Writing

The first reason, then, is the one that most educationalists have concentrated on for the last few decades: teaching grammar improves first-language writing skills. The argument is that mature academic writing (the target of school literacy teaching) requires high-level linguistic skills, including not only a broad vocabulary but also sophisticated grammatical skills. These skills are of two kinds, negative and positive:

• standardness, meaning the avoidance of forms from the local Non-standard dialect (e.g. ain’t); this is sometimes called ‘accuracy’ or ‘correctness’.
• diversity, i.e. the sensitive use of a wide range of constructions, including constructions that aren’t normally used at all in ordinary conversation (e.g. While working in the garden he injured himself).

Until very recently this argument has carried very little weight in the English-speaking world because of the research (mentioned earlier) that purported to show that teaching grammar simply did not work as a way of teaching either kind of skill. However this research had a fundamental flaw: all it showed was that grammar can be taught ineffectively. Typically, a class would have (say) a weekly lesson on grammar, and their written work would be compared with that of another class that had no such lesson. The results showed that grammar is ineffective when taught in this way; but it did not show that this was the only possible way to teach grammar.

The received wisdom has been overturned by two recent strands of research, both conducted in Britain. Since the 1990s, the psychologists Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nunes and their colleagues in Oxford have shown that explicit instruction in morphology (the grammar of word-structure) does indeed produce measurable positive effects on children’s spelling, their use of apostrophes, and the growth of their vocabulary[1]. For example, children were better able to distinguish plurals and possessives in pairs such as boys and boy’s after practising morphological analysis than when the practice involved just pronunciation or just meaning and syntax (sentence structure)[2]. More recently, the educationalist Debra Myhill and colleagues in Exeter have shown considerable benefits in a large-scale study from ‘focused’ teaching of specific grammatical patterns; for instance, discussion of modal verbs such as may and must produced benefits in the children’s use of modal verbs in their own writing[3]. Teaching is focused, in this sense, if it concentrates on patterns which are then tested in the children’s writing. This is an important qualification, which I return to in section Ошибка! Источник ссылки не найден., because one of the main problems with previous research was that the teaching was unfocused, so what was tested bore only a very general relation to what was taught – a rather obvious weakness.

Another important strand of research, this time from America, gives somewhat weaker support for teaching grammar[4]. This research shows that a classroom activity called ‘sentence combining’ is good for the children’s writing skills. In sentence combining, the teacher provides two or three single-clause sentences for the class to combine into a single sentence. For instance, given the sentences (1) The boys were playing with the dog. (2) They were standing on the pavement. (3) It was barking loudly, a class might synthesize a wide range of sentences including the following:

• The boys who were standing on the pavement were playing with the dog that was barking loudly.
• The boys standing on the pavement were playing with the loudly barking dog.
• While standing on the pavement, the boys were playing with the dog barking loudly.
• Although it was barking loudly, the boys standing on the pavement were playing with the dog.

The research shows that this activity has a strong positive effect on writing quality. The only uncertainty is about whether the activity can really be called ‘teaching grammar’. Most of the research literature rightly contrasts it with grammar teaching as this is normally interpreted, at least in the States. But as I shall explain in section Ошибка! Источник ссылки не найден., there are many ways of teaching grammar, and a good case can be made for recognising sentence combining as one of these methods, whether or not the teacher or students use technical grammatical metalanguage.

I introduced this discussion of writing skills by distinguishing negative standardness and positive diversity. Both are legitimate targets of grammar teaching if the aim is for every school leaver to be able to write mature standard English, but the research that shows the positive effects of grammar teaching has focused on diversity rather than standardness. This is reasonable because the two goals are very different. Teaching children to write isn’t rather than ain’t is intellectually very easy, but may raise emotional problems for children who use ain’t in their family, especially if ain’t is labelled simply ‘wrong’ (or even worse, ‘bad’). This kind of teaching is often based on a list of ‘common grammatical errors’ which has been handed down from one generation of school teachers, via their pupils, to the next. In contrast, teaching children to use a wider range of modal verbs is intellectually difficult (because of the subtle meanings involved), but emotionally easy since it doesn’t threaten the children’s identity. Moreover, it is rather obvious that telling children to avoid ain’t in writing does have an effect, because most school leavers do avoid it in writing even if they use it in speech; whereas the received wisdom was that merely telling children about modal verbs would have little or no effect on their use of modal verbs. The main point to emerge from this subsection is that this is wrong. Focused teaching of specific grammatical points does indeed increase the diversity of children’s writing.