Testing Times for Grammar

This academic year will be an interesting, and no doubt controversial one, with changes in place for the way children are tested in writing at the end of Key Stage 2. Lord Bew’s recommendations for the tests have been fully adopted by the DfE and children, as well as being given a teacher assessed level for their creative writing, will also sit a test to measure their ability to spell, and use grammar and punctuation correctly.

Year 6 teachers will be familiar with teacher assessing writing levels from last year, and this will continue in 2013, but it is the new, ‘SPAG’ or ‘GAPS’ test that will, and already is, causing trepidation amongst the profession. Little is currently known about this test, and much has yet to be finalised by the DfE. We know it will be a test for children working at level 3 and above of understanding of sentence grammar and punctuation (through identification and grammatical accuracy), vocabulary (through grammatical accuracy), handwriting and spelling. However, many questions still remain unanswered, like the weighting (we only know, from Lord Bew’s recommendations, that the teacher assessed element will form the ‘lion’s share’), and, of course, the content, although we know that it will be taken from the 1999 curriculum.

One thing that we at the ‘Tree’ are sure about is that, other than for a sense of geeky satisfaction, there is little long-term gain in teaching grammar for the sake of grammar alone. We will often be heard chanting one of our mantras when supporting the teachers with whom we work, that learning grammar is only useful to help children make more sophisticated choices in their writing so that they can effectively communicate their ideas to an audience accurately, precisely and, perhaps most importantly, creatively. This forms the crux of our grammar training, that grammar must be firmly embedded within an exciting teaching sequence that gives children a purposeful writing context. Just like children who take home spellings to learn, week in week out and then continue to spell them incorrectly in their written work, learning ‘grammar’ out-of-context will not support children to select and apply appropriate grammatical devices in their written outcomes. In fact, teachers are often surprised when we demonstrate that grammar can be engaging and motivating when embedded within the existing sequence for writing.

So, with this in mind, will the new ‘SPAG’ tests be a worthwhile way of allowing children to demonstrate their understanding of grammar? Well, if it allows teachers the creativity and freedom to incorporate explicit grammar objectives into their existing teaching sequences (without the baby being thrown out with the proverbial bathwater) and children are motivated to select grammatical devices that can support them to become better writers, then it may. However, where the danger lies is if professionals feel pressured to decontextualise grammar and move back to the dim and dark old days of cloze procedures using extracts from texts.

Click hereClick here to view the sample materials for the new test.