A
not so shortish time ago, we posted some comments from our colleagues at the
Survey of English Usage, discussing aspects of a recent joint symposium on
grammar teaching. Below are some of my own eventual thoughts on these comments, with the
originals placed in italics (and labelled [IC]), and my response immediately
below (and labelled [MB]). Apologies for the delay!
(1) What’s your impression
of our respective similarities/differences?
[IC] Our approach adopts the position that there is some value in learning about grammar for its own sake; your approach adopts the position that learning about grammar is especially valuable for its capacity to further enable reading and writing development. I think we would stress that we don’t disagree with you here – it’s just that there’s a slightly different focus and motivation. Indeed, our two CPD courses that we offer (English Grammar for Teachers and Teaching English Grammar in Context) try to address both approaches.
[MB] Yes, no doubt about the core similarity,
tempered by a slightly different focus and motivation, I think. Something I am
really interested in, though, is how this difference specifically unpacks in
the classroom. For example, there are open debates amongst grammarians as to
whether or not prepositions and subordinators are actually the same part
of speech, and as to whether or not modal
verbs actually head clauses just like lexical verbs. Such debates seem much more fundamental to a
grammar-for-grammar's sake approach than a grammar-for-communication approach.
After all, the latter only needs to identify a coherent enough grammatical
category to be able to go on and explore how such features work within actual
pieces of language. So in a sense it doesn't matter too much what grammatical
features and framework the curriculum adopts. To do justice to a
grammar-for-grammar’s sake, on the other hand, I think you’d need to give
students the chance to engage with those more “fundamental” sorts of debates;
to become, in other words, full grammarians, able to engage with grammar at all
levels.
(2) How important do you
think meta-language is in dealing with grammar in the classroom?
[IC] Meta-language and grammatical terminology is often the thing that
teachers and students feel "frightened" of. To us, that’s
understandable – there’s a lot of it, and grammatical terms are not always
particularly intuitive or self-explanatory. That’s one of the reasons why we
built the extensive language glossary section on Englicious, especially given
that the 2014 National Curriculum glossary is brief (although it is certainly
the most comprehensive NC glossary to date). We believe that meta-language is crucial
to understanding how grammar works, and see it as an affordance, not a
constraint. Meta-linguistic knowledge is enabling and empowering for students,
and gives them the tools to talk about language in a systematic and accurate
way. Having said that, if students want to avoid the pitfalls of
"feature-spotting" when exploring grammatical choices in texts, they
must be exposed to high quality talk about how language works and be encouraged
to explore how grammar works as a meaning-making resource. Meta-language is
useful, but it is not the only thing required for good language analysis.
[MB] Agreed, and basically on all counts. It's
definitely not the only thing required, though it can obviously be helpful to
have a common language to anchor a discussion. And it's important not to do
students the injustice of assuming they cannot grapple with the meta-language
simply because it seems too difficult.
That said, I do think it is important to do more work into which bits of
meta-language are most/least important and when, as well as to exploring how
students actually do grapple with these terms. Moreover, I think this is also
an interesting area for highlighting some potential differences in our
respective emphases. In particular, a grammar-for-grammar's-sake approach seems
of necessity to require a lot more meta-language. After all, such meta-language
is at least in part exactly what such an approach is aiming to achieve. On the
other hand, I am not sure meta-language is so critical to a
grammar-for-communication approach. It may well be helpful, but at root all the
approach really requires is enough information for students to be able to
identify the particular feature of interest and work out how to do things with
it; and you could conceivably do quite a lot of that without much meta-language
at all.
(3) Do you think there is
space for grammar to be taught for its own sake?
[IC] Yes, if it’s taught in a way that’s engaging and focused. By focused,
we mean taking one particular aspect of grammar (for example, noun phrases) and
exploring that in detail. So, a lesson activity on noun phrases might cover a
range of things: the difference between a word and a phrase; how to judge the
head and dependents; the various internal structures of noun phrases; the
mapping of grammatical form to grammatical function, exploring how noun phrases
can fulfil the function of Subject, Complement or Object; the various meaning
potentials of short and long noun phrases – and so on. This kind of grammatical
knowledge can then be further "applied", such as by looking at noun
phrase choices in fictional writing (e.g. to describe characters or locations).
