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Informing and improving grammar teaching in English schools and beyond: the Englicious web platform

Englicious is a free online platform which contains a library of original English language teaching resources that is accessed 438,000 times per year and used in 227 countries.

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28 April 2022

The 2014 National Curriculum for English requires the teaching of grammar in primary and secondary schools to a specialised level. Pupils must acquire “an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions”, including technical terminology such as determiner, adverbial, and subjunctive. The web-based platform for English language teaching, Englicious, addresses the practical teaching and learning needs in schools. It uses authentic language materials which are sourced from the research databases (corpora) developed as part of SEU research – the ICE-GB and DCPSE. Prof. Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis and their team developed the platform (with feedback from teachers at various stages), and created guidance and teacher-training materials, which were then tested in schools. Englicious makes available to schools a wide variety of innovative teaching materials (lesson plans, interactive exercises, projects, videos, glossaries, etc.), as well as subject knowledge for teachers, and it helps pupils and teachers to prepare for the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling tests at primary level, and for GCSEs and A-levels, where competent use of language is now part of the assessment.  

The number of users signed up to Englicious reached 15,000 in January 2021, over 10,000 of whom were teachers, around 2% of the total number of teachers in the UK. The number of annual page views grew from 216,000 in the first year to 457,804 during 2020. Google Analytics shows that the website has been used in 227 countries, predominantly the UK, Indonesia, India, the US and the Philippines. Englicious supports teachers with printed materials linked to the website that are designed by the SEU team and with the app Grammar Practice Key Stage 2, both of which draw upon corpora.  

An associated programme of CPD workshops and INSET courses (online from April 2020) trained 800 teachers, leading to improvements in professional capacity to teach grammar to KS1-KS5 pupils. Income generated from the programme (GBP15,000 - 20,000 per annum) was re-invested into the Englicious online platform, contributing to a 100% increase in teachers subscribing to access free teaching resources since 2017. Professor Aarts’s blog, Grammarianism and podcast ‘Grammar Explainers’ provide further free teaching and learning resources, with 97,890 views (in 2020) and 6,000 listeners (Nov 2019- Jan 2021) respectively. The book How to Teach Grammar (by Prof. Bas Aarts, Ian Cushing and Prof. Richard Hudson, published in 2019) served as a valuable resource with inventive ideas to engage learners. 

Research synopsis

Informing and improving grammar teaching in English schools and beyond: the free web-based Englicious platform

Englicious is a free online platform which contains a library of original English language teaching resources sourced from corpora developed at the Survey of English Usage (SEU; a research unit based in the UCL English Department) that is accessed 438,000 times per year. The resources empower teachers of Key Stages 1-5 pupils to teach grammar in accordance with new requirements introduced in the 2014 National Curriculum for England. The Englicious website also achieved global impact through the provision of English teaching resources for 15,000 registered users (including 9,700 teachers); the website is used in 227 countries, predominantly the UK, Indonesia, India, the US and the Philippines.     

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  • Image credit: Englicious