The National Literacy Strategy Grammar for Writing, Raising Standards, 2000

The National Literacy Strategy Grammar for Writing, Raising Standards, 2000
By:Department for Education and Employment - Macmillan Press
Published on 2000-07-30 by Bukupedia

This book has a two-fold purpose: ● to provide lively whole class activities for teaching the Key Stage 2 sentence level objectives in the National Literacy Strategy Framework for teaching; ● to explain and illustrate the varied forms which shared writing can take as a powerful medium for teaching writing. Introduction and rationale We all use language to think and communicate. Language is systematically organised by its grammar which is inextricably linked to meaning and communication – we cannot make sense without shaping grammatical and linguistic structures. 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. This guidance is designed to help teachers teach writing. It focuses on the teaching of the sentence level objectives in the National Literacy Strategy Framework for teaching.We have called it ‘Grammar for writing’ to emphasise the centrality of grammar in the teaching of writing. In the video accompanying Module 3 of the NLS 1998 training materials, Professor David Crystal explains the importance of grammar: ‘Grammar is what gives sense to language … Sentences make words yield up their meanings. Sentences actively create sense in language and the business of the study of sentences is the study of grammar.’ Some would argue that the study of grammar is worth teaching in its own right because it is intrinsically interesting – and so it is. This is not the primary aim here; our aim is to improve children’s writing. Grammar is fundamental to this, as a means to an end, but a means which involves investigation, problem-solving, language play and a growing awareness of and interest in how language works. This book focuses on the teaching of sentence level objectives in the Literacy Hour but, throughout, the emphasis is on how children’s growing understanding and use of grammar helps them to write more effectively. It should be clear from this that the purpose of teaching grammar is not simply the naming of parts of speech, nor is it to provide arbitrary rules for ‘correct’ English. It is about making children aware of key grammatical principles and their effects, to increase the range of choices open to them when they write. Children learn grammar as an integral part of learning to speak from the earliest stages. The development of oral language is vitally important in its own right as well as being essential to success in literacy. In the course of development, children will use grammar in a wide variety of ways, often with considerable complexity. Very young children will imply meanings using single Introduction and rationale 7 words in a variety of grammatical ways. For example, a one-year-old saying ‘Milk’ could mean: Look! There’s some milk; Can I have more milk?; Is that one milk? etc., showing what they mean by tone of voice and/or gesture. Older children often use very complex grammatical constructions in speech which may not be appropriate as written forms. Children frequently encounter very sophisticated grammar in the speech and writing of others which they understand without difficulty. The National Literacy Strategy sentence level teaching objectives are not intended to provide developmental descriptions of this kind. They focus on a limited but important range of skills that children need for writing. They are about extending and making explicit aspects of children’s intuitive knowledge of grammar, focusing on aspects of grammar which tend to distinguish written from spoken texts. The grammatical characteristics of spoken language are different in significant ways from those of written language. These differences are related to the permanence of the written form, and the need to be concise and explicit, and because often the intended reader is separated from the writer by time and space. Whereas speakers often rely on context, facial expression, intonation, pauses, etc. to convey meaning and create effect, writers often use more explicit grammatical structures as well as other organisational features, such as paragraphs, headings and sometimes diagrams, to communicate ideas. The following two texts illustrate some of the differences: A Today we learnt about taste and Miss Ward put some things out on the table and we had to taste them and what we had to do is they all had numbers by them and we had to taste them and it had a different taste to them and we had to taste them and see if it was sweet, salt, and bitter and sour and I did not taste any sour. B Taste experiment We had to taste foods which had different numbers to see if they tasted sweet, salt, bitter or sour. I thought the best taste was cheese and the worst was pickle. I did not find anything sour. In these two examples, the intentions are similar: to explain the experiment. Text A recounts the events but backtracks and repeats. When written down, these repetitions stand out but, when spoken, they make sense. The speaker joins all the thoughts together with ‘and’ and uses intonation, gesture and stress to keep the listener on track. Text B is more clearly a written recount. It contains far fewer clauses than A and joins them in more complex ways, ie by subordination rather than the continuous use of the conjunction ‘and’. The effect is a more focused and free-standing account which can be read by any reader. The growth of competence in writing also contributes importantly to the broader development of children’s thinking. The more context-free and explicit nature of writing helps children become increasingly reflective about language. By structuring and restructuring ideas in writing, children extend their powers of imagination, learn to express increasingly complex, abstract and logical relationships, develop skills of reasoning and critical evaluation. This, in turn, feeds back into their competence as thinkers and speakers. Introduction and rationale It is instructive to look at the key messages about children’s writing from the national tests derived from analysis of a sample of scripts. These give a very clear indication of the writing skills that children need to succeed in as they move through to their secondary education (Standards at Key Stage 2 English, Mathematics and Science. Report on the 1999 National Curriculum Assessments for 11-year-olds, QCA, 2000). Key messages about writing from the National Curriculum tests To reach a secure level 2A by the end of Key Stage 1, children should be able to: ● write with legible and accurate handwriting; ● discriminate and spell phonemes accurately – especially long vowels; ● understand spellings of simple word roots and inflectional endings: ‘ed’, ‘ing’, etc.; ● write and punctuate simple sentences; ● sequence them coherently in a text; ● select from an increasing range of vocabulary to enhance meaning, create effects and add precision to their writing. To reach a secure level 4 by the end of Key Stage 2, children should be able to: ● apply spelling rules and conventions, eg consonant doubling, pluralisation, affixes; ● apply strategies to choose correct vowel formation; ● modify the meanings of words by adding words or phrases for effect and precision; ● develop more varied and complex sentences; ● use commas to mark clauses in complex sentences; ● pay more attention to the ending and thus the direction of the narrative; ● use formal, impersonal styles, eg consistent use of third person or the passive voice; ● review and edit work for clarity and interest, organisation and purpose; ● connect ideas at both text and sentence levels; ● organise texts in other ways than by order of event; ● adapt their writing to the purposes and characteristics of non-fiction text types. Some of these expectations refer to phonics and spelling which are addressed in other guidance (National Literacy Strategy, Progression in Phonics and Spelling Bank, DfEE, 1999). Nevertheless, it is striking how many of them are directly or indirectly about grammar – about children’s ability to manipulate words in sentences and to link sentences together. Some are specifically grammatical, eg the ability to form and punctuate simple sentences at Key Stage 1 or to develop more complex sentences at Key Stage 2. Others, like the use of formal styles, the purposes and characteristics of non-fiction text types and the direction of narrative also depend on the writer’s awareness and control of grammar. Across the primary years, there are three key features of grammar which need to be addressed. All of these are covered in the National Literacy Strategy Framework for teaching. They are particularly important because they mark key differences between the ways in which grammar is used in spoken and written English. Introduction and rationale

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