#WritingRocks writingrocks.bsky.social

1/ "Some children don't even know what a noun or a verb is!" You'll hear this. It’s usually followed by a call for “going back to basics” and more grammar drills. However, it’s all a big muddle. … See Dyson:

2/ My daughter Isla-Scout is 15 months old. Her first words include: dog, hat, banana, Grandad, Tigger, go, this, no, again, hi, bye, oh dear. Things, people, an action, pointing, negation, recurrence, social routines. She's already sorting the world into words.

3/ To be fair, researchers debate whether a toddler's single words are "nouns" and "verbs" in the adult sense. "Ball" might mean "give me the ball” or “Look Daddy, a ball!”.

4/ By around two, children use sentence structure to work out new words. In Naigles's experiments, toddlers heard a made-up verb in different contexts and looked at different scenes depending on the grammar. That takes a working sense of how verbs behave. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2380274/

5/ Then comes the over applying: goed, runned, mouses, sheeps. Nobody taught them those. Children are over-applying rules they worked out for themselves.

6/ Berko's "wug test" (1958): show a child a made-up creature called a wug, then two of them. "Two wugs!" They treat an unknown word as a noun and inflect it correctly the first time they hear it. britannica.com/biography/Jean…

7/ By school age, children have a huge working grammar. They make plurals and past tenses, form questions and negatives, and use subordinate clauses. None of it depends on knowing the terms.

8/ So what does "doesn't know what a noun is" really mean? That a child can't name or spot one on a worksheet. That's a gap in their ‘structural linguistics’ knowledge, not in grammatical knowledge (using it).

9/ Mixing these up matters. Chn get treated as if they are idiots when they are anything but... Labelling words gets mistaken for grammatical knowledge. Andrews’ review finds little writing benefit from grammar taught as structural linguistics bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.108…

10/ What does help? Myhill and colleagues found grammar taught in context, as choices writers make in their own texts, made a real difference. The use mattered most, not the terminology on its own. journals.indianapolis.iu.edu/index.php/teac…

11/ This isn't anti-terminology. Shared terms help us talk together. But the terms should name something children already do, not stand in for something they supposedly lack.

12/ Starting from deficit ("they don't even know what a noun is") gets children and grammar off on the wrong foot. Starting from expertise sets things up better: "you use nouns all the time; let's look at how you choose them."

13/ Every child in your class has been building a grammar since before they could walk. Our job is to help them notice it, name it, and use it with more intention in their writing. writing4pleasure.com/2021/02/13/tea…