Teach Secondary 14.4

DICTIONARY DEEP DIVE Join David Voisin on a rich, and sometimes surprising journey through the points at which literacy, language and vocabulary intersect... SAME ROOT, DIFFERENTWORDS PARDON MY FRENCH Someone being shot at ‘point blank’ range is the sort of scenario you’d encounter if you’re an avid reader of the ‘Norwegian Noir’ thriller genre. The word ‘ noir’ , being French for black, here refers to the sombre atmosphere commonly found in detective stories. The term‘point blank’ actually comes from‘ point blanc ’ (‘white dot’), describing the bullseye of archery targets back when bows were a standard military weapon – because only when they were at close range would archers align their arrows directly with the centre of the target. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Any teacher reading this will have likely come acrossmultiple spelling mistakes in just the last week alone. Among themost tenacious is the spelling of the possessive ‘its’.The irony, as I’msure some readers are already thinking, is that teachers share some of the blame – though whether their culpability is down to intellectual fatigue, typos or grammatical lacunas is up for debate. In his book AccidenceWill Happen (sic), Oliver Kammmounts a crusade against pedantry, explaining that grammar is about syntax,morphology and phonology,with spelling being an entirely separate element. Is ‘its’ really just amatter of spelling, though?When we look at non-natives who have learnt English grammatically,we see that relatively few among this group regularly confuse ‘its’with ‘it’s’. English is a ‘morphologically light’ language,which can serve to obfuscate what are actually close relationships between spelling and grammar. People such asme,who learnt English grammatically, rather than phonetically,will circumnavigate the spelling of homophones by replacing the relevant words with non-homophones of the same grammatical nature. Instinct may lead us to believe that ‘its’ is equivalent to ‘hers’ or ‘theirs’ – when it is, in fact, grammatically the same as ‘her’ or ‘their’. Compare, for instance, the structurally similar ‘The dog and its owner’with ‘The girl and her pet’. When you substitute ‘its’ (possessive) with the longer version of it’s (it is), you immediately realise that one of those options isn’t grammatically coherent while the other is. TEACHING TIP: LESS WRITING, MORE THINKING Manywill have heard the saying“ I have not had the time to write less ” loosely attributed to either Blaise Pascal orMarkTwain – but what about taking less time to write more ? If writing is indeed the residue of thought, then perhaps spending more time reflecting on the content will increase a writer’s productivity in terms of both quality and quantity. I once carried out an experiment with two pupil groups, both taskedwith producing a 300-word essay in a foreign language.The first groupwere allowed to organise their writing freely over two lessons.The secondwere instructed to spend a whole lesson revisiting their notes and drafting a detailed plan, complete with paragraph headings, sub sections and annotations regarding technical elements (such as idiomatic expressions) that could be later injected into the prose. The first group producedmostly disjointedwriting that often lacked clarity.The second group effortlesslymet or exceeded the word count with articulate andmeaningful pieces of writing. A key didactic element of the process was for everyone to utilise their exercise books judiciously – thus shifting the students’ perceptions of their books asmere ‘content recorders’ to seeing them instead as working tools, and effectively an extension of their brains. David Voisin is a head of MFL In Judaism, the Pent ateuch comprises the first five chapters of the Old Testament The modern Pent athlon is an Olympic sport consisting of five disciplines The US Pent agon takes its name from the geometrical shape with five sides 11 teachwire.net/secondary