With Charlotte Brewer and Jonnie Robinson I’m one of the co-organisers of the English Grammar Day 2024. This year it will take place on Friday 28 June 2024 at the British Library (Pigott Theatre, Knowledge Centre, British Library, London NW1 2DB). The day will start at 09:30 and will end at 17:00. For more information about ..read more

Beware of online grammar quizzes. Their authors often do not have a clue about grammar! Here are some examples from a recent one that make me despair. There’s no pronoun in sentence (b)! For most grammars the correct pronouns are ‘its’ in (a), ‘their’ in (c) and ‘your’ in (d). (Though in the National Curriculum ..read more

With Charlotte Brewer and Jonnie Robinson I’m one of the co-organisers of the English Grammar Day 2023 on 23 June 2023 at University College London. Here’s the programme: 09:30-09:50 Registration 09:50-10:00 Welcome & Introduction 10:00-10:30 Sylvia Shaw, Lost in Transcription? The representation of parliamentary speech in writing 10:30-11:00 Julia Snell, Does correcting children’s spoken grammar improve their writing? 11:00-11:45 ..read more

This post is for subscribers Type your email… Subscribe ..read more

Stroppy Editor A teacher running an interactive grammar exercise (still from Englicious in the Classroom video) A recent study, asyoumayormaynothaveheard, has found that teaching grammar to Year 2 children (age 6-7) does not improve their writing. But that’s not what it found. The study, by researchers at UCL and the University of York, did not compare grammar teaching with no grammar teaching. It compared one particular programme of grammar teaching, called Englicious, with the grammar teaching that schools were doing already, and it found that Englicious produced results that were essential ..read more

For some years now, with the regularity of clockwork, opinion pieces appear in the press about grammar teaching. The dystopian language used in these articles might lead you to think that children are subjected to unspeakable suffering: a recent piece laments the “full horror of the primary grammar curriculum”, another talks about the “Kafkaesque grammar system” used in our schools which “kills the English language”. The writers of these pieces often pride themselves on being successful writers or journalists, despite claiming not knowing what a fronted adverbial is. Why is there so much resis ..read more

English compounds of the type x-free usually mean ‘free of x’ or ‘without x’, as in trouble-free, tax-free, hassle-free, pain-free, trouble-free, smoke-free, and many other combinations. These days there are many new meat-free food products on the market. How do food sellers describe them? Using the description meat-free is often only partially informative: it tells you a product has no meat in it, but nothing is said about how the product tastes. Consider this recent newspaper announcement: Among 11 new plant-based foods going on sale at Tesco this week are centrepiece dishes using the ..read more

I have long been teaching a course called English Grammar for Teachers, initially face-to-face, and later online. This course is still available for booking here. This course is now also available on the FutureLearn platform. The course runs for six weeks, with a time commitment of approximately 90 minutes per week. It can be started on several different dates and you can study at your own pace. For more information, click here. Aims of the course On this course we will teach you the subject knowledge that you need to teach English grammar confidently and engagingly, using the innovative free ..read more

It’s not unusual for a name to be preceded by an indefinite article in English, as in this example: These are troubling times, but a President Barack Obama could handle them. However, grammatically, the construction is odd because we combine the indefinite article a with the definite expression President Barack Obama, so you would expect this to lead to a semantic clash of sorts. However, it doesn’t . We interpret the phrase a President Barack Obama to mean ‘a person like President Barack Obama’. But what about the following example, which I came across in a newspaper: More specifically, a ..read more

Have a look at this headline in a newspaper: It took me several minutes – and the help of my wife – to understand this headline. Why? You may not see any problem with it. But I kept interpreting the noun pay as the object of the verb block, resulting in an imperative: block pay. I then interpreted as you go phones as a subordinate clause, but immediately stumbled as it doesn’t make any sense. The way the headline is laid out doesn’t help, nor does the fact that no hyphenation was used. What is being blocked are pay-as-you-go phones. This kind of construction is called a garden path sentence ..read more