Literacy
Does teaching complex sentences have to be complicated?
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Does teaching complex sentences have to be
complicated? Lessons from children’s
online writing
Alison Kelly and Kimberly Safford
Abstract
This paper draws upon data from a research project,
undertaken in 2 Year 6 classrooms during the 2006
World Cup, to analyse how children used complex
sentence structures in their writing on a football
web-log. We explore how the confluence of a temporary, popular, global event and an online forum
for communication created a moment of linguistic
empowerment where pupils began to use high-level
forms of language, and we consider the implications of
transience and interactivity for the teaching and
learning of sentence grammar.
Alan’s contributions to the football blog prompted us
to delve more deeply into the digital linguistic data
from this research; in this article we consider its
implications for the teaching and learning of sentence
types in primary school.
‘‘I think that if England are winning comfortably then I
would put on Theo so he can get past the tired defenders.
But if England were chasing the game, then I wouldn’t
put him on because it puts a lot of pressure on him and
he’ll get frustrated and lose the ball.’’
Within Key Stage 2 literacy objectives there is an
understanding that complex sentences are a marker of
mature and thoughtful writing. The Primary National
Strategy for Literacy states that children in Year 3 should
be able to ‘‘show relationships of time, reason and
cause through subordination and connectives’’
[Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2006,
p. 29] in writing and that by Year 6 children should be
able to ‘‘express subtle distinctions of meaning, including hypothesis, speculation and supposition, by constructing sentences in varied ways’’ (DfES, 2006, p. 35).
In the Key Stage 2 National Curriculum Assessments
(SATs), children gain higher marks for ‘‘the controlled
use of several subordinate clauses’’ [Qualification and
Curriculum Authority (QCA), 2007, p. 32]. Moreover,
in their study of the impact of reading powerful
literature on children’s writing, Barrs and Cork (2001)
identify complex sentences as one of the ‘countable’
indicators of sophistication in children’s written
texts.
These are the words of 11-year-old Alan, written
during the run of the World Cup, 2006. Alan is
speculating as to whether England captain, Sven
Goran Eriksson, should try out the inexperienced
young player, Theo Walcott. Alan was a reluctant
writer, so as teachers our first response was one of
delight at the enthusiasm and exuberance with which
he articulated his opinion.
Clearly, understanding language, and language in context, is important teacher subject knowledge. However,
as teacher educators working in higher education with
the first generation of ‘‘literacy hour kids’’, we encounter many trainee teachers (and experienced teachers in
schools) who may lack confidence when it comes to
grammar and its pedagogic application in practice.
This is not a new state of affairs.
Key words: literacy, grammar, complex sentences,
blogging, ICT, interactivity, digital writing, online
writing, sport, football, World Cup
Kicking off . . .
A closer examination of Alan’s writing reveals that this
pupil, whose literacy folder in school was virtually
empty, has expressed his ideas using multi-clause
complex sentences, which include adverbial clauses of
condition, reason and result. What was making this
difference to Alan’s writing? He, and 2 Year 6 classes,
were blogging; Alan was contributing to on an online
football web-log. His blog entry is one piece of data
from a wide-ranging corpus of evidence collected from
a research project exploring the language affordances
(Marsh, 2005, p. 4) of a global sporting event.1
Teaching complex sentences in the primary
classroom
1984 saw the publication of a Department for Education and Science (DES) publication (the first of many to
adopt the original title of English from 5 to 16). This
modest, pocket-sized booklet contained an educational
bombshell in the form of prescribed objectives for
children at the ages of 7 and 11. Among those for 11-
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Literacy
Volume 43 Number 3
November 2009
year-olds was the expectation that they would ‘‘use
and control . . . where appropriate, complex sentences’’
(DES, 1984, p. 8). A storm of protest greeted the
publication as this was an era and culture in which the
notion of age-related objectives, let alone prescribed
ones, was unheard of. If we fast-forward some 14
years, through several versions of the National Curriculum, we find the National Literacy Strategy [Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), 1998]
and its adjunct Grammar for Writing (DfEE, 2000)
setting out detailed objectives for ‘sentence level’ work
including, in the first term of Year 6, the expectation
that pupils should be taught to ‘‘form complex
sentences’’ (DfEE, 1998, p. 50).
Ten years later, pedagogical questions as to how such
age-bound targets can be realised are still problematic.
