It’s something of an understatement to say that glamour and grammar are not usually closely associated in many people’s minds. One of the 100 words David Crystal uses to tell The Story of English is ‘grammar’. It turns out that grammar and glamour come from the same root. Grammar originally meant the study of everything written but, as reading must have seemed like an almost magical skill to your average medieval peasant, grammar became synonymous with supernatural or occult knowledge. ‘Grammary’ came to mean magical or necromantic learning. And this leads us to ‘glamour’ which first meant a magical spell or enchantment and has since travelled on to arrive at its modern meaning which is about as far from the study of grammar as one could imagine.
Daisy Christodoulou argues that the best way to teach grammar is through decontextualised drill. The alternative, typified by Deborah Myhill’s Grammar for Writing approach is problematic. If you want to teach grammar in context, you have two choices. You either give them feedback on their writing which concentrates just on the grammatical knowledge which you are engaged in actively teaching at the time, or you give them feedback on all the grammatical mistakes in every piece of work. If you take the first approach you will be forced to ignore certain mistakes and allow pupils to embed bad habits. Practice makes permanent and pupils become skilled at what they practise doing. If on the other hand you pick them up on every mistake you run the risk of overloading their working memory with the result that they will fail to learn anything. But if grammar is taught systematically and out of context then pupils will be able to master each item grammatical knowledge before moving on to the next step.
But, problematic as Myhill’s approach appeared, there was some annoying evidence from the education giant Pearson supporting the fact that it appeared to work. It therefore came as a bit of a relief to read this post on the need for caution when looking at evidence in education from Alex Quigley without which I might have completely missed the report from the Education Endowment Foundation which found that “Grammar for Writing is not effective in improving general writing among Year 6 pupils when delivered as a whole class intervention over four weeks.” This led to the conclusion that “The evidence for Grammar for Writing from this evaluation is insufficient to recommend widespread adoption among Year 6 pupils.”
We all believe we’re right, even when we’re wrong. Whatever your views of grammar teaching, I’m sure they’re sincerely held. I should imagine this must have come as a blow to Myhill – an academic who has done excellent work on literacy and for whom I have nothing but respect – but I have to say that these findings are satisfying on a personal level. Schadenfreude is an ugly thing, but it’s always nice to have one’s bias confirmed.
We all seem to agree that grammar, and by that I mean both the meta-language of verbs, clauses and participles and the practical knowledge of the function of words and sentences, is important, but we’re no nearer a definitive answer on how best to teach it. For what it’s worth I recommend the following two-step process:
- Decontextualised & discreet grammar lessons are a tremendously useful way of getting pupils to master the fundamentals
- This then needs embedding across a whole school with every subject teacher expecting pupils to apply the grammatical knowledge they’ve acquired within the naturally occurring contexts of their subjects.
As always, my understanding is of course incomplete and I’d be interested to hear how your opinions might diverge from mine.
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It’s interesting that you mention Swan’s Practical English Usage. I used to work for the British Council in the world of teaching English as a foreign language. Any TEFLer knows, from long experience and practice, how to teach grammar and so, when I returned to English teaching in a comp back in the nineties, I applied a functional approach to teaching grammar in the context of teaching genre.
Here’s a specific, practical example: When teaching Romeo and Juliet, I decided we’d write a newspaper ‘Red top’ front page on some exciting event in the play and got children to bring in copies of The Sun, Mirror, and so on.
We examined and analysed the headlines, paying particular attention to the grammar and the literary techniques being used: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, etc., as well as specific grammatical forms, such as expressing the future through the use of ‘for’ and the infinitive: ‘Queen for Australia’; ‘PM to visit West Country’, etc. I provided lots of supplementary but relevant examples, too.
We then looked at the structure of a typical red top piece and the students were given the task of looking at this in groups, each group examining a different topic and feeding back.
By the time we’d, in effect, modelled the structure of a newspaper front page, the students were easily capable of deploying their new-found structural knowledge and pouring into it their creative and imaginative content. The result was that there were some surprisingly well written pieces.
By the way, I’ve always found Matthew Lewis’s The English Verb: An Exploration of Structure and Meaning extremely useful.
Hi John
I’m really interested in Halliday’s use of functional grammar and think it has a lot to offer us, however, traditional grammar is still worth knowing and teaching.
By own view of English teaching is that getting students to imitate tabloid articles isn’t really a worthwhile thing to do. I go into this point in more detail here: https://www.learningspy.co.uk/english-gcse/5034/
I’ll certainly have a look at Lewis’s book, which I’ve not read.
