar'!

3. The children don't need to know they're being tested.

This is simply blaming teachers again. Teachers and schools are under enormous pressure to 'perform' ie get good results in the SATs. If not, they can have their management 'taken out', another imposed, and if this involves forced academisation, this will mean surrendering the school up to unaccountable 'sponsors'. Inevitably, they pass on some anxiety about this to the children and parents. But you can't blame the teachers for this. They are anxious. I would be. And of course some of this rubs off on to the children and parents. End of.

4. Grammar makes the building blocks you need in order to write.

This is as much a fallacy as saying that knowing the chemical make-up of paint is a necessary pre-condition for being able to paint. At some point in life a painter might want to know and might find it useful. But not at 7 and 11. Same goes for the oxygen exchange rate in muscles for dancers.

Parents, children and teachers know that it's possible to become literate THROUGH being creative. Read a book with a child and say, 'let's make write like that'. Or tell a story and ask, 'what is that person thinking? Let's write that down...' and do that in pairs and together so that the child learns writing through inventing.

Again, it's possible to investigate language, rather than simply take it as 'rules'. How do authors being stories? Do writers of non-fiction write in different ways from writers of fiction? How? Why?

Let's look at how long sentences are in this newspaper article. If some sentences are longer than others, what makes them longer?

Let's think up and investigate some writings to find all the different ways we can say that something happened 'in the past' or 'in the future'. Let's collect these and put them up on the wall and this can help us with our writing...

How SPaG/GPS makes a difficult description even harder

At the core of standard 'structural' and so-called 'functional' descriptions of English (along with other languages) is this little trilogy: subject, verb, object.
(I say 'so-called functional' because it's the function within the system not what I call 'social function' is as part of human behaviour.)

It's so ingrained in someone like me who studied French, German, Latin, English Language and Anglo-Saxon, it's nearly impossible to get behind it as a description. To question it feels like questioning 'air' or 'gravity'.

First what is it?

In the sentence: 'I write rubbish' -
the 'subject' is 'I'
the 'verb' is 'write'
the object is 'rubbish'.

Warning 1: not all sentences or 'utterances' follow this exact pattern but let's leave that to one side.

Warning 2 - clearly the words 'subject' and 'object' are not the usual uses of those words. A 'subject' can be someone ruled over by a monarch. An 'object' can mean not much more than a 'thing'.  Here, in this blog,  these are specialised 'grammar' terms.

The idea behind the 'subject-verb-object' description is that it is supposed to describe how the parts of a sentence 'function': for example, in many circumstances the 'subject' acts on an object - does something to it, or changes it. (nb not in all circumstances!) - the 'acting on' bit is the 'verb' bit.

One first snag with the terminology though stems from a bit of inconsistency.

Subjects and objects have to be 'nouns' or 'pronouns' or  'noun phrases' or 'noun clauses' or indeed what used to be called by some 'nominal groups'.

So, one 'function' of these nouns etc is that they are 'subjects', another function they have here is that they are 'objects' .

Now on this level of classification, what are 'verbs'? Er...'verbs'! In other words, their 'class' name is the same as their function name. The function of a verb is to be...er...a verb.

In other words, the naming of the categories is faulty. There ought to be another word for the function of 'verbs' that fits the 'subject'-'object' naming system, one that expresses the process that verbs do...something to do with a subject working; or acting on or relating to the object - when there is an object - which isn't always!

Now, when you've been immersed in describing language(s) according to this system, spotting these functions is not massively difficult. When you're both very young and new to it, there are all kinds of things about it that pose problems, particularly when examiners in SPaG tests put traps in front of children.

For example, verbs in English often have several parts: 'am leaving',  'have painted'.

Because English is very flexible, we can then take the second bit of those phrases and use them to do another job - according to the 'function' way of describing the language:

'Leaving home is difficult.'
'A newly painted room smells nice'.

We can 'shift' part of the verb to do another job.

We do this without thinking about it, if we are familiar with English. Once we start using terminology to name bits of sentence and stick these terms into questions which have to be answered under pressure, it's actually quite easy to get these 'wrong'. They are ideal for examiners using them to lay traps for children.  They act as what are called 'plausible distractors' in multiple choice questions where the child is asked to spot the 'verb'. Saying 'leaving' or 'painted' in the sentences above  are 'verbs' would be 'wrong' even though 'leaving' and 'painted' are both derived from a verb and are, in their own ways, doing verb-ish things in verb-ish ways! What's more 'Leaving home' is described these days (not in my days!) as a clause precisely because it contains part of a verb! It's a 'noun clause'.

