Your state curriculum asks you to teach it
Attention should be given to the teaching of grammar across all the years of schooling to help students meet the demands of schooling and their lives outside school. These demands include reading, understanding, speaking, writing, and creating texts that describe, narrate, analyse, explain, recount, argue, review, and so on. Shape of the Australian Curriculum: English, p.7 But how well do you know it? "Inquiries into Australian teacher education and literacy have highlighted concerns about the preparedness of teachers to teach literacy effectively. In the international literature, ‘knowledge about language’ has been identified as an important factor in successful literacy teaching." Helen Harper & Jennifer Rennie Charles Darwin University & Monash University, 2008 “To successfully implement the functionally oriented model of grammar proposed by the Curriculum, many teachers will need to expand their expertise in grammar." Pauline Jones & Honglin Chen University of Wollongong, 2012 And how do you teach it? “If we are teaching grammar, but the students are not learning grammar from us, then there is something wrong with the way we are teaching it." Mary Ehrenworth, Literacy Staff Developer, New York City Public Schools Columbia University, 2003 |