Thanks, David
Hi David,
I’d be interested in your opinion of the comments developing below my aforementioned post. The queries raised about the EEF study are interesting, as much as the Pearson advertising of GfW was overblown!
I am busy, as ever, rejecting the dichotomy you present and see value in both approaches. I am not cowardly looking for compromise. Instead I’m busy leading the design of our own original method that foregrounds the metalanguage of grammar and repeats the threshold concepts of morphology and syntax throughout the chronological span of English literature and brought it our year 9. I think it could be bloody brilliant! It will need work and building and will be refined no doubt after it is enacted next year, but it has potential.
I’m intrigued by my professional instinct which tells me that the grammar for writing style pedagogy could be very useful for developing the requisite knowledge and skill to write essays for improving reading, whereas the drilling practise of writing can better service an improvement in writing. I think you can have both in carefully defined schemes of learning that have robust indicative outcomes and that are rooted in the knowledge of specific texts and literary contexts.
I too had the laissez faire experience of grammar mixed with some decontextualised drilling that didn’t do the job (based on my shoddy A level essay writing and my having to teach myself at degree level). I am actively forgetting my own experience – it is too laden with anecdote and bias. I’m aiming to root our approach in good quality research – viewed with a critical eye – and in our work on the ground in our department. I am of course trying to dampen my own confirmation bias, but I will no doubt fail on that score!
Hi Alex – I’ve had a look through the comments on your blog, and yes: what’s interesting to me is that there can never be an Answer. There will just be answers. Inevitably, we will pick the ones we prefer. And this is fine as long as we remember that we’re as wrong as we are right.
I’m not sure if you intended to characterise my position as a dichotomy, but that does sound a bit dismissive. I’m guessing it may in part be a reference to my aphorism that compromise is the refuge of the unprincipled? If so, fair enough. But let me make my position perfectly clear to avoid confusion:
I think grammar is best taught, initially, in a decontextualised setting. I’ve tried it and have been impressed not only with the results but also by how much pupils said they valued it. Then, ideally within a whole school approach, subject teachers would expect pupils to use the grammar the have learned in contextualised settings, thus embedding their knowledge and also to show them the worth of it. Or to put it more simply: context is needed to make sense of what’s been learned out of context.
Maybe we could agree on this: traditional grammar is usefully taught out of context: this gives pupils the knowledge & language to think about what they read and write. But functional grammar (certainly that espoused by Halliday) may well best be taught in context?
Thanks, David
Hi David,
Didn’t mean to be dismissive – apologies. It was a tongue in cheek reference to the ‘compromise’ aphorism! I think your position makes a lot of sense. I agree about functional grammar and ultimately that is where real mastery lies.
I’m still trying to work out the sequencing and balance. I reckon it is a good thing we are interested in grammar – the days of it being an non-entity in English teaching has hopefully passed.
I think that there is value in both arguments. There is research which I read last year that said that boys in particular find it difficult to apply things that they have learned in decontextualized exercises as it often doesn’t occur to them to use in a different situation. What I have tried to do as a primary teacher is to give the grammar some context. I use whatever text we are studying or a topic in History or Science and create exercises on a specific grammar point. Yes, it takes longer than just picking up an exercise from a grammar book but it is more relevant and my children seem to take it on board.
I might try the comma question on my year 6s tomorrow. I would be surprised if they gave me the answer you quote. However my class often surprise me so maybe I should expect it.
I think it is easy to tie ourselves in knots with the research question – why should we trust EEF over Pearson or vice versa? The trouble is when research is presented as an immovable fact – things change, we find out more about how we learn – meta cognition is big at the moment which I think is great; seems to confirm my views but… The phonics argument is a good example – new research says, based I think on Prof Snowling and advocated by EEF, that phonics is not enough for reading development esp in those with language diff (inc. dyslexia).
What I have little doubt about is that you and huntingenglish (or is it huntingenglish and you?) will be excellent at teaching grammar which ever way you choose. Subject knowledge is imp. as is helping learners ‘get it’ – don’t we all do this in very different ways? Personally I find some strategies incredibly dull and would struggle to teach grammar that ‘way’ but that is not to say it doesn’t work for others.
I’ve tied myself up in knots now and am not sure what point I was wanting to make – I’ll be off (take a breath), now to boldly go splitting my infinitives…
I wasn’t taught any grammar either and now find the whole thing terrifying.
[…] week’s reflection comes from a blog post entitled “The Glamour of Grammar: In Context or Not?” As a prospective English teacher I was immediately drawn to the title because grammar is something […]
[…] https://www.learningspy.co.uk/english-gcse/glamour-grammar/ […]
Interesting debate!
