'Essential Grammar' by Jennifer Webb and Marcello Giovanelli

‘Grammar’ has at times been as dirty a word as you can imagine in the English teaching world. As Jennifer Webb and Marcello Giovanelli state at the start of their new book Essential Grammar, The Resource Book Every Secondary English Teacher Will Need:

Grammar has been branded as elitist, dry, oppressive and pedantic.

There you go: four adjectives hammering down on the lid of an essential part of the fabric of both written and spoken language. But the fact is that we move in a world of grammar (or, rather ‘grammars’), just as a fish swims in water.

It is the authors’ contention that teachers have a positive opportunity to use grammatical knowledge and informed classroom practice as empowering and liberating. Their expertise is used to good effect here, since grammar is so little part of third-level or teacher-training courses in Ireland, or I think the UK (much of my own knowledge comes from once teaching Latin, a wonderful experience). Rather than being rule-bound and constricting, they believe grammar is ‘about possibilities’, and that teachers should be explicit about it, making language awareness central to their classroom practice.

They show this through a coherent sequence of chapters underpinned by many diagrams and tables, with the technical terminology always shown through examples and in a helpful teaching context. At no point is this book ‘dry’ or ‘pedantic’: there are no discrete meaningless rote exercises here. Instead, the authors keep their eye on the end purpose: excellent purposeful and expressive writing. This is the case whether they are looking at the passive/active voices, the use of affixes, or how to use a corpus tool. In each case the teacher is the central resource, using his/her knowledge and expertise as he/she judges fit in the context of a particular task, while having an overall sense of purpose (they mention the accessible work of Efrat Furst as a guide to best cognitive principles):

Teaching grammar over time is about more than the activities you do in the classroom. It is about maintaining a culture of language awareness in the classroom.

They are keen on modelling as good practice (a visualiser is a handy classroom tool), which helps metacognition about the extraordinarily complex matter of constructing sentences, so that children are able to develop awareness and confidence in their writing. As teachers we tend to find writing easy and thus suffer from the curse of knowledge, but we should never forget what a demanding and in many ways unnatural process it is.

There is a lot of practical, actionable material here, and a lot of information clearly presented for teachers who feel their own knowledge is shaky, and are not confident. Jennifer Webb and Marcello Giovanelli have provided a helpful guide to an inescapably important area of our teaching.

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