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Topic: Professional development

Background material for teachers on an array of topics in English language and linguistics. These resources are designed to help teachers feel more confident in their knowledge of the English language, and more adept at leading Englicious lessons, starters, and projects in class.

Want to know more? Or would you like to ask all your questions in a face-to-face session? The Englicious team offers full-day CPD courses entitled English Grammar for Teachers and Teaching English Grammar in Context, in conjunction with the UCL Institute of Education and UCL Life Learning. Forthcoming session dates can be found on the IoE and UCL Life Learning websites.

Your Test Performance



Test results

Test 54. Tuesday 2 September 2025
Score: 37.75 out of 50

1.Nouns, pronouns and noun phrases
6 / 7
86%
2.Determiners, adjectives and adjective phrases
5 / 6
83%
3.Prepositions and preposition phrases
5 / 5
100%
4.Verbs, auxiliary verbs and verb phrases
6.8 / 10
68%
5.Adverbs and adverb phrases
4 / 4
100%
6.Conjunctions
1.3 / 4
33%
7.Clauses and clause patterns
3.3 / 5
66%
8.Subjects and Objects
1.9 / 4
48%
9.Adverbials
2 / 2
100%
10.Form and Function
2.2 / 3
73%

Grammar Subject Knowledge Test: The Grammar Test

Please answer all of the questions and part-questions. This test is not timed.

When you answer a question, it is given a green highlight. Be careful though: the right answer to some questions may be more than one item.

If you forget to answer a question, don't worry. When you get to the end of the test, you'll see some orange buttons that take you back to any you missed out.

Question 1

Which of these words are nouns?

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Grammar Subject Knowledge Test

Our standardised test, developed for participants in the 'English Grammar for Teachers' FutureLearn course

Welcome to the Englicious Grammar Subject Knowledge Test.

This test is designed to allow you to test your knowledge of English grammar in the National Curriculum for England.

It is intended to give you a simple indication of your current knowledge of grammar and identify any areas of potential weakness that you might wish to improve on.

It takes between 15 and 30 minutes to complete.

At the end of the test you will be given a percentage score, and your results are stored on our server.

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A framework for language analysis

This page includes a handout on which you will find a framework for language analysis, developed over time through our Teaching English Grammar in Context course.

Starting to analyse a text can be a rather intimidating task. Where to start? What to include/not include? And how to do this systematically, rather than simply pulling out grammatical features at random and trying to write some kind of cohesive analysis?

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Teaching grammar in context

Pedagogical principles and a rationale for contextualised grammar teaching

Teaching grammar in context is a method and approach for teaching grammar. Below is our rationale and guiding set of principles for teaching grammar in this way. You can find out more about this method on our CPD course for teachers.

'In context' means that the teaching of grammar is embedded and integrated into other aspects of the curriculum, such as creative writing and analytical reading, rather than a standalone activity. 

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Clause types: advanced

In the National Curriculum no terminological distinction is made between the grammatical patterns of the clause types, and the way that these clause types are used. In linguistic studies different terminology is used for the former and latter. What follows is not statutory in the NC, but some readers may appreciate some more background on terminology.

In linguistics the terms declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamative are used to talk about grammatical patterns.

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Sentence types: simple, compound, complex

This unit further explains simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences, which were introduced in the unit 'Clauses: main and subordinate'. Simple sentences contain one clause, while compound and complex sentences contain more than one clause.

National Curriculum note: The National Curriculum now refers to sentences that contain one clause as single-clause sentences, and those that contain more than one clause as multi-clause sentences.

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Determiners: Advanced

The following is taken from Bas Aarts's Grammarianism blog.

In a recent blog post on terminology I mentioned the word class of determiners, and said that they are a relatively new word class.

By 'relatively new' I mean 'early twentieth century'. The National Curriculum Glossary definition, determiner, is very brief, here I'll expand on it.

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Phrasal verbs: New phrasal verbs

There are many phrasal verbs that you won’t find in any dictionary. This is because we commonly create new phrasal verbs based on the meanings of existing phrasal verbs. Usually, new phrasal verbs are either transparent or aspectual – new idiomatic phrasal verbs would usually be too difficult for listeners to decode. Perhaps you’ve heard examples like the following:

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Phrasal verbs: Three categories

Non-native speakers are often told that their only option is to memorise each phrasal verb individually. Is it really necessary to do all that work? No. Not only is it unnecessary, it’s inefficient. And it’s inefficient for three reasons:

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