The teaching of complex sentences is embedded in a
wider argument about grammar teaching per se. As the
QCA document, The Grammar Papers, (1998) demonstrates, this is an area fraught with difficulty. Questions
about the usefulness of ‘traditional’ grammar teaching
– parsing and naming of grammatical elements typically learnt by rote – were first raised in the 1960s. A
particular concern was the impact, if any, that such
teaching had on children’s own use of language. How
far did an explicit knowledge of word classes and
sentence types, taught in a prescriptive and dislocated
way, actually impact on the children’s skills as writers
and speakers?2
Two government reports, one specifically examining
teachers’ own knowledge about language, offered
teachers little in the way of help. First, the Bullock
Committee (1975), amidst a flurry of double negatives,
had the following to say:
‘‘We do not conclude from this that a child should not be
taught how to improve his/her use of language; quite the
contrary. It has not been established by research that
systematic attention to skill and technique has no
beneficial effect on the handling of language’’
(in QCA, 1998, p. 47).
Then, in a similar vein, John Kingman’s Report of the
Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of the English
Language rejected ‘‘old-fashioned grammar teaching
and learning by rote’’ (1988, p. 3). He went on to say
that ‘‘for children not to be taught anything about
language is seriously to their disadvantage’’ (12) but
his four-part model of language,3 intended to illuminate teachers’ practice, proved to be of little practical
use and fell by the wayside rapidly.
Hot on the heels of Kingman’s report, came Brian Cox’s
English from Ages 5 to 16 (1989), the document underpinning the first version of the National Curriculum. In a
principled chapter on ‘‘Knowledge about Language’’,
Cox argued for the integration of teaching about
language into work on English and rationalised it in
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terms of the positive effects on pupils’ own language
use but also:
‘‘. . . as an important part of their understanding of their
social and cultural environment, since language had vital
functions in the life of the individual and of society’’
(Cox, 1991, p. 57).
Advocating a broad approach encompassing sentence
structure and ‘‘larger patterns of organisation . . . a
range of stylistic and dialectal varieties . . . meaning and
use’’ (p. 58), the pedagogical focus was on learners’ own
language competence. The suggestion was that teachers
accrue their own materials, drawn from pupils’ own
research, on which to base study about language.
In our World Cup project, we were interested in how
these ideas about pupils, language, grammar and
culture might ‘play’ in the digital interactive millennium. As we will go on to show, the children we
worked with were using complex language forms
spontaneously; these arose as children discussed and
speculated online about the games and the players, yet
their teachers had not explicitly ‘taught’ them to write
complex sentences as part of the World Cup project.4 It
was the blog that got these children writing at length
and with commitment, and with syntactic complexity.
Before we look at the children’s writing, here is . . .
A byte about blogs
In 2003, Robert McCrum reported that The Observer
required that a square bracket gloss be inserted
whenever the new term ‘web-log’ was used; no such
gloss is needed today, with blogging, blogosphere and
even blogophobe all sitting comfortably in our lexicon
without so much as an inverted comma to mark them.
Blogging – online writing – is a world wide phenomenon: in 2006 The Guardian reported that one in four
internet users make daily online blog entries. For many
adults and teenagers blogging is a way of life and blogs
abound for all occasions, domains and audiencesF
there are political blogs, academics who blog, events
which trigger blogs, celebrity blogs, . . . the list is endless.
However, despite this blogging fervour, little has been
reported on the use of blogs in the primary school and
hence of the language of primary-aged bloggers.
Davies and Merchant (2007), writing about adult
academic bloggers, highlight the social, networking
dimensions of blogging which resonated with our own
convictions about classrooms as communities of readers
and writers. Huffaker (2005), working with pupils from
primary through to secondary school also identifies the
communal characteristics of blogging where:
‘‘. . . ‘comments’ form a chain between the author and
readers, and in essence, an online community. Communities are also built as bloggers link to each other, creating
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a group of storytellers that provide individualistic
expressions, as well as interactions with each other.’’
(Huffaker, 2005, p. 10)
Our inclusion of a class blog in the project was
motivated by these ideas of social networking as well
as our understanding of the open-endedness and
pliability of blogging which Herring et al. (2004) say
creates opportunities for a wide range of genres in
accordance with the needs of users. Concepts of
audience and purpose have been central to thinking
about the teaching of writing since the work of the
National Writing Project in the 1980s and in the World
Cup project we were interested to see how far blogging
might refresh contexts for children’s school writing.
