The child ran towards me, tripped, cried a little, picked herself up, and offered me her grubby hands to kiss better. "I felled over. Silly me! Never mind. I uncried myself." When we really listen to what a young child says, we must be astonished by her ability to deduce laws of language and apply them. Consider what is proved by those ten words. At twenty-five months she understands that she can make a sentence with a subject, verb and extension (adverb or object.) She knows that we usually form a past tense by adding "ed" to the present tense, and the fact that she said "felled" proves that she is trying to follow a rule she has observed, not imitating adult speech parrot-fashion. She knows that words as different as "I" or "me" can be used instead of her own name, and has also noticed that it is "I" when it is subject ("I felled over") and "me" in an exclamation: ('Silly me!") Most interestingly, she has worked out that she can form a negative version of a verb by using "un-" as a prefix ("uncried") and that it is possible to use a verb reflexively, taking herself as object: ( "/ uncried myself") a form of words she cannot possibly have copied because no adult would use the expression and her use of it was the first I had ever heard. She adapted the idea of "/ undressed myself." How many rules of grammar has this perfectly normal two-year old applied in a speech of ten words? I want to share these reflections, partly to encourage the habit of listening to children's speech and appreciating the wonderfully inventive things they do with language, and partly as a very modest contribution to the debate on English teaching, a subject on which I readily confess an interest as a retired teacher. The Government is attempting to insist that children are "taught" grammar, that teachers must correct children's speech, even when they are using their own homely dialect in

the playground, and that education should be the business of making children absorb facts, of which the teacher is assumed to be master, rather than encouraging them to work out ideas for themselves. It insists that the teacher is boss, instructor, corrector, not listener. It will encourage bad teachers to remain convinced that children will learn only what they are taught. Grammar is not a set of rules to which language is obliged to conform. It is the coordination of the muscles of language, learnt in early childhood as instinctively as the muscular impulses we make in order to walk. Brave writers use grammar inventively, as adventurously as gymnasts, just as that little child did. Teaching grammar should be the business of reminding children of the fantastic things they can do when they find the confidence to use the muscles of language.