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.