We had the ‘perfect’ (which is one way we can express something in the past) and then the ‘pluperfect’ which to my ears at least made it sound ‘even more in the past’ as if it was ‘perfect-plus’. This invites a particular kind of teaching - much loved by these grammarians, though they sometimes deny it - doing ‘conjugations’. Some people use Standard English all the time, in all situations from the most casual to the most formal, so it covers most registers . But yet again, this has given them another problem: actually you can bung exclamation marks wherever you want. but because the examiners’ definition of ‘grammar’ is slippery and inconsistent (one moment using it to mean something defined by ‘structure’ as with Question 1, the next - as with this question - using it to include meaning.

The easiest and most fun way to explore Standard English and non-Standard verb forms is to use a piece of fiction where the narration is in Standard and the dialogue is in non-Standard.This three-tiered case will appeal to the journallers, artists and illustrators among us due to its organised and expandable structure. The categories of sentence that they’ve come up with: ‘Question’, ‘Statement’, ‘Command’ and ‘Exclamation’ were originally devised on the basis of the ‘verb forms’ and/or ‘verb structures’ within them. I got to this one and thought I knew the answer according to the ‘grammar’ that these examiners believe in. Clearly, we use a word like ‘command’ in real life (as opposed to the Alice in Wonderland world of ‘grammar’) to mean ‘to command’ and we can choose a variety of structures to do this depending on who it is who’s speaking and who that speaker is speaking to.

In fact, it’s very hard to learn how to do such questions, asked in such decontextualised ways, without having to do some form of parsing. But this gives them the problem of saying that such-and-such a sentence is a 'command' and another one is not - based on meaning alone. Why, for example, would the formation ‘suggest that her mother be’ be more formal than ‘really hopes to be’? In fact, by their own definition of a command, even ‘You must bring your coats’ wouldn’t be a ‘command’! We still remember those last weeks of August, when parents would rush us into our local Woolworths, WH Smiths and Rymans to pick up the last of our school-mandated stationery supplies while they were still on offer.Meanwhile, back with ‘formal’, I have no idea how the children can be expected to get this except through some kind of hunch. I put out a question about this on twitter and Facebook: where are the text books which give teachers and pupils some kind of definition and a grid of what is ‘formal’ English. Keep scrolling for a round-up of the best pencil cases to spend your hard-earned cash on and never lose your favourite pen again.

Writing like this is full of class-based assumptions based on the idea that this way of writing has the same status as say, a piece of formal scientific writing.

If one of the choices in a multiple choice question is reasonable and feasible but is ‘wrong’ then the test fails. By the way - open question: is there a good and useful text-book that teachers are using which lays out interesting and fun ways in which the differences between Standard and non-Standard can be taught? The Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, tied himself in knots trying to explain the proper way to use exclamation marks. If you are attempting to access this site using an anonymous Private/Proxy network, please disable that and try accessing site again.

More seriously, of course the great industry of worksheets and textbooks don’t and can’t keep up with this nonsense, so quite often they are ‘wrong’. Clearly, these examiners decided that they were too hard for 10 and 11 year olds (probably true) so they came up with what they thought were more user-friendly terms like ‘question’ and ‘command’.It's not language which determines how and why we use language but it is people (us) who choose to use language in certain ways. Anyway, the point is that these sentence-types were devised on the basis of grammar and language structure. When we finally rounded the corner to that all-important pencil case aisle, we could’ve sworn that we stood for hours deliberating on which design to purchase. Surely, we want children to acquire a knowledge about language which is linked directly to how it is used in its many different ways. To spell it out: it’s only by knowing the meaning of the word ‘Tomorrow’ and the phrase ‘we went’ that we know that the sentence is ‘wrong’ (ie doesn’t make sense).