I’d just like to point out that the original Myhill et al study was not funded by Pearson. It was funded by the ESRC, and you can read the project report here: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-062-23-0775/read/reports
And the original Year 8 Schemes of Work are available to NATE members for free here: http://www.nate.org.uk/page/grammarschemes
I’m not familiar with the teaching materials that are being published by Pearson, but I just thought I’d share the pedagogical principles underpinning the original study as I think there are a lot of misconceptions around what the ‘Grammar for Writing’ pedagogy actually is:
“* grammatical metalanguage is used, but it is always explained through examples and patterns;
* links are always made between the feature introduced and how it might enhance the writing being tackled;
* discussion is fundamental in encouraging critical conversations about language and effects;
* the use of ‘creative imitation’ offers model patterns for students to play with and then use in their own writing;
* the use of authentic examples from authentic texts links writers to the broader community of writers;
* activities should support students in making choices and being designers of writing;
* language play, experimentation, risk-taking and games should be actively encouraged”
Source: Myhill et al. (2013), p. 105: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4369.2012.00674.x/abstract
I think there are a lot of resonances in that description with your approach, David – I know you’re interested in metacognition and writing. The original study included interviews and observations as well as the RCT. Students who were taught using the intervention/GfW approach talked about their writing choices in a much richer way. I think the research that is going on at the moment is looking at this further.
I’ve commented further on Alex’s blog on the differences between the EEF study and the original Myhill et al. research so I won’t repeat that here. It’s such a shame that the academic articles are stuck behind paywalls because the marketing tends to over-simplify things, ignoring the interesting insights that are useful for practice.
I would really appreciate your thoughts on sequencing and planning lessons focusing on decontextualised grammar acquisition.
For example, do you think that students should learn to identify the parts of speech (adjectives, verbs, nouns, adverbs etc) before learning about sentence structure and punctuation? Our department have introduced a weekly grammar lesson for Y7, but we’re finding it hard to sequence things to ensure sufficient challenge and progression. It’s quite hard to teach a 50 minute lesson on colons!
Yes – parts of speech should come before sentence construction and then on to textual coherence.
Thank you for your thoughtful post. As a secondary English teacher in Canada, grammar instruction is an issue I have been grappling with for many years. I had an instructive conversation with a middle school teacher last month that went something like this:
MST: But you should never teacher grammar directly. It should be taught in context.
Me: So how DO you teach grammar?
MST: I identify their mistakes when I mark their work.
Me: Well, of course, we all do that, but how do you explain, say, a comma splice to your students?
MST: Well, if they don’t know what it means, they can come see me, or I might stop the class and provide a mini-lesson…
I didn’t pursue how often “stopping the class” occurs, but I bet it isn’t often. As a result, I suspect “taught in context” is merely code for “not taught at all”.
My own practice has evolved to teaching grammar instruction throughout the school year, starting with acute issues like basic sentence structure, fragments, run-ons, SVA and capitalization. I then try to connect these ongoing “mini-units” to the context of larger units and writing assessments. It’s certainly not a simple or quick solution, and I know I’ll be modifying this until I retire, but it seems to be the best way of combining contextualized and de-contextualized instruction. If I’ve read you correctly, your approach is similar to mine, and that is reassuring!
I think your suspicion may well be correct. despite my best intentions, that was certainly what used to happen in my class before I started teaching grammar systematically.
[…] on my own blog. David Didau, author of the blog The Learning Spy, wrote a blog titled “The glamour of grammar: in context or not? In this particular article, he tackles a huge teaching debate: how to teach grammar. He […]
[…] your language – a language based approach to pedagogy The glamour of grammar: in context or not? Some useful papers by Mary Schleppegrell: Academic language in teaching and learning Words as […]
Thanks for the link and for the research papers it cites. It has been informative and – as ever with grammar – equally robust on both sides of the contextualised/ decontextualized fence.
We are all instructed by what works well in our own experience. This success leads to a refining of the approach and this further feeds the belief and more refining. We become good at what we do. Good teachers listen to their students and watch for evidence of their convictions. I have taught decontextualized grammar; the abstraction from purpose/ context made the process, in my view, something that was lost before the next lesson. Repetition of the process in the hope of retention led to comments that the lessons had become boring – a black day in my career.
On advice from my HoF (who was a decontextual advocate), a combination approach was introduced that started with context and was far more successful. Ten years later, I am still refining, still open to suggestions and still starting with context. Often, there is no need to go any further – sometimes there is a need to dedicate a more intense programme.
