Clause for thought

Arcane knowledge or necessary rigour – Phil Beadle can’t decide which best describes the new standards in grammar. Either way, if you can’t conjugate the subjunctive mood, your students will suffer...

When I run SPAG courses, I ask teachers to consider how much grammar one needs in order to be an expert at writing. Briefly touching on the point that there have been whole generations who have not been taught any to speak of who write perfectly adequately, I then go into a long and not entirely unfunny skit about the perceived moral aspect of what grammar is: how it is, to an extent, merely a means of class differentiation – the knowledge of Latinate constructions conferring on the owner of that knowledge a sense of their infinite superiority to us plebs.

We conclude that you don’t really need to know much more than the parts of speech and, even then, you really only need to know these in that they bash up against the rules for punctuation: if you can’t spot an adverbial, then your comma usage will be sketchy. From my point of view you don’t really need to know a great deal about grammar in order to write, and most writers rarely give thought to this stuff in anything other than passing. And as a secondary English teacher I’ve always been aware that my knowledge is patchy, and nowhere near that of the MFL teachers down the corridor.

Looking into the GAPs test (the reordering here is salutary: grammar is now first among unequals) – the Standards and Testing Agency’s Key Stage 2 English grammar, punctuation and spelling: sample questions, mark schemes and commentary for 2016 assessments – it looks as if I am not going be able to get away with such a paltry clutch of grammar any more, and that 11-year-olds will be coming to secondary school with vastly more knowledge than their English teachers.

As it is impossible to assess yourself on a spelling test, I’ve completed the grammar and punctuation sections of the sample paper and scored, ulp, only 32/39. It’s a pass, alright, but a long way from being top of the form. At one point, I’d scored four marks out of the first 10 questions before things started swinging my way a little. Where I failed was in lacking an understanding of modal verbs, being unable to recognise determiners, not being able to identify a relative clause, nor being able to tell the difference between a subordinating conjunction and a preposition (I’ve got previous on this) and not having a clue what a subjunctive mood is (it’s using verbs and pronouns like a posho). Admittedly, I fluked the question about the past progressive tense but, still, I feel somewhat the chastened idiot, and will have to knuckle down and radically rewrite the SPAG course I am doing next week this very afternoon.

But there is a word of warning in this article. If you, like me, like more or less everyone I know, like more or less everyone I have ever met, or ever will meet, weren’t brought up to know how to conjugate the subjunctive mood, then your students will suffer.

I am not sure what I think of this. I’ve argued long and hard that the intellectual standards in British education need shifting upwards, and the level of rigour in this test is certainly doing that. But I wonder whether, in prioritising these ‘formerly elite’ pieces of knowledge, we are transforming literacy into a rather joyless, barren arena. Of course, there is benefit to be had being able to analyse exactly what an author is doing, but usually writers just don’t think about this stuff. They know how to punctuate, of course, but it is a rare writer indeed who can be bothered to identify that what he is doing is using a participial phrase that is doing nothing more or less than modifying the subject. And it is worth wondering aloud here, how much of the new regime with grammar is merely equipping children with arcane and useless knowledge just so the former Secretary of State can be the toast of the green pen brigade who waste their remaining years writing letters to The Times.

Phil Beadle’s latest book, Literacy: Commas, colons, connectives and conjunctions, is published by Independent Thinking Press and is part of his How to Teach series, which covers every element of classroom practice in a highly practical, yet irreverent, manner.

About the author

Phil is a much sought after speaker, an English teacher, a former UK Secondary Teacher of the Year in the National Teaching Awards, and a double Royal Television Society Award winning broadcaster.