Happy National Poetry Day

This blog started out with conscientious intentions, aiming to publish regularly on the project and its various ins and outs. But what with this, that and a likely unnecessary amount of the other, that hasn't happened. Since we are entering our final year, however, now seems as good a time as any to make good on those intentions. So if for no other reason than it's useful to have an excuse to get that intended series of posts going, some of our favourite poems in honour of National Poetry Day.

Phil

I've gone for a Turkish poem: Güzel Havalar by Orhan Veli. I like it because it has a sense of joy in the everyday and the mundane, but with a cynical edge that stops it getting carried away into sentimentalism. It also sounds beautiful (especially when read by a master). To me, being in a foreign language, even one I use every day, helps me experience the language more as an object, "from the outside", increasing the impact of the tactile feel of the poem.

Güzel Havalar (Beautiful Weather)

Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti,

Böyle havada istifa ettim

Evkaftaki memuriyetimden.

Tütüne böyle havada alıştım,

Böyle havada aşık oldum;

Eve ekmekle tuz götürmeyi

Böyle havalarda unuttum;

Şiir yazma hastalığım

Hep böyle havalarda nüksetti;

Beni bu güzel havalar mahvetti.

[This beautiful weather has destroyed me. It was in weather like this that I quit my job at the foundation. I got used to tobacco in weather like this. It was in weather like this that I fell in love. I forgot to bring home bread and salt in weather like this. My poetry-writing disease always recurred in weather like this. This beautiful weather has destroyed me.] 


Debbie

I can’t pin myself down to a favourite poem: there are so many, but I’ll go for W B Yeats and The Cloths of Heaven. I love its simplicity, the images of the ‘embroidered cloths’ and the ‘half light’ – but then I love the idea of spreading your dreams beneath someone’s feet – the vulnerability of that act – and the final line ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’, suggesting the potential destruction of the reams, as fragile as the half-light.  It was also one of the first poems that made me love poetry.

The Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Mark

I've been profligate and gone for two: God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens. I'll also take the liberty of being a little heretical and say I've never thought all that much of poetry. Never been entirely clear why anyone would choose poetry over prose, and there have been few poems to match the artful language of my favourite fictions and non-fictions. But there are always exceptions, and these are two. This is partly why I've chosen them, pieces that have been personally epiphanic. But they also do what I think great writing does: make mentally free with language, weaving ideas into semantic knot, building worlds in word; a syntax of thought. In Hopkins's case, no writer has ever worked so thoroughly to develop a unique metaphysics of language: it is his and his alone, writ in and between every word. For the Stevens poem, beyond the delight in word, image and rhythm, this does something I think few poems do: escape the weight of its describing. Supposedly about a funeral, the language could so easily have been submitted to the event, taking itself of value for what it describes. But this is all about the how, a transformation of something strange into something stranger, personal. So doing, it chimes and surmounts; and is free.

God’s Grandeur 

    The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 
        It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
        It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

    And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


The Emperor of Ice Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Grammar in the Classroom: Now Whether but How pt2

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.

Grammatical Gallimaufries

Grammar is amazing. It's complex, fascinating, and a core part of what makes us distinctively human. It’s also a critical communicative resource; something each and every one of us draws on to help us do what language does: make meaning. That's true whether the particular piece of meaning at hand is Paradise Lost, a 140 character rant, or a few sweet nothings.

So it might seem odd to hear that I wouldn't be all that devastated were grammar to be removed from its current place within the National Curriculum for England. I'd be disappointed, of course, and I'd think it a mistake. But then it’s not for me to decide an education system. That, rightly, is a collective discussion; something to be decided as a society. And if the outcome is grammar be gone, then grammar be gone.

Supposing we are going to have that discussion, though, it's important to be clear about just what is being claimed. This is all the more so given recent reporting on the statutory grammar tests (see here and here). There's a lot to be said about these tests, much of it negative and much of it providing grounds for junking them tout court. But it would be wrong to leap from this to the conclusion that we should junk grammar (or even the principle of grammar testing) altogether.

To see why, consider that there are at least two reasons why we might want students to learn about grammar. The first, call it the grammar-for-communication approach, argues that grammar helps students become better language users. The second, the grammar-for-grammar approach argues grammar to be its own reward; that is, students should be taught grammar because we as a society feel it is something students are entitled to know about. Both reasons are legitimate on their own terms. After all, who would argue against teaching something that makes for better readers and writers? And who would argue against teaching something because it is so central to who we are as human beings?

