It became clear in Friday’s Y12 Lang lesson that:
- having to do exercises on language concepts really helped to clarify your knowledge and understanding
- few of you had taken advantage of the resources I keep mentioning that will help you to have all the grammatical knowledge and understanding you need (and more) without us having to spend a disproportionate amount of lesson time on it.
So, I am going to formalise what I expect of you in that regard. As a minimum, by the time we come back after half-term, I expect you to have worked through the englishbiz grammar guide that starts here:
http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/grammar/
It will help your understanding if you make notes as you go along. Mindmaps and other ‘visual’ ways of organising the material you read are often helpful in doing this. You should also do the periodic ‘progress tests’ as you go along, before looking at the answers on the following page. There’s no point trying to cheat yourself into thinking you’ve understood when you haven’t really.
Be honest with yourself about terms and concepts you don’t understand or are unsure about. Try looking at other sources (eg. The Internet Grammar of English is also an excellent guide, with lots of self-test questions, or get yourself a simple but reliable book such as David Crystal’s Discover Grammar or Rediscover Grammar)
Anything that you come across that you are still unsure about, feel free to ask via a comment on this post, or directly via email.
After half-term I will assume that you are familiar with the terms and concepts introduced on that section of the englishbiz site and will be using many of them as a matter of course – and expecting you to use them – as we move on to focus further on textual analysis and language and social contexts.
Heald English 