Grammar to Go, featuring Harry Potter and a goblin

By Markus Skårnes

My practice group consisted of me, Marikken and Vegard. We were teaching in seventh grade. We were all involved pretty much equally both in planning and teaching the lesson. We were introduced to the concept of grammar to go, which teaches us to not teach grammar as a separate unit, but rather in the context of the language. This can be done by working with a text over a period of time. The pupils will preferably learn the text by heart as well as learn the grammatical structure, literary devices and vocabulary that the text uses. By knowing the text, they will hopefully remember all of the things they learn. The advantage of this is that you get to see grammar as a natural part of the English language instead of just an additional thing you have to learn.

For our grammar to go session, we decided to use a poem from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:

Enter, stranger, but take heed

Of what awaits the sin of greed,

For those who take, but do not earn,

Must pay most dearly in their turn.

So if you seek beneath our floors

A treasure that was never yours,

Thief, you have been warned, beware

Of finding more than treasure there.

In the book it is the warning that can be read when you walk in to Gringotts, the wizarding bank. We decided to use this because it relates to the fantasy project we worked on for the entirety of our practice period.

Our plan for working with it was as follows: First we show the pupils a video that we made, showcasing Gringotts and the dangers within. This was to both give visual context to the poem, thereby making it easier to understand for the pupils, and also to start the class off with something fun. After handing out the poem as well as the worksheets, we then read the poem out loud for the pupils and go through difficult or strange words to expand their vocabulary and to make sure they understand what the poem means. Following this, we planned to go through all of the pronunciations that might be tricky for learners of English. This was to be done by first saying the word in question and then having the pupils repeat it back a few times.

Moving on to grammar, we wanted to focus on two word classes. We therefore made one table with three columns for verbs (infinitive, present tense and past tense) and another with two columns for nouns (singular and plural). After a short repetition about word classes, the pupils were to work with this for most of the lesson.

At the end we planned to have the pupils sit in pairs and read alternate lines of the poem out loud to each other.

When the lesson came, it started with a missing video. All was well in the end, as Vegard was able to fetch the video quickly while we talked about the picture of the goblin above the poem on the paper which the pupils had. After that, everything went smoothly until we noticed that we did not have enough time for the pupils to read the poem out loud. We decided to skip that part instead of rushing through it at the end, to give the pupils more time to work on the grammar part.

Due to the limited time frame we had, we could not have the pupils memorize the text, thus losing out on part of the point of grammar to go. We could have worked with it for a longer period of time, but we felt it was more important to get the fantasy project done.

When reflecting on the lesson and our plan we realized that we had bitten over more than we could chew. I think instead of doing both verbs and nouns, we should have focused on one of them. That way, we could have explained it more thoroughly and the pupils would get the feeling that they are mastering the concept. One of the reasons we felt it would have been beneficial to focus on only one word class is the fact that there were some difficult and possibly confusing words. There were abstract nouns, like “greed”. There were also words that could be nouns of verbs depending on the context, such as “turn” and “heed”. We could probably have spent an entire lesson just on words that can be several word classes. The word “heed” was especially confusing, as it is a verb most of the time, but in this particular context is a noun due to the word “take” in front of it.

Despite this, the pupils still learned a good bit from the poem and overall the method worked well for just one lesson. In one lesson we touched upon vocabulary, pronunciations, word classes and expanding on their knowledge of fantasy literature. If we had more time, we could have done words that are both nouns and verbs, abstract nouns, rhyme scheme and even creative writing based on the text.