Grammatical Knowledge Task

GRAMMATICAL KNOWLEDGE TASK

Research Focus: This is an example of a purpose-built task to investigate students’ knowledge about language, specifically grammar. The task takes place in an interview style context but the interviewer only asks questions about the tasks. Here the tasks are labels with grammatical terms on them to trigger student talk about what they know; sentences from a text to explore in more detail their syntactical knowledge; and the use of their own Baseline Writing Task to see if they can use that knowledge.

Theoretical Constructs to investigate:

 Explicit grammatical knowledge – declarative ie they can name things

 Explicit grammatical knowledge – procedural ie they can make use of that knowledge in their writing

Interviewer brings Student’s Baseline Writing Task to the Interview.

EXPLICIT GRAMMATICAL KNOWLEDGE

Section 1: declarative knowledge ie can they name and identify things

 Lay out the set of labels with word classes named on them:

Year 4: noun; verb; adjective; adverb;

Year 7: noun; verb; adjective; pronoun; adverb; conjunction; determiner; preposition

Invite the student to sort the labels into ones they Know/Don’t Know/Might Know. For those selected as Know or Might Know, invite them to explain in their own words what it is and give an example.

 Lay out the other set of labels with syntactical constructions named on them:

Year 4: Complex sentence; simple sentence; compound sentence

Year 7: Complex sentence; simple sentence; compound sentence; clause; subordinate clause; relative clause; subject; adverbial; prepositional phrase; noun phrase

Invite the student to sort the labels into ones they Know/Don’t Know/Might Know. For those selected as Know or Might Know, invite them to explain in their own words what it is and give an example.

 Lay out the four sentences from the Morpurgo text used in the grammar test. Invite students to discuss what types of sentence they are.

 Using the card labels and their own writing, invite the student to identify where they have used any of these grammatical constructions in their own writing, working first with the word class labels, then the syntactical labels.

Section 2: Explicit grammatical knowledge – procedural ie can they use that knowledge in their writing

 Invite students to explain any how any of these grammatical features have contributed to the effectiveness of their writing, dealing first with word class labels, then with syntax.