Coming to Terms with Terminology

Since the arrival of the curriculum, we've been asked to clarify quite a few grammatical terms. We've also been asked if we could explain which terms are relevant and which are now redundant. Having used many pages of flipchart paper to do this job in schools and conferences, we thought it would be good to provide something concrete or cribsheet-like (with some visuals of course!) Firstly, we wanted to tackle the term 'Connective'. This came to the fore in the National Strategies handbook 'Grammar for Writing' (2000) as a word or phrase that links clauses or sentences. It was not ever considered to be an actual proper grammatical term, more as a useful teaching tool and as an umbrella term for many different cohesive devices (hence our visual choice below!). Connectives can be conjunctions (e.g but, when, because) or connecting adverbs (e.g however, then, therefore). The word ‘connective’ is not mentioned in Curriculum 2014 and the sample 2016 tests indicate that children will not be asked what one is, so it would now be more relevant to use the correct grammatical terminology immediately (see table below – Appendix 2 abridged and the column on the right hand side that children should know for each year group)

Conjunction (term needed to know in Y3)

A word used to link clauses within a sentence. For example, in the following sentences, but and if are conjunctions:
It was raining but it wasn’t cold.
We won’t go out if the weather’s bad.

There are two kinds of conjunction:

a. Co-ordinating conjunctions (and, but, or and so). These join (and are placed between) two clauses of equal weight.
Do you want to go now or shall we wait a bit longer?
And, but and or are also used to join words or phrases within a clause. (expected to use in Y2)

b. Subordinating conjunctions (eg when, while, before, after, since, until, if, because, although, that). These go at the beginning of a subordinate clause:
We were hungry because we hadn’t eaten all day.
Although we’d had plenty to eat, we were still hungry.
We were hungry when we got home. (expected to use by the end of Y2)

Some ‘connectives’ were classified previously by teachers, e.g as ‘time connectives’. These are actually connecting adverbs, adverbial phrases or prepositions (expected to use by end of Y3) Again, it is more useful to refer to these terms now as they will be used in their SPaG test in Y6.

‘Expressing time, place and cause using conjunctions [for example, when, before, after, while, so, because], adverbs [for example, then, next, soon, therefore], or prepositions [for example, before, after, during, in, because of] (Y3)

The other point of confusion is often the ‘Complex sentence’ as this is not mentioned in the new curriculum or the glossary and does not feature within the sample papers of 2016. From the Curriculum 2014 glossary: ‘A sentence may consist of a single clause or it may contain several clauses held together by subordination or co-ordination. Classifying sentences as ‘simple’, ‘complex’ or ‘compound’ can be confusing, because a ‘simple’ sentence may be complicated, and a ‘complex’ one may be straightforward. The terms ‘single-clause sentence’ and ‘multi-clause sentence’ may be more helpful.’
And finally, the terms ‘drop in clause’ or ‘embedded clause' do not exist either in the curriculum. Occasionally these may be relative clauses (Y5) but they might appear at the end of a sentence, not just in the middle as implied by the previous terms.

Have a look at our version of Appendix 2 from the National Curriculum saved in a table format.