EEEEK!! Grammatical Forms??? English??!!

That's right. This is where we get technical. On the other hand, this is what makes us as teachers shine. We learn so that others may learn from us!

What is a grammatical form?
So let's remember what this is all about to begin with. Grammatical forms are simply put, the syntax of a language. And what is syntax- it is how words come together in any language in order to create well formed sentences. These words come in different flavors: verbs, adverbs, prepositions, etc. and are what we "fill in the blanks" to convey a message about a noun. For example, The ELD teacher __________ students very ___________.

How do I know what grammatical forms to teach?
This is the toughie. Remember the discussion around proficiency levels? Well, this is very important to consider when deciding upon what grammatical forms to teach. In the past, teachers had to "feel in the dark" or rely upon an extremely solid knowledge of the grammatical forms of the English language, and intuit how they build upon in more and more complex ways.

Well, since 1999, the California Department of Education has adopted ELD standards which are organized by grade span: K - 2, 3 - 5, 6 - 8, 9 - 12 (I have discussed the rationale for this in the past) but also by proficiency level. These are essentially the ELA Standards "scaffolded" up from the "Beginning" proficiency level towards the "Advanced," where the ELD and ELA standards are indistinguishable. Unfortunately, they did not call out grammatical forms very explicitly and so it left many ELD teachers to continue down that dark path, although with a little more light to see...

Nowadays, I know of at least one curriculum- The Carousel of Ideas from Ballard & Tighe that offers teachers a progression of sorts of increasingly more complex grammatical forms according to proficiency level. Unfortunately, many teachers have also (rightly) complained about the lack of rigor they notice in the grammatical forms it exposes ELLs to and the topics they choose for context are not always age appropriate- e.g. teaching about zoo animals to Intermediate ELL students in 5th grade.

The one excellent source that I've seen is the ELD Matrix of Grammatical Forms from EL Achieve. This is part of a tool kit you receive after going through a training on the Systematic ELD Framework. While even they claim it is not an exhaustive limit, nor meant to limit the forms to teach to students at any particular level (you know your students' needs best after all) it is an extremely wonderful guide to what to teach.

Fortunately for you, the Santa Unified School District has done the legwork of creating a correlation between The Carousel of Ideas curriculum and the ELD Matrix. For those of you out there who have never heard of The Carousel of Ideas until today, no worries. Ignore the numbers in parentheses and just focus on the grammatical forms in boldface. On the left you will see the various large categories of grammatical forms: verbs, nouns & articles, etc. By column, you will see the increasing levels of English proficiency. Thus, tracking the verbs for example, you can see a progression. From a focus on (simple) present tense at the Beginning level, to present tense with past perfect by Early Advanced, you should get a sense of how language demands become more complex as ELLs become closer to the goal of achieving fluency and automaticity similar to that of a native speaker of English.

Digest that for a while. And do give credit where credit is due if you plan to share this resource/ tool with colleagues.

And I hope you do!

- W