TEACHING THE GENRE AND GRAMMAR
Ants are tiny and quick insects.
An ant is black and red.
It moves fast.
It lays eggs.
A queen ant has wings.
Ants collect food from the ground.
An ant has six legs, two antennas and three body parts.
Year 1
C O M PA R E A N D C O N T R A S T C L A S S I F I C AT I O N S
Work through each of the classifications, questioning your students on the similarities and differences in the grammar. For example,
1 Ants are tiny and quick insects.
2 Ants are insects.
3 Ants are small animals.
• All are classifications but are different. Discuss the similarities and differences.
• What is common to each classification?
– Each has the relational verb – are.
– Each has the same subject of the sentence – Ants.
• What is different about the classifications?
– 1 and 3 have adjectives for their object nouns (tiny and quick, small).
– 1 and 2 use a class noun as object that is more specific as a classification statement.
Help the students to make connections between the grammar used and the purpose achieved. See this as a constructive strategy, in terms of the way that language makes meaning, rather than as a crit- ical exercise between right and wrong.
C O M PA R E A N D C O N T R A S T D E S C R I P T I O N S
Follow a similar procedure when you move on to a description of the appearance and behaviour. Discuss the description stage with the students.
• Pose questions such as:
– In what way is it different from the classification?
– What sort of things are being described?
Take some time to discuss the change in verbs; that is, the move from using relational verbs when classifying and describing appearance/attributes to using action verbs when describing behaviours.
Ask the students to identify the verbs, including those that involve an action. Look closely at the other verbs and ask the stu- dents what they are doing in the sentence; that is, the relational verbs generally function as an equal sign.
Appearance
An ant hasthree body parts.
Some ants havewings.
Behaviours
The queen ant laysthe eggs.
Ants livein colonies.
Conduct cloze exercises, with the verbs omitted, to reinforce stu- dents’ understanding of the way verbs are used differently, depend- ing on purpose and the stage of the text.
D E V E LO P I N G E D I T I N G S K I L L S
Consider the following commonsense description of ants and think of editing strategies for helping the students to make changes to the grammar in order to make the text more appropriate as an objec- tive description.
Ants
An ant is an insect.
An ant can look lots of different ways.
The colours can be black, red, white and lots more colours. An ant has anteni. I think they have six legs. Their shiny and very tiny.
In cartoons an ant carries food but I don’t believe it. It digs a little tunnel in the ground and builds nests.
Year 2
For instance, you would not expect an objective description to have:
• Mental verbs (think, believe), which express subjective views.
• Modalities (can look, can be), which qualify points of view.
Ask the students to think of ways of writing about the ants’ vision.
(Ants have big eyes and wide vision.)
Observation descriptions provide the same textual framework used for scientific descriptions.Your students therefore will have the writing resources necessary for the task; what is required now is an understanding of scientific classification and description.
T E C H N I C A L / S C I E N T I F I C D E S C R I P T I O N
Scientific description uses a particular type of classifying, tax- onomising and describing the physical world. By moving from observation to scientific description you can explain how science goes about its job of organising the physical world into carefully defined frameworks or taxonomies.
Scientific description differs fundamentally from observation description, because science deals with a phenomenon as an abstract class rather than as a concrete experience. Scientific reports are not about the ants your students have observed in the playground, but about ants as a class of insect and how individual species fit into that class.
Because it is an abstraction of experience, teaching scientific reports should be considered in relation to the students’ cognitive development.
By building up from observation description, teachers will be able to discuss how scientific classification and description differs from the types of descriptions already produced by their students.When teachers com- pare differences, it is important that they point out how each is perform- ing the same task textually, but doing it from different perspectives (one is cultural, the other scientific, but both are legitimate).
Conduct activities to develop the students’ relevant technical language that builds on their commonsense understanding of ants.
For example:
• Ask students to label a line-drawn diagram of an ant using their commonsense language
– head, body, legs, etc.
• Display a copy of the same diagram that uses technical language – thorax, abdomen, antennae, mandibles, etc.
• Compare and contrast, developing a word bank of technical terms with commonsense definitions.
• Have students write technical noun groups with these words.
The above activities focus on the appearance of ants. A similar set of activities could be used to develop the relevant technical language for behaviours.
To further develop the students’ knowledge of ants, consider the following reading activities. Point out to your students the grammatical features that have already been covered in commonsense descriptions.
• Use a big book and read with the class.
• Peer reading.
• Individual reading.
• Watch a video stopping at relevant points to discuss new knowl- edge and/or reinforce old.
Collaborate with your librarian to conduct a research lesson in the library.You could help the students to organise this activity by pro- viding research sheets.
R E S E A R C H S H E E T S
• This research activity could be done in pairs or groups.
• Point out the benefits of using an index so that the appropriate information can be found quickly.
• Show how to collect the relevant information in point form.The layout of the research sheets should help here.
• As a report-back session following the research activity, ask the students questions on each of the different categories and record their responses in point form.
Once you are satisfied that enough research has been carried out, discuss with the class the way that the information is organised and how it might be used in their report on ants.
Each information box, for example, could be used as a way of organising the text into paragraphs.Take the time to discuss any tech- nical/scientific terms that have arisen in the research, pointing out pronunciation, spelling, scientific meaning, taxonomies and so on.
S C A F F O L D I N G T E C H N I C A L D E S C R I P T I O N S
Discuss how the information gathered here is similar to and different from the information in the students’ experiential descriptions of ants.
Now ask the class to write their topic classifications. This could be done in research groups, pairs, or individually.
Once they are written, ask for examples to discuss with the class. In the classifications, you would be expecting some degree of technical/scientific information.
Follow a similar procedure for discussing the grammar used in the experiential descriptions (nouns, verbs, sentence structure), although as your students become more familiar with grammatical terms you can increase their competency in this area.
Make the most of this activity and the students’ knowledge of the topic (ants) and of writing (generic structure and grammar), to teach them editing skills.Your role here is not to ‘correct’ or rewrite their work, but to ask questions that help them to make connections between the topic, the purpose, and the language features of a clas- sification. You will find that this activity will promote enthusiastic discussion and interaction as the class becomes confident in their knowledge of how writing works. Give the class the opportunity to rewrite their classifications before moving on to the description of the ants’ appearance. Again, follow a similar procedure to that used for the rest of the report, continuing to build on their knowledge of the field and the language of description.