What's happening here is that the 'rules' about structure that have to be spotted in the GPS tests have to be used only in relation to the function that comes within the 'subject-verb-object' system and not in relation to the basic naming of parts of speech system. (ie verb, noun, adjective etc). But, as I've pointed out, the word 'verb' is the word used in both systems.

Do children get this 'wrong'? Do children get it 'wrong', particularly when perverse test-junky examiners put these distractors in test questions? Yes.

But, take a step back from all this naming stuff and remind ourselves of what language is for and why humans have invented ways of talking in terms of things and processes, subjects acting on objects, people doing stuff etc. This is what I mean by 'social function'.

The truth of the matter is that because of the flexibility of English, we don't need to reserve our need to talk about things, objects and people to 'nouns', and we don't need to reserve our need to talk about processes to 'verbs'. This isn't awkward, or a snag or a difficulty. It's something clever and delightful about the way we can express ourselves and communicate with others. As it happens, Shakespeare for one loved doing it.

If we could free ourselves from the pressure of right/wrong answers and have time and space to investigate how we can use language, we would get to this really interesting stuff.

Are the grammatical descriptions that children have to learn, helpful?

I hear people say that 'grammar' is really helpful.
(What they mean is that the descriptions of language which are called 'grammar' are helpful. The other meaning of grammar is 'the process by which we stick words together to make meaning'. That precedes the terms that people have come up with to describe the process. In the history of the human race, people used language before they came up with terms to describe what they were doing. So there are two meanings (at least!) for the word 'grammar')

Anyway, are the descriptions that children have to learn, 'helpful'?

Here is the Cambridge Grammar's definition of a 'subordinate clause':

Subordinate (or dependent) clauses cannot form sentences on their own. They are dependent on main clauses to form sentences. They can be finite or non-finite (the main clauses are in bold; the subordinate clauses are underlined):

I didn’t go to work because I wasn’t feeling very well.

He studied violin and mathematics before taking a medical degree and doing postgraduate work in biophysics at Harvard.

She had pretty hair and must have been nice-looking when she was young.

If I tell him will he be angry?

Let's leave to one side the fact that old school purists wouldn't allow for that 'finite' OR 'non-finite' thing, so the dogmatic statement, 'They can be...' has to be qualified by 'on the other hand, plenty of old school purists would say they can't.' (I don't care either way.)

Now for the definition itself.

The word 'dependent' is a description of a group of words (a clause) that can only be deduced from meaning. How else can they decide that something is 'dependent' or not?

And that, let's remember, is the defining characteristic of this particular 'clause'.

Look at the sentence 'She had pretty hair and must have been nice-looking when she was young.'

Yes, it's clear that 'when she was young' entirely on its own is incomplete if you pull it out of this sentence and leave it on the page. In real life, of course we often say things like 'When she was young' because we're answering questions for which that's the answer and you can say in that case, it was 'dependent' on the question.

So, the idea is to become complete, 'when she was young' 'depends on' what came first in that sentence: 'She had pretty hair and must have been nice-looking...'

Now, let's look at that first part of the sentence which is supposed to be 'independent' or 'main': "She had pretty hair and must have been nice-looking."

Remember that these structures are derived from meaning and then abstracted into something 'structural' ie 'clauses' and 'types of clauses'. Can we really say that 'She had pretty hair and must have been nice-looking...' is really 'independent'? The whole point of the sentence as a whole revolves round a state the person is in at a particular point in time. The whole meaning and purpose of the so-called 'independent clause' depends on the so-called 'dependent' (or 'subordinate' clause), otherwise there would be no point in writing it. In other words the so-called 'independent clause' depends on the so-called 'dependent clause' when we consider the sentence in relation to its meaning and any possible function it might have in a passage of writing. So we have a terminology that was derived from meaning, was turned into a structural rule, yet the rule doesn't work when we consider the sentence as a whole, its meaning and any possible social function (ie in life.)