Crucially, however, they are also distinct reasons, with distinct implications for the classroom. For example, if it's grammar-for-grammar that you're after then some formal grammar lessons are perfectly appropriate. On the other hand, if it's grammar-for-communication that you're after, formal grammar lessons simply won't do; at least, not by themselves. This is actually something we've known for a long time, with the available research clearly showing the communicative benefits of formal grammar teaching to be negligible at best. Instead, what we need are lessons that show how particular grammatical features can be used to achieve particular effects. Lessons, in other words, that treat grammar as a literary tool, no different from all the other common-or-garden tools that we take for granted: simile, metaphor, alliteration, &c.

Given such distinctions, it is clearly important for an education system to match its particular rationale for grammar teaching with the kind of grammar teaching that it actually ends up emphasising. And it is primarily for this reason that many think the current grammar tests are so problematic: in effect, despite the curriculum explicitly claiming a grammar-for-communication rationale, the tests have ended up emphasising a grammar-for-grammar model of teaching. This isn't, of course, to claim that the current tests couldn't be improved on their own terms. It is simply to point out that, for the tests to really make sense, they should be designed in such a way that they connect with the underlying rationale for teaching grammar in the first place. Or, to put it another way, rejecting the current grammar tests in no way entails a rejection of grammar teaching altogether. That would be to mistake an overarching rationale for something with the kind of practice that a particular test ends up mandating. And these just aren’t the same thing.

Perhaps most importantly, however, this distinction also allow us to highlight the hollowness of a particularly common objection to grammar teaching. This objection essentially sees grammar teaching as at best a distraction, at worst a stifling chore that almost wilfully stops students becoming better users of English. Such an objection ultimately only goes through because it puts a grammar-for-grammar model of teaching up against a grammar-for-communication rationale; and finds the former wanting. That's correct, as far as it goes. But there really is no reason to assume that formal grammar is the only way that grammar can be taught, and every reason to see grammar as something that can be taught as a means for helping students develop their communicative skills.

After all, that's a substantial part of what grammar is, a communicative resource that we all draw on to help us do what language does: make meaning. And, at its best, it constitutes a sophisticated literary device that can be manipulated to subtle rhetorical ends. Take, for example, the two versions of the same sentence below (the second of which is the original wording as it appears in the book from which its drawn – Karen Wallace & Mike Bostock’s wonderful Think of an Eel):

Version One: He swims like a mad thing into the river.

Version Two:  Into the river, he swims like a mad thing.

While both sentences express more-or-less the same content, their rhetorical effects are clearly distinct. In particular, version two is by far the more striking, directly evoking the eel’s vital, bursting energy, written as if to throw the reader into the water along with the mad eel. The difference, of course, is achieved by a relatively minor shift – the mere positioning of three words. And yet, this difference is not only crucial to the effect, it is crucially grammatical in nature. Specifically, it involves the placement of a prepositional phrase (“into the river”) at the beginning rather than the end of the sentence, where it functions as a fronted adverbial. In other words, the author has achieved their intended effect by targeting the grammatical structure of the sentence. Or, to put it another way, where you put your adverbial preposition phrases really can matter.

And if the grammatical structure of a piece of writing can genuinely play a crucial role in achieving specific communicative effects, then there is no reason why students shouldn’t be taught to develop the sorts of grammatical insights that would further enable them to become the best readers and writers and speakers and listeners they can. Indeed, it is this basic claim that motivates our own approach to grammar education at Exeter’s Graduate School of Education. Not that we are alone – valuable, productive research and training is also being conducted in this area by our colleagues at the Survey of English Usage, for instance. We all have a long way to go, of course, but the basic insight is sound and usually well received by those who matter most – the students and the teachers.

So by all means debate grammar, for all its goods and ills. But don't reduce grammar to a mythical boogeyman. And be sure to pay close attention to what someone is claiming about grammar and why they are claiming it. As any good grammarian will tell you: it's always a mistake to confuse form and function.

Grammar in the Classroom: Not whether but how

In this blog post, we open a discussion on the one-day symposium "Grammar in the classroom: not whether, but how", held at the University of Exeter in February 2017. It begins with some introductory thoughts by Mark Brenchley from the University of Exeter, before moving on to a "response" by Ian Cushing from University College London. This will be the first of a two-part "discussion", with the second part following up on the thoughts voiced here. Reader comments are welcome for both parts. Readers are also invited to visit the links below, in order to find out more about the ongoing work on grammar education by both groups of researchers.

