Grammar for teachers

Britain's teachers have been given detailed instructions on how to use a full stop.

A training manual aimed at boosting teachers' grammatical knowledge describes what punctuation marks are for. It says punctuation marks are used to "chunk text up into meaningful units".

A section on full stops says: "In writing, we mark sentences by using a capital letter at the beginning, and a full stop (or question mark or exclamation mark) at the end."

Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, said the basic nature of the advice indicated that many teachers had a dire grasp of grammar.

Last year up to a third of teacher trainees needed two attempts or more to pass a 45-minute test which assesses spelling, grammar, punctuation and comprehension.