[MB] Yes, this makes a lot of sense, and makes for
some great grammar lessons. I think for me the critical question is ultimately
what we mean by a grammar-for-grammar's-sake approach. To my mind, such an
approach is essentially encouraging students to be grammarians - to be able to
critically analyse how (for example) English grammar works, whether or not that
makes them better writers. (After all, I'm sure both you and I can think of any
number of excellent grammarians who are poor writers and vice-versa!)
(4) What barriers do you
think there are for ensuring grammar is a positive feature of the curriculum,
rather than an arbitrary (and often stressful) chore?
[IC]
It’s probable that "traditional" grammar pedagogy has a
lot to answer for here. For many teachers, their schema of "grammar"
triggers dry, boring, somewhat mechanical naming of parts and sentence parsing.
It’s our feeling that this type of pedagogy is what most teachers think of when
they think of "decontextualized" grammar teaching. That’s not the
only way of learning about grammar for its own sake, and that’s what we’ve
tried to demonstrate in Englicious. At the same time, many teachers don’t feel
secure in their own grammatical knowledge, which is why they might revert back
to using the traditional methods (or just try and avoid it altogether), using
artificial sentences that present a rather inaccurate picture of how real
language works. We want teachers to see that knowing about language is
empowering and will help them to teach different texts, rather than being a
"bolt on" afterthought. Universities and teacher-training providers
must also work to increase grammatical subject knowledge provision on their
teacher-training courses, knowing that the majority of teachers do not come
from linguistics or language related subject background.
[MB] No arguments here! One
thing I think it is really important to highlight, though, is just how wrong
teachers are to feel unconfident about doing grammar; even though that’s very
understandable given the lack of familiarity and general lack of training. In
my experience, teachers (not to mention students) are actually very good at
picking up key grammatical concepts. Unfortunately, many such concepts are
really prototypical things - capturing the core cases and sort of fudging the
non-core stuff that sort-of-fits-but-not-quite. So what I often see is teachers
very quickly grasping the prototypical cases of various grammatical phenomena
(e.g. clauses when grouped around/headed by a lexical verb), but then panicking
when they come across a case that doesn't quite fit (e.g. verbless clauses).
The lesson they generally seem to draw is not "well, I get what these
things are, but some cases are fuzzy and grammatical categories are at best
ideal things, an imperfect reflection of the knowledge that is actually
embodied in our heads"; instead, it’s more something like "see, I
knew I didn't get the concept at all - god, I am rubbish at grammar". For
me, this is very much a confidence issue that needs to be supported much more
extensively across the profession. Not least because I've never seen that same
panic when it comes to other phenomena that is really just as technical (e.g. iambic
pentameter), but which is taken to be a more intuitive part of skilled writing.
(5) Where do we go from
here? That is, where do we researchers need to be focusing our attention?
[IC] Good grammar teaching requires two things: subject knowledge and
pedagogical knowledge. In our view, an ultimate aim would be for teachers to
have a secure combination of both. That means teachers having access to
training materials, resources and ideas that are research-informed, and driven
by classroom actualities. We believe that research should be conducted in
collaboration with practitioners – a blend of a top-down/bottom-up approach,
using our best knowledge of language and education. If we can challenge
perceptions that grammar is a dry and boring subject, and demonstrate that
knowing a bit about how language works is interesting in itself, then we’ll be
on the right track to making progress.
[MB]
Again, no disagreements here, especially when it comes to the notion of
collaboration. Historically, I think grammarians have been really poor at this,
and it is something we need to work much harder at. We've certainly as much to
learn about this area as any practitioner, not least when it comes to having a
better sense of what grammatical development actually looks like. Hopefully, the
Growth in Grammar project can make a substantive contribution here, and in a
way that allows teachers and students to feel more in control of the grammar
classroom. That's always got to be the end goal with any research with an
educational focus. Fingers crossed we
can do it justice.
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