Each lesson includes teaching content, a stimulus, an exam-style question, starter sentences, a Band 6 sample answer, annotation, marking criteria and a worksheet.
Intended learning: define grammar as a meaning-making system and explain why composers manipulate it.
Teaching: Grammar = word level + phrase level + clause level + text level. Deviation from the norm is itself meaningful (poets break rules against an expected pattern). Link to NESA outcome of understanding "language forms and features".
He sang his didn't he danced his did.— E.E. Cummings, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" (1940)
Starters: "By converting X into Y, the poet forces the reader to…" · "This deviation signals…"
Cummings converts adverbs ("didn't", "did") into nouns, so abstract behaviour becomes a possession someone can own. The reader must rebuild the grammar to read at all — and that rebuilding enacts the poem's theme that love is a private language, legible only to its participants.
| Feature | Effect |
|---|---|
| "converts adverbs into nouns" | Precise grammatical naming — not vague 'wordplay'. |
| "reader must rebuild the grammar" | Effect on reader explicitly stated. |
Rewrite "He ran quickly down the hill" three ways: change the verb, delete the adverb, front the adverbial. Note how each change alters pace and emphasis.
Intended learning: identify nouns, pronouns, verbs and their sub-types, and analyse their effects.
Teaching: Noun sub-types matter analytically: concrete vs abstract nouns track theme; collective nouns frame groups positively or negatively ("team" vs "mob"). Verb types: material (action), mental (thought), relational (being) — the seed of functional grammar.
King's dream is built from abstract nouns — justice, freedom, dignity — but each is anchored by material verbs: "we must rise", "hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope". The grammar refuses abstraction to remain passive; hope is something done.
Take any news paragraph. Highlight all verbs; classify them material/mental/relational; write one sentence about what the verb mix reveals.
Intended learning: classify adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, determiners and recognise phrase structures.
Teaching: Phrases are units around a head: NP ("the ruined chapel"), VP ("must have been waiting"), AdjP ("strangely calm"), PP ("beneath the floorboards"). Adjective order and stacking set tone; prepositional chains build cinematic space.
Describe your kitchen using: one stacked adjective sequence, two prepositional phrases, one sentence adverb. Then note the mood you created.
Intended learning: distinguish rules from conventions and analyse non-standard language respectfully and precisely.
Teaching: Prescriptive rules govern formal register; descriptive grammar records real usage. In texts, non-standard grammar constructs voice: dialect, idiolect, sociolect. Never mark a character's speech as "wrong" — analyse what it does.
The narrator's dropped auxiliaries ("she gone home") are not errors but signals: they locate the speaker inside a speech community whose trust the reader must earn. Standard narration frames this vernacular, letting the composer critique, rather than merely depict, who gets judged by their grammar.
List three prescriptive rules you were taught. For each, find a published author breaking it, and explain the effect.
Intended learning: identify clause types and explain how subordination backgrounds information.
Teaching: Independent clause = complete thought. Dependent clauses (adverbial, relative, nominal) cannot stand alone. Subordination creates hierarchy: main clauses carry foreground; subordinate clauses carry assumed truth. Compare "Although she lied, we forgave her" vs "We forgave her although she lied" — the concession shifts weight.
Write five sentences each containing one independent and one dependent clause; underline clauses; note which idea feels dominant and why.
Intended learning: analyse clauses into process/participants/circumstances and expose representation choices.
Teaching: Every clause answers: what's happening (process), who acts (Actor), what is affected (Goal), under what circumstances? Passive voice deletes Actors — crucial for media analysis: "Mistakes were made."
In the passive version the police appear only as an instrument ("by police"), while protesters retain Agent-like salience through position. The grammar redistributes blame before any fact is processed — evidence that syntax is never neutral.
Rewrite five active headlines as passives and vice versa; annotate who becomes visible/invisible in each version.
Intended learning: use modality (certainty) and theme/rheme analysis on persuasive texts.
Teaching: Modality scales from low ("might") to high ("must"); high modality asserts authority, low modality invites agreement. Theme = first element of the clause; it frames everything after. Speeches front inclusive pronouns for solidarity.
Take a persuasive editorial; list every modal auxiliary; grade them; write a paragraph on the writer's certainty strategy.
Intended learning: explain structural ambiguity and analyse its deliberate literary/commercial uses.
Teaching: One surface string can map onto two deep structures: "Old men and women", "Flying planes can be dangerous". Poets and advertisers exploit ambiguity so multiple readings coexist.
Find or invent three structurally ambiguous sentences; draw bracket diagrams showing both parses.
Intended learning: convert grammatical observation into analytical sentences that score marks.
Teaching: Formula: Feature → Evidence → Effect → Link (F-E-L). Ban "uses" alone; upgrade verbs: foregrounds, suppresses, juxtaposes, presupposes, modalises.
Upgrade five weak sentences ("The author uses metaphors") into F-E-L analyses.
Intended learning: edit drafts for comma splices, agreement, tense consistency; self-mark against criteria.
Teaching: Three-pass edit: argument, evidence, expression. Hunt: subject–verb agreement across long subjects, comma splices, dangling modifiers, inconsistent literary present tense.
Mark your last essay against Lesson 9's model bank and list two grammar habits to fix before trials.
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