If there’s one ‘framework’ that has the ability to haunt both teacher and student alike, it is surely grammar. For many teachers, putting a tentative toe into the Sea of Grammar seems all-too-easily to risk slipping on a coastal shelf and floundering to seemingly bottomless and very murky depths – not waving but drowning, maybe?
This guide is the result both of a passion for grammar and several years of trying to find ways to teach it that work for students of varying abilities and levels of interest. It’s not an attempt at anything definitive or comprehensive but something that can be used to create effective grammatical analyses of a variety of texts. It’s presented in the hope that it will make life easier for both student and teacher alike – and produce worthwhile results. The methods and suggestions it contains should enable students to feel less in awe of grammar and thus allow them to put this important framework to good use in their analysis and discussion of a variety of texts.
The ‘linguistic concepts’ (aka ‘analytical frameworks’) the exam boards provide are designed to allow students to uncover and discuss linguistically interesting aspects of texts in a methodical manner. Using grammar as a framework is, therefore, only going to be of use if it can be put to work to reveal interesting aspects of a text related to aspects of its production, reception and interpretation.
Introducing Grammar
It’s not uncommon for students to read or be told that they are already ‘grammar experts’ – a well-meant idea, perhaps, and based on the fact that as they use complex grammatical structures all the time for talking and writing they must know a fair…