So, what's going on here is:
1. Using 'meaning' (semantics), grammarians describe what they see as 'structure'.
2. They define the structure using a term which includes some sense of this meaning - as with 'dependent' or 'subordinate'.
3. However, because this term is very general, when you test the meaning of the term in relation to the meaning of the sentence as a whole and its social function (ie in life), it falls apart.

Now things get even more unhelpful when it comes to those sentences which contain two clauses which are supposedly '...of the same grammatical type' which we can combine 'to form sentences using coordinating conjunctions.'

Here's the classic example:

[main clause]I’ll take the train and [main clause]you can take the car.



So, according to the rule, neither of these two clauses is 'dependent' or 'subordinate', as derived from the meaning. They 'co-ordinate'. Again, ask yourself why would a person say or write one half of this sentence if they didn't want to say the other half. 'I'll take the train' does indeed 'stand alone' but so does 'you can take the car' but in terms of meaning and social function, the one depends on the other.

Now when it comes to the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test in England, everything that I'm saying here MUST BE IGNORED. You have to go along with the rules as described either in the Cambridge Grammar or in the 'glossary' provided by the government.


In fact, the distinction between subordinate and co-ordinate clauses is so hard to deduce from merely looking at one sentence plonked in front of you in an exam, teachers give children a mnemonic. That's how they get to 'know' or 'understand' the distinction ie absolutely nothing to do with the dubious grammar. The mnemonic is FANBOYS telling children that clauses beginning with, for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so are 'not subordinate'. When the question comes up - as it will do - tick the box to say which of four sentences contains the subordinate clause, just do your FANBOYS mnemonic, and it's the one that isn't a FANBOYS one that gets you (I mean the school) the mark.


Meanwhile, just consider one of these: 'so'. Make up any sentence you like with 'so' in it.


Here's mine.

'I'm starving hungry, so I'm going to eat my beard.'

How - according to any system you like - 'so I'm going to eat my beard' is NOT dependent, NOT subordinate to 'I'm starving hungry' defeats me. You can claim, if you like, that it doesn't qualify or modify the preceding 'I'm starving hungry' but that's another matter.

So, remember, 'so' is a 'co-ordinating conjunction' and must ever more be so - whether that bit of terminology makes sense or not.

The best way (perhaps the only way) to remember this bit of 'knowledge' is by remembering the mnemonic.

Best of luck.

How to use my poetry videos as starting points for writing

Here is the safest way to view my poetry videos, go to this site and scroll through them:

https://www.youtube.com/user/artificedesign/videos?sort=p&view=0&flow=list

If you are a parent or teacher then obviously you don't have to 'do' anything with them other than watch them.

If you would like children to have a go at some writing in response to them, can I suggest that you do something like this:

(What follows is primarily in relation to free verse, freewheeling anecdotes and monologues. I'll do a separate blog on the rhyming poems)

These anecdote poems cover a range of emotions and events from the comic to the sad, angry to fun. For your own notes, you might want to think about what kinds of emotions and feelings you might be exploring with this kind of work.

In the class: suggest that 'we' could write "something like that". I know "something like that" is vague-sounding but it's also non-threatening and open-ended. This is important.

If you have a copy of the book the poem comes from, take a look at that too, as that turns what seems like a flow of speech into words on the page - the thing the children find the hardest.
It gives the children a chance to get to see how this stream of words looks on a page.

If you haven't got a copy of the book, say to the children that everything that Michael Rosen said on the video, he wrote down.
You can say, it's as if he talked with his pen and then speaks what he wrote.

So, you can say, how can we talk with our pens?

First step - is there anything Michael Rosen said that reminds us of anything that has happened to us?

Get the children to talk to each other sharing some stories and anecdotes sparked off by the poem/performance.

Share some of these in the whole class or group.

'Grab' one of these and get the child to tell the story again.

As the child talks, 'scribe' it in front of everyone on a board, or flipchart.

Try not to change anything that the child says.

Discuss whether this 'says' all that needs to be said, or whether there's anything that could be added or taken away that would make it more interesting?

If you have copies of any of my poems, you could put one up on the whiteboard to see how I lay out these out on the page. Is there anything there that might help? Perhaps, perhaps not. (No need to be rigid about this, or implying that this is how it must be done.)

Everyone then has a go at writing like this.

Keep sharing what people have written, projecting it up on the whiteboard, performing, starting a class blog, making booklets of 'Our Stories' or something like.