Levels of understanding children’s online
writing
The blog was set up and ran for the 6 weeks of the
tournament. The 2 Year 6 classes had access to the blog
at school (in the classroom and in the ICT suite) and for
many, at home too. The blog was a secure, password
protected site, and a teacher demonstrated how to post
comments explaining that it would be monitored for
unsuitable content. None of the children had blogged
before but most had access to computers at home and
were proficient users of ICT. Over the 6 weeks,
members of the research team posted match reports
and posed questions, most of which were ignored by
the children who, once they began writing, were much
more interested in presenting their own ideas and
responding to each other’s comments.
In our initial reading of the written data, we first
recognised that children felt they were permitted to
write in different registers for a wide range of
purposes. Some used the colloquialisms of a chat room:
‘‘‘Hey Katie, did u watch da football on sat?’ – ‘Yes
England vs Paraguay, England won 1-0. I knew they
were going to win.’ – ‘but it was kinda borin on sat’.’’
There were calls of encouragement and exhortations to
teams:
‘‘‘England is the best team. I have faith in you’; ‘Come on
England do your best in the world cup you have to win the
world cup again or another team like France will win the
world cup. Come on England’.’’
Other children felt free to voice their dissent:
‘‘watching TV is better than football I would watch tom
and jerry. My best opinion on football is boring as
snoring. If there were no rules I would watch it. I think
football is a waste off time!!!!!!!!!!! What is the whole
point of football?’’
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Does teaching complex sentences have to be complicated?
Some children reflected speculatively:
‘‘We are a little bit worried about England playing with
Trinidad and Tobago because the way they played with
Paraguay wasn’t really a good performance. Even the
goal wasn’t their own goal, one of the players for
Paraguay accidentally headed it in their own goal. We
thought it was really embarrassing for their team.’’
and hypothesised:
‘‘Wayne Rooney is a very talented young player. If I was
as gifted as him I would consider myself lucky’’.
Herring’s points about genre hit home forcefully as we
noted the immediacy and authenticity of the different
language uses at work in this online community.
After this initial reading, we examined the vocabulary
choices and phrases, which the children used. We
noticed numerous incidences of what we might
describe as ‘‘in-the-moment’’ language of football
commentary such as ‘‘the defence was sleeping’’, ‘‘he
skills up most of the team’’ and ‘‘bicycle kick’’. The blog
was alive with the vivid phrases that belong to sport
commentaries, both oral and written, in which the
children were so immersed at the time. We noted the
ebullience and enjoyment which characterised the
children’s contributionsF a ‘‘cracking goal’’, a ‘‘classic
match’’ and ‘‘great pace and first touch’’.
Finally, prompted by Alan’s contribution with which
we opened this paper, we analysed the sentence types
used by the children across the blog. Remember that
Alan was a disaffected writerF he was underachieving with a Level 3 in the Year 6 National Curriculum
Assessments and there was no evidence of any writing
of this sophistication in his almost-empty literacy
folder. And yet, as a blogger, he was making assured
use of lengthy and complex sentences to articulate this
speculative thinking.
In the first sentence, his main clause, ‘I think’, precedes
an adverbial clause of condition – ‘‘if England are
winning comfortably’’. The noun clause object – ‘‘then I
would put on Theo’’ is followed by another adverbial
clause, this time of result – ‘‘so he can get past the tired
defenders’’. The second sentence is also complex and
includes adverbial clauses of condition and reason.
This is clear evidence of written language supporting thinkingF his use of the modals ‘‘would/
wouldn’t’’ – reveal him considering the possibilities,
projecting and thinking ahead. He is using the
language of logic, cause and effect (‘‘if . . . then’’). This
is a powerful example of language driven by Alan’s
expertise and an informed desire to communicate
accurately and forcefully.
Alan’s contribution proved to be indicative of children’s language use across the blog: out of 248 entries,
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there were 125 complex sentences (10% of which
had more than one subordinate clause), 91 simple
and 32 compound sentences. Further analysis of
the clause types revealed a significant proportion
(just over 18%) of adverbial clauses of reason, for
instance:
‘‘The blog is the best part, because you can put your own
opinions into it, you don’t need your friends to do
anything, you can just put your own opinions on.’’
‘‘by keeping possession well and passing well and they
were crossing well’’
‘‘because nothing much happened and the first goal was
an own goal and in the second half we think the players
were really hot and tired’’
‘‘as he was the only forward on the pitch’’
‘‘because he shot from far away from the goal and because
they had better positions even though they missed’’
But – and it is a big ‘but’ – this was a temporary
moment. Blogs and sporting events are, by their
nature, ephemeral, and digital data are elusive; all
we have captured here is a linguistic moment in time,
an example of what Elaine Millard (2006) has so
usefully conceptualised as ‘fusion literacy’.