EXETER

http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/education/research/centres/centreforresearchinwriting/projects/grammarforwriting/

http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/education/research/centres/centreforresearchinwriting/projects/growthingrammar/

UCL

http://www.englicious.org/

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/

----------------------

Opening Remarks

Mark Brenchley, University of Exeter

Thanks so much for coming down Exeter-way for our grammar teaching symposium. I really enjoyed it; and that’s not just because I got a chance to actually talk with actual people for a change, rather than stare at a computer all day. Perhaps the most productive aspect of the symposium for me was a clearer (dare I say even reasonable!) discussion of the role of grammar teaching. That’s not always the case; at least, not in my experience. So I thought we might try continuing the discussion a little further, just to see where it takes us. Let’s hope we’re on a roll, and not pushing our luck.

As far as I can see, there are basically three reasons for teaching grammar to students who already speak the language in question. 

[1] It’s the law: Grammar remains a statutory part of the curriculum, and you’ll get fired if you don’t teach it. 

[2] Grammar is valuable for its own sake: Children have every right to know about the language they speak, much as they have every right to know the kings and queens of England or how an ox-box lake is formed. 

[3] Grammar is instrumentally valuable: We should teach grammar because of its wider impact on student development.

I think we’d all agree that [1], though a perfectly reasonable survival strategy, isn’t especially compelling. After all, we’re much more interested in the question of why we should even have curricular grammar in the first place; and [1] has zero to say here.

[2], on the other hand, is much more interesting, and deserves to be given a more thorough hearing than it has so far. In fact, my only really quibble with a grammar-for-grammar’s-sake approach is the reality of a high stakes, already jam-packed curriculum; a reality that I suspect leaves little time for doing justice to such an approach.

That leaves [3], grammar taught not because it is simply something students have a right to know about, but because it helps students be better at something else. Moreover, here at the Centre for Research in Writing, [3] is very much where we hang our hat. Specifically, we’re interested in grammar for its potential to help students become the best speakers and writers they can be. And what’s more we have the evidence to prove it. Well, substantiate it. Well, make it a reasonable inference to a decent explanation.

I’m happy to go much more into the details of the CRW’s approach in a future post, as well as the underlying research base. But, in essence, our approach construes grammar less as an abstract system, and much more as a rhetorical tool: something always deployed in specific pieces of writing in order to achieve certain communicative effects (intentional or otherwise).

Turning to your own approach, my impression is that, though you’d agree that grammar can help students improve their writing, you have a much wider rationale for grammar teaching. That’s both in terms of [2], arguing for grammar as something valuable in its own right, and [3], with instrumentality construed much more widely in terms of other benefits like improving reasoning skills.

As already noted, I think [2] makes a lot of sense in principle, though I’m not sure there is enough teaching time to do it justice. And I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the wider benefits of grammar (I’m dimly aware of reading something somewhere sometime ago which offered some evidence here, though I can’t for the life of me remember what or where it is!).

But what I’m particularly interested in discussing are the consequences of our respective conceptions; that is, what they actually mean for teachers and students. In particular, whilst there’s likely a great deal of overlap between these conceptions, I’d wager that our separate emphases yield somewhat distinct practices. For example, my impression is that your own approach is keener on the use of grammatical terminology than our approach, which has a lesser interest in terminology, effectively highlighting features only where these are relevant to the particular kind of discourse at hand and only to the extent necessary for students to make better use of such features.

So, with that in mind, I thought I’d pose some questions that we can try teasing out over a couple of blog posts or two. Feel free to pick and choose as you see fit:

1) What’s your impression of our respective similarities/differences?

2) How important do you think meta-language is in dealing with grammar in the classroom?

3) Do you think there is space for grammar to be taught for its own sake?

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? (And feel free to include linguists as a category here – despite a few honourable exceptions I don’t think the field has especially covered itself in glory here!)

5) Where do we go from here? That is, where do we researchers need to be focusing our attention?

----------------------

Response 
Ian Cushing, University College London

We would very much agree with your three reasons for teaching grammar, and the symposium gave us a chance to reflect on a number of things related to grammar and pedagogy. It was great to see so many people there from different institutions, positions and backgrounds – and very encouraging hearing about some of the fantastic work being done.

Much of the debate and discussion focused on points 2 and 3 of your "three reasons for teaching grammar": [2] (Grammar is valuable for its own sake) and [3] (Grammar is instrumentally valuable). We’ve always argued that [2] is something that "justifies" grammar being on the curriculum, though we feel it’s often a position and an argument that is overlooked. Although the wider benefits of learning grammar are evident (as is the case in Exeter’s research findings), we advocate that learning about how language works is an inherently interesting thing to do by itself, regardless of the impact this might have on reading and writing development.  To take your five points: 

(1) What’s your impression of our respective similarities/differences?

