Englicious in the primary classroom: Teachers’ experiences of using a play-based intervention to support Year 2 children’s understanding of grammar

SUE SING, RESEARCH FELLOW, UCL FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND SOCIETY, UK BAS AARTS, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LIGUISTICS, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, UCL, UK Background and policy context In 2013, the UK government introduced the National Curriculum, which contains detailed specifications for the teaching of English grammar in primary schools (DfE, 2013). However, it did not provide teachers with any materials or support through continuous professional development (CPD). Furthermore, teacher training courses do not offer much grammar training, due to the programme being very full. The Englicious Project A team at UCL’s English department created Englicious (http://englicious.org), a website that offers teachers free CPD materials, lesson plans, an accurate, extended glossary of grammatical terminology, and interactive practice materials. Englicious views grammar as a toolkit to help students to improve their spoken and written literacy in an engaging, fun way (Aarts,