How to Kill the English Language
18th March 2021
Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a ‘fronted adverbial’ is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional linguists, b) seven-year-olds, or c) are, like me, recovering from several long months of home-schooling a seven-year-old. Forgive me if in mentioning it I retraumatize members of category c).
‘Fronted adverbials’ have become something of a cause célèbre among the parents of young school children. In Britain they even occasioned a prime ministerial joke, interpreted in some quarters as a dig at a certain former education secretary, about ‘every detail of the syllabus, from fronted adverbials to quadratic equations’. This term for what others know as a sentence modifier — essentially, a word or clause that qualifies the main part of a sentence — has become a metonym for a whole approach to language teaching. It’s an approach that has baffled many parents, exasperates experienced educators (try getting Michael Rosen started on this stuff), and seems to issue in some very odd and potentially counterproductive ideas about how sentences are best formed.