All the subject knowledge you need to teach primary English.

If you are training to be a primary school teacher, you need to understand what you need to know about primary English before you can teach it.

Secure subject knowledge and understanding is the foundation of confident, creative and effective teaching. To help you master this, this comprehensive text includes subject knowledge from each part of the primary English curriculum and comes with a wide range of resources so you can test your growing knowledge as you progress through the course.

• an online English subject knowledge audit with the ability to share results
• end of chapter self-assessment questions
• Interactive tasks
• an English subject knowledge checklist
• useful weblinks for primary English teaching
• Recommended further reading

Jane Medwell taught in primary schools in Cardiff and South Devon, before moving into teacher education. She has lectured at the Universities of Cardiff, Plymouth and the College of St Mark and St John, and is currently Director of Teacher Education and Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Her research and writing has covered areas such as the teaching of writing and the use of electronic books to teach reading. More recently she has begun a major research programme exploring the teaching of handwriting, and has begun a unique programme of teacher education in primary Modern Foreign Languages. She is fluent in French and Russian, and is learning Chinese.

Introduction
Spoken English and Standard English
The nature of learning
The acquisition of language
Representing sound in writing
Words, vocabulary and morphology
The grammar of the sentence in Standard English
The components of sentences
Handwriting
Punctuation
Cohesion: grammar at the level of the text
The qualities of stories
The qualities of poetry
The qualities of drama
Looking at information books
Electronic texts
Looking more closely at children's errors