Teacher Trainees’ Explicit Knowledge of Grammar and Primary Curriculum Requirements in England
CASE STUDY ANALYSIS
Case Study 3: Catherine
Catherine had the highest level of grammatical knowledge, ending the year with full marks in the audit. She had to explain person to 7–8-year-olds, to understand the differences between verbs in the first, second and third person (DfEE, 1998: 34). She taught contrastively because, she claimed, ‘it is easier to teach them together’. Using the story of The Fox and the Hare, she explained each person in turn and asked check questions, for example:
Catherine: If we say that the Fox is telling the story, then he would be saying that HE [her emphasis] was telling the story and
when we are describing how you use different words in sentences we say that HE is the third person.
Pupils: (indistinct noise)
Catherine: Who is the first person?
Pupils: We.
Catherine: Or?
Pupils: (pause, then some mutter): I
Catherine: I.. Don’t call out please .. so first person is either I or we.
Pupils: Or her!
Catherine: Don’t call out please. What’s the second person? [nominates Graham]
Pupils: Hmmm, her, her and he.
Catherine: Not quite.
Pupils: He and…
Catherine: [interrupts] No, that’s the third person, HE and SHE and THEY.... The second person is ... (pupils mutter him, her)....
The first person is ME; the third person is HE. What’s over there? Who is in the middle? You.
Pupils: You... (muttering) oh.
Catherine then resorted to direct explanation to offer clarification when elicitation drew erratic responses, or what Hudson calls “exercises in the production of language” (Hudson, 2001) that she next set for the pupils worked much more effectively. In these, she encouraged pupils to imagine the different possible ‘characters’ in the text and re-tell the story from that perspective (hare or tortoise). Then, they wrote appropriate stories. Despite her success, she was very self-critical after viewing her ‘grammar’ episodes believing that about 50% of the pupils did not:
- understand that ‘we’ was first person (because it was more than one, and not ‘I’).
- accept that ‘you’ is both singular and plural, while ‘person’ is a singular word.
Catherine felt that the learners did not have a clear understanding of person as a grammatical concept. They saw ‘person’ as people. She accepted that her method of explaining might have added to confusion.
Interviewer: There, you were using a pointing procedure to try to explain it.
Catherine: Except, to the children they would be ‘we’ wouldn’t they (laughs)? It is not very clear.
Interviewer: Why not?
Catherine: From my point of view, pointing at the children is YOU but from their point of view it’s US.
Asked how she felt after watching the video, Catherine said:
I would not labor the technical side of it but try to relate it to practical examples that they can do already.
It was when, as she put it, she was ‘lecturing them on the technical points’ that she got into hot water. Exercises in the production of language were successful but direct explanations were ineffective despite the fact that she understood and could talk about the linguistic concept of person.
Catherine concluded that the pupils could have written or re-told the story in the first person or third person without the grammatical input. The confusion was clearly demonstrated when she attempted to transfer the learning to a different text at the end of the lesson. After reading a poem with the opening line: ‘I never slide and never slip’, she asked: ‘What person is that written in?’ A pupil called out: ‘Hare’.
She complained that the NLS objectives led her to focus on a concept that would be better left for a later stage in pupils’ development. Also, NLS objectives promote the use of direct instruction. Like Harriet, she was trying to teach to an objective, set by the NLS for 7–8-year-olds:
to identify pronouns and understand their functions in sentences through distinguishing the 1st, 2nd, 3rd person forms of pronouns e.g. I, me, we, you, she, her, them investigating the contexts and purposes for using pronouns in different persons, linked to previous term’s work on 1st and 3rd person (DfEE, 1998: 36).
Had an inspector been present, he or she might well have applauded her adherence to the objective. It is not the fault of teacher educators that trainees find themselves facing such dilemmas. We do not have the authority to advise trainees not to follow official objectives, but perhaps in future provision we can mediate the NLS objectives so that trainees use them more ‘creatively’.
