The Essential Guide to SPaG in the Primary Classroom

David Waugh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the the School of Education, University of Durham where he is also the subject leader for primary English.  Kate Allott is Senior Lecturer in Education at York St John University. Kate worked as a literacy consultant in a local authority from the inception of the National Literacy Strategy. More recently she spent two years as a regional adviser with the Primary National Strategy, working on the Communication, Language and Literacy Development initiative. Rosemary Waugh is a linguist and classics teacher at Queen Margaret′s School, York. She collects children′s literature and has lectured on the subject for the University of Hull, and contributes to conferences and publications on children′s literature.

This book is very accessible to students and follows key terminology featured in the national curriculum. It has useful explanations and examples of different grammatical terms and some good ideas about how to teach such language features in the classroom. Giving examples of texts that could be used to teach such language features would have been an added bonus.

• 1.WHAT IS GRAMMAR?2.STANDARD ENGLISH3.DIALECT AND ACCENT4.FORMAL AND INFORMAL LANGUAGE5.PREFIXES6.SUFFIXES7.COMPOUND WORDS8.PLURALS9.WORD CLASSES10.NOUNS11.VERBS12.ADJECTIVES13.ADVERBS14.PRONOUNS15.PREPOSITIONS16.DETERMINERS/ARTICLES17.CONJUNCTIONS18.SYNONYMS AND ANTONYMS19.SPELLING20.HOW TO LEARN A SPELLING21.PHONICS AND SPELLING22.HOMOPHONES, HOMOGRAPHS AND HOMONYMS23.PHRASES AND CLAUSES24.SENTENCES25.PARAGRAPHS26.PUNCTUATION27.APOSTROPHES28.BRINGING WRITING TOGETHER: COHESION AND AMBIGUITY29.THE SPAG TEST