“The curriculum is quite weird, the learning a certain feature at a certain point, I do not understand that at all,” says Mark Brenchley, associate research fellow at the Centre for Research in Writing at the University of Exeter.

 He and Ian Cushing, a teaching fellow in English linguistics at University College London, believe that is not the only weird thing about grammar teaching in schools and how teachers perceive grammar. In the 8 December issue of Tes, they detail a number of these aspects and in this episode of Tes Podagogy they build on these and add a few more. 

In an advice-packed podcast the pair discuss how to teach grammar most effectively, what impact grammar teaching has on writing, why grammar is “fuzzy”, how we empower teachers to be more confident with grammarand the delightful sounding “noun-y nouns”.