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The benefits of grammatical terminology

Nouns, verbs, adjectives and their friends can be hard for students to get their heads around. They can be difficult for adults as well! Yet knowledge of these ‘Parts of speech’, the grammatical labelling of the types of words can be highly useful. It is beneficial for students in writing sentences since they can be aware of all the parts that are required for one. It is useful especially for writing stories since students can identify if they are utilising adjectives and adverbs to make their descriptions more descriptive.

An app to help students analyse their texts

I created an app that identifies adjectives, verbs, nouns and so on, in texts. Students can write texts and then use the tool to analyse them. They can then identify if their texts are missing adjectives or if they are present. In the past, I have often required students to highlight the parts of speech in their own books but this has led to problems. Sometimes students have misunderstandings and end up highlighting everything. This tool clearly shows them which is which. Then they can rewrite their texts and see the difference!

An app to help students learn the terms

After finishing this app, I started thinking about whether there was a way for students to practise identifying the parts of speech. I created a little game where students can paste their text and then select words of a particular type. The app will tell them what they got right and wrong and what they missed.

The benefits of this approach

There are so many ways to analyse our writing and to try and make improvements. Recognising the parts of speech is one tool for understanding our writing, recognising deficiencies and improving it. Simply adding adjectives won’t necessarily make our writing better, but I think it is better to know what parts our writing is composed of. Some people argue against having students learn grammatical terminology, but I think it is just another way to look at things, and it can’t hurt to know.

Analyse TextsGame
Jake Heading

Creator of GoodTeach and Primary School Classroom Teacher.

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