Dear All,

Schools in England are emerging from a long period without any systematic teaching of grammar, so there is no established tradition of grammatical concepts or terminology. The new 2013 National Curriculum for English and the tests of Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar for every Keystage 2 child demand more teaching of grammar, but give very little guidance on the content of this teaching, either in terms of concepts or of terminology (apart from a brief glossary of elementary grammatical terms for primary schools in the National Curriculum for English).

A workshop at the LAGB conference in 2012 agreed that this is an opportunity for the LAGB to share expertise with schools, so a new LAGB glossary has been developed by LAGB grammarians to meet this need. The project was carried forward by a group of LAGB members advising the editor, Dick Hudson.

The glossary can be found here: http://lagb-education.org/grammatical-terminology-for-schools.

The glossary must by necessity be a work in progress. No project of this type can be perfect or future-proof. For that reason, a standing committee has been set up to oversee changes to the glossary in view of comments and suggestions from fellow linguists or developments in the field. The members of the standing committee are Bas Aarts, David Denison, John Payne and Dick Hudson (who will also act as editor). Needless to say, your feedback is very welcome! It can be sent directly to Dick (r.hudson@ucl.ac.uk).

I would like to make use of this opportunity to thank Dick and the many other linguists who have contributed to this project for all their hard work, and to congratulate them on a world-first!

Ad Neeleman