This confounded our original expectations that contributions to the blog would be elliptical and more
akin to textese. Clearly this was language composed and constructed to fit its purposes – to explain,
hypothesise and speculate. It seemed to be the
dialogic nature of the blog that powered this language:
perhaps it was the blog’s communicative network that
enabled the children to hypothesise and defend their
reasoning and speculation using complex sentence
structures.
The world in the classroom: implications for
the teaching of grammar
Blogging offers a real-world digital medium for
communication. It is multi-dimensional in that it does
not just offer a ‘‘container’’ for writing but has the
possibility of multiple audiences and access points.
From this small-scale pilot we propose that the
bringing together of the blog with a temporary, global
event taking place in real time and with unpredictable
outcomes, together with children’s authority and
passion about the subject matter, provided a moment
of linguistic empowerment, fired particularly by the
language and content of sports commentary.
Unlike much other school writing, there was nothing
contrived about these audiences and purposesF the
children were writing in the context of a real-life world
event, which their out-of-school communities were
also watching and commenting upon. Children would
blog from home as they watched matches, and friends
and families were reading the blog’s match reports and
commentaries. Their enjoyment of the blog and the
freedom it gave them to express their genuine thoughts
and opinions was clear from the sheer energy of their
writing and their reflective comments:
‘‘I liked the web-log. You can write about how you felt
about the game and how you think the match could have
been better. I made a couple of comments. I said how
England weren’t playing as best they could but they still
picked up a victory.’’
(Kofi)
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Certainly the blog data goes some way towards
challenging popular notions that technology is the
cause of diminishing standards in children’s literacy
(e.g. Brown, 2007). What we also take from the World
Cup project as teachers is that is it possible to offer
children meaningful experiences and resources, which
create opportunities for them to enact implicit syntactical knowledge. Just as Margaret Peters (1985)
conceptualised spelling as both ‘caught’ and ‘taught’,
our findings suggest similar possibilities for the
teaching of sentence types. If children can so readily
call upon these linguistic resources, teachers could
then explicitly build on this spontaneous usage in the
classroom by discussing and extending children’s
language choices and forms.
Furthermore, the data from this small project suggest
that the confluence of a temporary, popular event and
an online forum may offer something specialF in this
case, a context for communication where children
articulated their ideas in a range of complicated
linguistic modes. From observing children’s use of
complex sentence structures (as we have here),
teachers could plan to build upon similar confluences
of transience and interactivity with the explicit aim of
promoting pupils’ awareness, use and control of
complex written language.
Notes
1. Exploring the Field was a pilot project set up to investigate the
potential of a world sporting event. It took place in a multilingual, inner-city primary school with 2 Year 6 classes (each with
an equal ratio of boys and girls). For the duration of the World
Cup, 2006, class teachers, teaching assistants and four Roehampton University lecturers developed a range of activities around
football texts (e.g. stories, poetry, newspapers, role-play, writing
journals). We were curious about how these, in the context of a
popular event, might influence children’s reading, writing and
speaking and listening through harnessing their ‘‘funds of
knowledge’’ (Moll, 1992). For an overview of the project, see
Safford et al. (2007).
2. Research evidence in this area is thin on the ground and, as more
recent work suggests, flawed (e.g. Bunting, 2000; QCA, 1998).
Harris’ influential study in the 1960s (in Bunting, 2000) raised
serious doubts about the validity of formal grammar instruction,
which left many teachers floundering. Some 30 years later,
Tomlinson (in Bunting, 2000) critiqued Harris’ and similar
studies, suggesting methodological difficulties and querying
claims to be researching ‘‘formal grammar teaching’’: ‘‘Does it
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mean the formal teaching of grammar, or the teaching of formal
grammar?’’ (Bunting, 2000: 6). Nonetheless, challenges to ‘‘traditional’’ methods seemed to propose few alternatives for classroom teachers.
3. Kingman’s model was intended to provide a theoretical underpinning for teachers’ Knowledge About Language (KAL) and
comprised the following parts: (1) The forms of the English
language; (2)(i) Communication; (2)(ii) Comprehension – some
processes of understanding, (3) Acquisition and Development;
and (4) Historical and Geographical variation.
4. It should be noted that, as part of the preparation for Year 6
National Curriculum Assessments (SATs), the teachers had
revised aspects of complex sentence writing with the children
in literacy lessons.
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Does teaching complex sentences have to be complicated?
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CONTACT THE AUTHORS
Kimberly Safford
e-mail: [email protected]
Alison Kelly
e-mail: [email protected]