Addressing muddles about grammar, English, and teaching in general
(also a page of resources for teaching advanced English Language…)
Contact: averbisnotadoingword@gmail.com
THE MUDDLES
- ‘Utilise’ is better than ‘use’…
- A dependent clause is less important, and does not make sense by itself.
- A paragraph is a set of sentences united around a topic
- A text is a tool for getting things done
- A verb is a doing word
- Building vocab is like putting money in the bank
- Creativity is Discipline
- English is an important subject, since it’s when we teach people to be literate
- English is hand-writing set-text essays
- ENGLISH LANGUAGE RESOURCES
- Every text has a target audience
- How can you analyze grammar if you don’t even know what a noun is?!
- Inference is, like, cool
- My job is to show the student what a literary text means
- No, really, what about knowledge versus skills?
- People haven’t evolved to be writers, so forceful schools must forcefully force them
- Spellings encode sounds
- Students don’t even know what a grammatical sentence is – no wonder they can’t punctuate.
- Teachers are professionals, and so should banish ideology from their practice.
- The advantages of phonics are immodest
- To get good writers, first get good sentences
- ‘Just-writing’ doesn’t help
Averbisnotadoingword 