Speaking and listening

Although grammar is historically associated with the written language – after all, in Greek gramma meant ‘letter’ – it is highly relevant to the spoken language as well because this is the source of written language. Spoken language, including the most spontaneous and casual conversational styles, is controlled by much the same grammatical rules as the most formal writing, even if real-time production allows slips of the tongue and disfluencies that would be edited out in writing. A sentence such as I love you comes out the same whether written or spoken, and has different syntax from its equivalent in other languages such as French Je t’aime, Latin Te amo or Arabic Ahibbik.

One of the very positive recent changes in our school curriculum is the much higher profile that we now give to the spoken language in both first-language English and foreign languages. Grammatical analysis has an important contribution to make in teaching about spoken language. I consider here first-language English, leaving foreign languages till the next subsection, and distinguish three different kinds of contribution: transcription, status-raising and detail.

Transcription of spoken language is an important exercise for any child[9]. It is easy to record conversation, and given a recording, any child can transcribe it; and of course if that child happens to be a participant in the conversation, so much the more interesting for them. One of the lessons that emerges from this activity is that any transcription goes well beyond the purely phonetic substance of the recording. The transcriber makes decisions about words (e.g. wait or weight?) and about grammatical structures (e.g. fun and games or fun in games?), so a transcription is, in effect, a grammatical analysis. This is particularly true if the transcription includes punctuation, since this forces decisions about sentence-boundaries and other major structural distinctions. Discussing these decisions in class is a useful way of sharpening pupils’ awareness of grammatical structure, but (of course) it presupposes a shared framework of ideas and terminology – precisely what grammar teaching provides.

Status-raising is particularly important for the large majority of children – probably about 80-90%[10] – who natively speak a non-standard variety of English. Thanks to the very negative attitudes to non-standard forms (described variously as ‘wrong’, ‘careless’ or ‘bad’), schools traditionally left non-standard speakers with quite unnecessarily negative feelings about how they spoke, described by some as ‘linguistic self-hatred’[11]. Even if schools aim to teach everyone to speak Standard English when needed, there is no reason why this should not co-exist with the local non-standard dialect in children who are essentially bi-dialectal. The challenge is to make sure that children feel as proud of their local variety as they are of Standard English, and the best contribution that schools can make is to treat them as different but equal. In the case of grammatical analysis, this means objective comparison: comparing them as equals, without implying that in some sense the local non-standard is a poor copy of Standard English. For example, if the local dialect uses was after we as well as after he, it is different from Standard English, but none the worse for it – indeeed, the lack of a contrast in the past tense brings the verb to be in line with all the other verbs, so the local dialect is more regular than Standard English.

The idea that grammar teaching might raise the status of non-standard dialects deserves a little more discussion. One argument that helped to remove grammar from the curriculum was that teaching Standard English was inherently prescriptive, prescribing the forms of Standard English and proscribing non-standard forms. In prescriptive grammar, we were and those books are correct, and we was and them books are simply wrong. If this kind of grammar teaching makes pupils feel bad, not only as speakers but as people, then perhaps all grammar teaching should cease[12]. The approach that I am suggesting reverses this argument: grammatical analysis can be purely descriptive (free of value judgements), so it can be applied as easily to non-standard dialects as to Standard English and thereby raise the status of the former.

‘Detail’ is my name for the fine linguistic details that children need to know when speaking and listening. These details include the features that distinguish the local non-standard from Standard English, but go well beyond them to include any patterns that are found in more formal or specialised discourse. Many of these are simply carried over from formal writing, but some are not: more formal ways of greeting people (e.g. good morning) and addressing them (e.g. sir), ways of structuring discourse (e.g. by the way) and expressing degrees of certainty (e.g. didn’t she?), and so on. Grammatical analysis can help children to broaden their range of constructions in speaking in just the same way as in writing: careful study of recorded speech not only reveals the new patterns in that sample, but also helps children to notice new patterns in all their listening. Just as in writing, they have a myriad fine details to learn before they count as mature competent speakers who can function comfortably in a wide range of social settings.

However, it is important to recognise the lack of relevant research evidence here as to how, or even whether, schools can help. It is easy to muster theoretical arguments for or against the use of grammatical analysis as a tool for expanding children’s repertoire of linguistic patterns for use in speaking. In its favour, it offers a plausible way to help children to help themselves by learning from experience, which is at least more promising than trying to teach all the details directly at school (given the constraints not only time but also on our collective knowledge of what needs to be taught). On the negative side, however, we simply don’t know whether it works – whether a grammatical analysis of a recording, done in class, produces skills that transfer to ordinary speech. The best I can say is that the idea is plausible, but needs research.