A GRAMMAR SEQUENCE – what it looks like

This is part 2 of developing grammar knowledge. Part 1 is here.

Knowing where to begin a sequence of learning grammar in secondary school is a difficult one, for a variety of reasons:

• a teacher’s picture of what a student knows and brings into the yr 7 classroom may be incomplete. * The expectations of knowledge are at the bottom of the post, but also see James Durran’s blog which discusses the literacy gap.
• the existence of a detailed sequential scheme of learning is difficult to find. Daisy Christodoulou’s seminal work ‘Making good progress’ identifies the need to design learning sequences that provide practice of tasks that may not reflect the final summative task, but in fact are individual components that make up the whole. She writes specifically about grammar design here. There are of course a limitless number of resources available online dealing with every aspect of grammar, but I am yet to find anything that takes a student step by step through word classes in a logical and functional manner, and/or does so in a way that doesn’t suffer from the curse of knowledge (the idea that when you know something it is difficult to imagine others not knowing it, which can interfere with teaching something to adequate depth). This is important – i hope to goodness that i am wrong, but I am not aware of a functional approach to grammar (which i espouse) that is connected to a specific scheme of learning. I’ve seen lots of examples of how functional grammar can be applied, but not an actual scheme that could be incorporated into a real curriculum.
• some don’t value the power of teaching grammar as a distinct discipline
• building a scheme into a curriculum may interfere with the core content, and as time is everthing’s enemy, takes a significant backseat in most English classrooms.
• as a corollary, lots of schemes actually don’t include grammar as a focus.

I talked about the power of grammar in the last post, as a tool that strengthens a student’s control of language and improves the feedback process with significantly more explicit direction. I also truly believe that understanding grammar significantly helps with punctuation, especially helping to elimate the dreaded comma splice and the equally as frustrating fragmented sentence. But without any shadow of a doubt, a successful grammar curriculum must be assiduously designed so that it is sequential, incrementally moving a student forward once mastery of each element is achieved.

To that end, I have created such a resource.

The resource is suited to a wide range of skill levels, moving from the basics of nouns, verbs and modifiers, all the way to using participle and prepositional phrases. The uniqueness of the approach however stems from the choice of sequence and the suggested teaching of it, carefully and incrementally building the capability of the learner regardless of their starting point, and moving them towards mastery before introducing the next grammar complexity.

Whilst the resource provides a clear strategy to teach the components, it does not provide an extensive list of activities. This is because the examples you give your students will very much depend on them, their age or year level and their vocabulary. Gen-AI can be used here to quickly create the desired examples for each activity to suit your audience. In this way, the resource is not limited to a specific year level, and reinforces the notion that the teaching of grammar and the benefits gained from it can be achieved at any year level.

Here is a short preview of the whole scheme. What you will hopefully notice is the progression style of each element. As much as possible, one element blends into another:

The sequence is the following:

• ​​Nouns​
• Determiners​
• Subject + object​
• Verb forms​
• Finite verbs​
• Auxiliary verbs​
• Modal verbs​
• Clauses​
• Conjunctions​
• Adjectives ​
• Relative clauses
• Adverbs​
• Phrases​
• Prepositions​
• Participles 

The next post will suggest how this scheme can be embedded into your curriculum

‌I’m Paul Moss. I’m a learning designer at the University of Adelaide. Follow me on Twitter @edmerger