You say yourself in the main body, that some students, usually those that are well read and frequent writers are intuitive on grammatical matters. These students may benefit from seeing how breaking the grammatical rules can create some fabulous effects as well as some rather ridiculous or embarrassing faux pas. A golden right/wrong impression might stifle creative flair – the A* prerequisite – without the benefit of context.
The decontextualized argument seems only to be one half of the coin – the other, I believe to be a contextualised approach. Perhaps it is the style of delivery which enables the bias to be successful – or not.
Thanks again for the links and ideas. It’s been refreshing to take a long look at my practice and that’s always a good thing.
Pam
I was well read and intuitive on grammatical matters as a student. I was taught no formal grammar so had no ability to think about what I read or my own writing in grammatical terms. It wasn’t until teaching TEFL and realising that all European children understand the grammar of their own language thoroughly did I fully appreciate the extent to which I’d been impoverished. Far from being stifling, knowledge of grammatical ‘rules’ is the basis of creativity in writing: once you know the rule, you can break ’em!
Yes, knowledge of the ‘rule’ is essential I am not disputing this. Perhaps you have misread. I was pointing out that the ‘this is correct/ this is incorrect’ format generated by decontextualised grammar promotes a black and white climate in which discovery or serendipitous effects is less likely due to a fear of being ‘wrong’.
Clearly, despite our evident differences in method, our goal is the same. I understand your perspective, I respect your reasoning. I am opting to agree to disagree on the balance of bias in delivery in class.
There are as many learning styles as there are teaching; one style will not fit all. That’s why this exchange is taking place. Thanks again for the the opportunity to reflect. I have enjoyed it. Happy new year.
I think there has to be some more clear thinking about why we are teaching children grammar.
If we want them to understand how the language works, and by extension how the English language works, we have no alternative but to teach them some version of the best answer we have to this question – the tradition of generative linguistics originating with Chomsky. However, I’ve studied this sort of linguistics to Masters level and I don’t think it has improved my writing one jot. It’s so complicated that it’s not a very good meta-language for talking about stylistic choices, at least not in its raw form.
Traditional grammar might be an alternative, but it’s riddled with pre-scientific nonsense, like prohibitions against splitting infinitives or ending a sentence with a preposition. Steven Pinker is very good at explaining this. Furthermore, we must be very clear that it does not and never did provide a complete explanation for the workings of the English language, and has been utterly surpassed by proper, scientific linguistics since the middle of the 20th century.
I don’t have the answers, but what I do know is that anyone looking to return wholesale to “traditional” grammar teaching is ignoring more than 50 years of scientific progress in linguistics. We need to teach a meta-language that accurately reflects the most up to date knowledge about how our language works, albeit in a simplified form, rather than relying on crude and outdated analogies with traditional Latin grammar,
How you teach that, I’m not sure. I’m not a teacher, so exactly what is entailed by “drilling” is not entirely clear to me.
By ‘traditional’ grammar I’m not interested in anything which prescribes silly behaviour. All I’m interested in is a working knowledge of how words, sentences and paragraphs can be fitted together to make meaning clearer. All else is tosh.
“By ‘traditional’ grammar I’m not interested in anything which prescribes silly behaviour. All I’m interested in is a working knowledge of how words, sentences and paragraphs can be fitted together to make meaning clearer. All else is tosh.”
Fair enough, I’m not really accusing you of anything here, I’m just pointing out what I think some of the pitfalls might be.
Perhaps because I’m not a teacher I have the wrong idea about de-contextualised drills. It puts me in mind of a teacher standing at the front of the class shouting “What is rule number fourteen, Jenkins?”, and receiving the reply “Never split an infinitive, Sir”.
I think you do have the wrong idea 🙂
Also, I think most discussions of grammar fail to make the necessary distinctions between grammar on the one hand, and orthography and punctuation on the other. Most of Daisy Christodoulou’s examples are of this sort, for example.
Orthography and punctuation are fundamentally artificial systems in a way that language is not, at least according to generative linguistics (which is not to deny the potential usefulness of a meta-language for discussing linguistic choices). This implies that drills and prescriptivism may be far more appropriate for spelling and punctuation than they are for other elements of sentence structure which are more accurately described as “grammar”.
David – I’ve just read this thread on grammar for the first time. Your approach makes total sense to me.
In fact, it seems very much like my approach to phonics provision which I have formally labelled as ‘two-pronged systematic and incidental phonics teaching and learning’. This includes both a planned, systematic phonics body of work for the main phonics provision, and also phonics applied to the wider curriculum as required – work ‘in action’ as it were.
Planned explicit teaching, incidental teaching at any time, and application to wider reading and writing. Simples.
Works for me