Linguistic terms were mostly developed in order to analyse languages rather than to learn them. The analyst needs precision, and as long as other analysts know what he or she means, there is no problem. The learner, though, does not know what a new word means in advance, and so the term itself is part of the learning.
Where a term does not have a meaning in common language - eg verb - it is straightforward to learn it as any other new word. Vygotsky's observation that our understanding of word meaning develops can be applied to teachers as well as children here. Verbs are still commonly presented as doing words when the most common verb, to be, does nothing at all. This problem can be avoided by careful phrasing - eg most verbs do things, some just are, so that words such as is, am, was, were, are, are all verbs. Chomsky's term verb phrase is useful as an indication that a verb can contain more than one word. I suggest verb group, as everyone knows what a group is.
The problem gets worse when there is a pre-existing meaning for the term. Subject, which is tne next most important grammatical term after verb - because nearly all sentences contain both - has the general meaning of topic which must be got rid of before a learner can understand it. Careful explanation and practice, for example using questions such as What is it? or Whodunnit? can help children to detect the subject, and to act on it when they write - in practice, repeating or changing a subject raises the question of using strong punctuation or a link word. Understanding subject lets the learner make an informed decision on these points rather than just guessing. This is a key point at GCSE as well as in SATs.
Articles are another problem. An article, in common language, is an object, a thing. Historically, an article has been seen as any separate item. It is highly likely that the term article was applied to short words such as a and the simply because they had to be called something - the examples in the OED entry are interesting on this point. Sometimes articles are now called determiners, though what they have to do with determination is so obscure to someone who does not already understand this sense of determine that the word is really an obstacle to learning rather than a help. To children, I just call articles short words that are a bit like the cement between bricks. We use them because we expect to. Some languages don't. Latin often left them out, as does modern Turkish. Short words makes sense to children - article doesn't. Anyone have anything better?
Further prolematic terms are adjective, adverb, participle and tense.
Tense is a corruption of the old French word for time. We should ditch it, and return to the idea of time, as modern French grammarians have. Everyone knows, in an everyday sense, what time is, and today, yesterday and tomorrow are clear introductory markers.
Participle. Part verb would be clearer and have a link to verb. It's a paradox that we add something to a verb, and yet take away its completeness as a verb.
Adjective and adverb. The second at least links the word to a verb, so is slightly informative. Adjective is obscure -originating as a word that could not stand on its own - but at least has no conflicting meaning in normal English. It needs careful explanation - it's nbot a word that can stand on its own, hence its Latin route, and to call it a describing word leads to confusion with adverbs. We talk about verbs being modified rather than described, but this is sophistry - to say someone runs quickly is to describe the way they run in common language.
Here are the relevant parts of the OED entry on adjective
1. Gram. Naming or forming an adjunct to a noun substantive; added to or dependent on a substantive as an attribute. noun adjective: a word standing for the name of an attribute, which being added to the name of a thing describes the thing more fully or definitely, as a black coat, a body politic; now usually called an adjective only, see B.
1414 D
K. OF EXETER to Henry IV in Hall Chron. (1809) 55 Scotland is like a noun adiective that cannot stand without a substantive. 1561 T. N[ORTON] Calvin's Inst. I. xiii. (1634) 46 All other names of God [except Jehovah] are but adjective names of addition. 1612 BRINSLEY Posing of Parts (1669) 3
Q. How many sorts of Nouns have you?
A. Two: a Noun Substantive, and a Noun Adjective..A noun adjective is that cannot stand by itself, without the help of another word to be joyned with it to make it plain.
1875 WHITNEY Life of Lang. vi. 103 The variation of an adjective word for gender and number and case
1. a. A ‘Noun Adjective’ (see A.1.); one of the Parts of Speech.
1509 HAWES Past. Pl. V. x. A nowne substantyve Might stand wythout helpe of an adjectyve. 1597 BP. HALL Satires VI. i. In epithets to join two words in one. Forsooth, for adjectives can't stand alone. 1690 LOCKE Hum. Underst. III. viii. (1695) 267 Our simple Ideas have all abstract, as well as concrete Names: The one whereof is a Substantive, the other an Adjective; as Whiteness, White; Sweetness, Sweet. 1865 MARSH Eng. Lang. xiv. §11 The only striking peculiarity of the English adjective..is its invariability, or want of distinct forms for different cases, genders and numbers.
I would like to find a simpler word to replace adjective. The only one I can think of is adnoun. Don't think it is very elegant, but it is at least more descriptive, and like adverb.
Phoneme is unnecessary - sound is a better and shorter word. Grapheme is a unit of writing - I just call it a letter or group of letters. Both of these terms can be learned, but why? They are not more precise than the words of plain English.
And of course, noun and pronoun. A little like verb. These words do not exist outside discussions of grammar, and the French alternative, nom, is not much help as there is interference from the common meaning, name. Both short words, and there is no interference in English. Can be learned, needs careful explanation - one hint from an OED example is that you can put a or the before the word and make sense. But why proper noun, when proper is in the sense of property, and hence obscure, for different reasons, to both children and adults. A first thought is that the term name could be reserved for proper nouns, which in English all have a capital letter, as the child's own name does. A noun could then perhaps be described as a thing, a feeling or a thought, and practised.
And that is my final point. As Wittgenstein said, What can be said at all can be said simply. If it can be, it should be. The national strategies have made a serious error in taking terminology from academic linguistics and feeding it straight to children without the benefit of what Jerome Bruner called a courteous translation into words they can understand. And of course, they then back this up with the authority of government. We can do better.