Why Standard English & SPaG Matter

When what it seems not important is of paramount importance.

Class Teaching

The 15 minute forum tonight was led by our Head of English, Kate Bloomfield.  Kate started the forum by reminding us of the unfortunate labels that are often used to describe people who get cross about the use of poor grammar (I hope there’s none in this article!?) e.g.

  • Grammar Fascists!
  • Grammar Police!
  • Grammar Nazis!

We were then treated to this by Mitchell & Webb:

Now whilst this may be seen (by some) as an extreme reaction, it’s important that we don’t ‘dumb down’ the importance of grammar.  We need it in order to communicate effectively – and so o our students.  For the same reason, we need to use ‘Standard English’ i.e. using standard English words to communicate.  This was illustrated using the following task.  We were asked to look at the picture below and then describe to a partner, how to ride a bike, without using the words…

View original post 515 more words

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.