Working Grammar – An Introduction for Secondary English Teachers

This book has been designed as a professional resource for English teachers, both practising and pre-service. It can also be used as a set text and framework for course development in secondary English teacher education. Working Grammar provides an introduction to or refresher on grammar, particularly the kind of grammar used to explore and create the texts of secondary English in the twenty-first century, and the kind of grammar that underpins the Australian Curriculum for English.

The reference to “working’ in the title signals our two-pronged approach to grammar: as a set of resources that work to build meanings, and as a set of understandings that teachers can exploit in working with the spoken and written texts of subject English.

The book has three main purposes:

– to outline a view of grammar as a ‘tool kit” of resources

– to provide English teachers with opportunities to practise their understandings of this functionally oriented view of language

– to model how a purposeful view of language can be used in classrooms.