One unanticipated consequence of school closures and remote learning has been a focus on the teaching of grammar. While supporting their children with home learning, many parents have been confronted with their own lack of knowledge of the basics. What exactly is a fronted adverbial, or how do you spot a past continuous verb form?
From my point of view, as someone who has been researching the teaching of writing for more than 20 years, this can only be a good thing as it surfaces many misunderstandings and confusions about grammar, which merit discussion. As a nation, we remain both divided and uncertain about what teaching grammar is for.
Much of this stems from the history of grammar in English schools over the past 50 years. In 1966, a major international conference of English educators in Dartmouth, in the US, concluded that teaching grammar was pointless because there was no evidence that it benefited children’s writing. This was highly influential in forming a strong voice in the UK against the teaching of grammar, and the subject was largely dropped from English lessons throughout the 70s and 80s. But grammar schools and public schools often retained it.
The introduction of a national curriculum in 1988 mandated the content of the English curriculum for the first time, and grammar was again a bone of contention. In fact, every one of the five versions of the national curriculum has included grammar, though to varying degrees. As a consequence, many parents today were themselves not taught grammar in their own schooling, which may account for some of the current anxiety. The latest version, without doubt, gives it the greatest emphasis, and this is amplified by the grammar, punctuation and spelling test for 11-year-olds. But no version of the national curriculum has ever been clear about the rationale for its inclusion – what is the point of teaching grammar?
One answer, supported by our research, suggests that explicit knowledge helps to develop understanding of how the language choices we make shape meaning. Writing is a craft – using phrases, images, sentences and paragraphs to make the text do what we want it to do. Of course, crafting a piece of writing is not just about grammar, but helping children to understand how grammatical choices affect the nuances of meaning demystifies the craft.