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. 

(2) How important do you think meta-language is in dealing with grammar in the classroom? 

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. 

(3) Do you think there is space for grammar to be taught for its own sake? 

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). 

(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? (And feel free to include linguists as a category here – despite a few honourable exceptions I don’t think the field has especially covered itself in glory here!) 

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. 

(5) Where do we go from here? That is, where do we researchers need to be focusing our attention?

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.

Metaphorically Speaking

The other day I posted a link from our cousins at the UCL Englicious project, together with a response from acclaimed author Michael Rosen. There's inevitably a lot that could be discussed here, and it's probably worth noting that I feel a broad sympathy with both perspectives. Nevertheless, for the moment, I wanted to focus on a particular connection made by Professor Aarts - that between grammar and metaphor. In his original post, Professor Aarts redrafts one of Michael Rosen's critical comments thus:

Original Version: So, if I say, something is a ‘conjunction’ – all that tells us is that it conjoins two things. It doesn’t tell me anything about the resultant meaning or why I would want to conjoin anything.

Revised Version: So, if I say, something is a ‘metaphor’ – all that tells us is that it compares two things. It doesn’t tell me anything about the resultant meaning or why I would want to compare anything.

Professor Aarts's own point, if I have it right, is that there is nothing inherently evil or useless about terminology, whether grammatical or otherwise; on the contrary, some sort of reasonably consistent terminology is part-and-parcel of helping children get a purchase on the language they are using. This isn't to claim that such terminology is the be-all and end-all of helping children develop their linguistic skills, of course. After all, being able to define (or even identify) a metaphor won't of itself tell you what a particular metaphorical instance means, or why you might generally want to use a metaphor (or even when; a critical question that is at the heart of our project, and which I'll visit properly when I get the chance). And obviously there is the matter of how you want to introduce particular pieces of terminology with students. But it's surely something you'd want in the mix.

That all seems fairly sensible to me. What is most striking for present purposes, however, is the actual connection between grammar and metaphor itself, even if only because it taps into something that has been on my own mind of late. Specifically, I don't think any teacher would feel instinctively antipathetic when it comes to teaching metaphor. In fact, I'd wager this is something they think important, and probably a substantial part of the reason they got into English-teaching in the first place. Yet, if you think about it, this readiness is a little odd. After all, metaphors are pretty abstruse things; and you needn't take my word for this: the philosophical record on metaphor makes its own case here. (Please do, however, feel free to take my word that really you don't want to worry too much about Philosophy of Language; it's far less interesting than grammar). And I'd also wager you could say much the same thing about other stuff that we take to be valued parts of a writer's repertoire, such as similes or iambic pentameter or some other rhetorical trope. Yet, I've never come across a teacher who felt hugely antipathetic about the very thought of having to teach such tropes. Indeed, even the word "having" here seems out of place: these are not things that teachers have to teach; they are something teachers want to teach, curriculum be damned.

Turn to grammar, however, and suddenly everything feels different, as if two incompatible worlds were colliding: that of the teacher and that of the grammarian (and if Seinfeld has taught me anything, it's that worlds should never ever collide). This is no doubt for a number of good reasons, both pragmatic and practical; the most prominent of these being a lack of confidence when it comes to grammatical terminology and a lack of perceived relevance to the art of quality speaking and writing. And, of course, grammarians have to hold up their hands here, and acknowledge their own historical role in this antipathy.

For me, however, such an antipathy to grammar is fundamentally about as odd as a teacher's willingness to teach metaphor. Certainly, the former is not necessarily more abstruse than the latter, and there is increasing evidence showing that grammatical development can be just as substantive a part of becoming a good writer (e.g. Myhill, 2011). In other words, I'm not at all sure why grammar couldn't, even shouldn't, be just another part of a teacher's repertoire: something to be approached with the same rationale with which you'd approach metaphors and similes and iambic pentameters; hence, something to be approached with just the same verve and confidence. Of course, there's a lot that needs doing in order to tease out the brass tacks of such an approach; and I see our project as a substantive part of that work. Nevertheless, I'm confident that this is a much more practical question than many might think; a question of "what" grammar to teach and "how" and "when", rather than any "if" or "whether". So, by all means, if rhetorical tropes are the sorts of monsters that keep you awake at night, then you might as well add grammar to the horde; but if not, then you have no more to fear from grammar than you do metaphors...

- MB