Grammar for Improving Writing and Reading in Secondary School

Geoff Dean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134005697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This practical book is chiefly intended to help English teachers tackle an area of the new English programme that causes anxiety and about which a large proportion are still uncertain: grammar.

Grammar has been an uncertain classroom topic for many years; taught often as a duty, without real progression. In this book, the latest knowledge about grammar is treated as a central component of the meaning making process, in both reading and writing. Pupils can become better readers and write with greater confidence and control as a result of using this approach to grammar. Teachers of other subjects may also benefit from knowing how to integrate some grammatical teaching into the textual interactions of their lessons.

CHAPTER 1

‘Grammar Wars’: Grammar Teaching Since 1950

‘Language has been treated as the compost heap in the walled garden of literature.’ (Tim Shortis, NAAE Course, 1 July 2000)

Grammar teaching, 1945 to the 1960s

This is not intended to be a grammar book in the traditional way that such books were once understood. It offers a view about how useful the teaching of grammar, as a natural part of the English/literacy curriculum, can be in empowering secondary pupils in understanding and meaning-making in all their textual encounters. It contains some examples of how the employment of a reasonable knowledge of grammar enables teachers to offer their pupils a much broader repertoire of approaches in their endeavours to discover what texts are about, and how to make more deliberately structured and purposeful texts of their own. There are other much more focused and detailed books offering broader direct classroom application, to take forward the sorts of recommendations made in this one. They are listed at the back of the book.

The English strand of the Key Stage 3 Strategy, introduced to secondary schools in the summer of 2002, expects pupils to have more than a passing acquaintanceship with grammar, or ‘sentence-level knowledge’. This requirement is the culmination of a movement to bring about the re-introduction of grammar teaching, certainly going back at least 30 years. Professor Brian Cox, chair of the committee responsible for the first English National Curriculum, writing in The Times in 1994 when a new crisis about teaching grammar was afflicting English teaching, stated:

Children need grammar and language to communicate effectively and make their way in society as individuals. This is English teaching’s most basic function, but there is more. (Cox 1994)

He continues:

The teaching methods in the 1930s relied heavily on rote learning and on boring exercises in parsing and clause analysis… In the 1950s and 1960s many good teachers started rejecting these old fashioned methods of teaching grammar because they were clearly not working. Research has shown again and again that mechanical exercises in grammar do not improve children’s ability to communicate effectively.

Unfortunately, in the 1960s, some teachers of English went to the other extreme. Because grammar had been taught badly, they taught no grammar. (ibid.)

Anyone attending an English lesson in most secondary schools soon after the Second World War could testify to this representation of the subject, embodied most clearly in the widespread adoption of a textbook series, English Today, first published by Ronald Ridout in 1947. He states his commitment to the value of grammar without equivocation, and his stance is quite clear in the following:

The study of grammar helps us to understand the contribution each word, or group of words, has to make to the total meaning we wish to convey by our sentence. If we can understand the work each word or group of words does, we shall be able to express ourselves more accurately, and this in turn will help us think more accurately. This alone should make the study of grammar worthwhile. But in addition we must remember that ‘correct’ grammar is the written record of what educated people say and write. By learning it, we therefore help ourselves to speak and write in a way acceptable and intelligible to all educated people – and they are rapidly becoming the majority of the English people. (Ridout 1947)

The emphasis on the idea of individual words building up into sentences is worth noting in his explanation. This attitude will contrast directly with a completely different approach to language to be explored in more detail throughout this book. It is also necessary to notice the emphasis Ridout places on ‘accuracy’ or correctness. Such attention to this sort of ‘accuracy’ was, in turn, thought to bring about focused, precise thinking. Such claims will not be sustained in this book!

After the introduction, Ridout goes on to offer the following exercise:

Not twenty yards from the window runs a honeysuckle hedge, and close to the top a pair of linnets had with great cunning built their nest and hatched their little brood.

From the above sentence pick out:

1. the subject of the verb ‘had … built’

2. the object of the verb ‘had … built’

3. the subject of the verb ‘runs’

4. a collective noun

5. a common noun

6. an abstract noun

7. a transitive verb

8. an intransitive verb

9. two adjectives and the nouns they qualify

10. two conjunctions and the parts of the sentence they join. (ibid.)

This was a way of working in English that was, I believe, called ‘the naming of parts’! As a pupil in a grammar school in the 1950s, I recall most of my English lessons in the lower school being filled with such material. Ronald Carter, in his book outlining the findings of the LINC project, cites a similar but even worse example of a passage in an O level paper employed as late as 1961:

Leaving childhood behind, I soon lost this desire to possess a goldfish. It is difficult to persuade oneself that a goldfish is happy and as soon as we have begun to doubt that some poor creature enjoys living with us we can take no pleasure in its company.

Using a new line for each, select one example from the above passage of each of the following:

(i)	an infinitive used as the direct object of a verb
(ii)	an infinitive used in apposition to a pronoun
(iii)	a gerund
(iv)	a present participle
(v)	a past participle
(vi)	an adjective used predicatively (i.e. as a complement). (Carter 1990)

This passage has been constructed, that is, brought into the world, solely for the purpose of offering an example of analysis! It has no other purpose except to be studied, containing, quite unrealistically, all the recognisable features waiting to be ‘spotted’ by keen-eyed grammar fans. Little wonder that the study of grammar came to have such a poor standing in English classrooms.

The prevailing learning principle that drives this sort of exercise is explicitly stated by Ridout on page 9. It is based on the notion that learners of language can be given tiny ‘building blocks’ of the raw material – separate bits, such as nouns, prepositions and conjunctions – which will then be put together with other bits to construct whole texts. There is an assumption that ‘meaning’ resides in these separate parts, and if all those components are correctly put together, then the language user will have solved the problem and created something worthwhile and meaningful. A secure knowledge of grammar was also believed to be the prerequisite for writing correctly. The English language, so the reasoning went, was based on the same structures as Latin. In this particular view, language had fossilised into a set of clear rule-based principles and could be quickly divided into ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ categories. Any ‘straying’ from the ‘correct’ path was a sign of sloppy thinking and needed immediate correction. Infinitives could not be split and prepositions were never to end sentences!

‘Transparent grammar’, 1960 to 1985

Ridout held sway with huge numbers of English teachers until the mid-1960s (and, depressingly, continued to have an influence in some schools for much longer!) A supposedly more ‘liberal’ textbook series, O’Malley and Thompson’s English One to Five was published in 1955, which also sold very well, but in most respects it echoed the tones of its immediate predecessor, as the opening to English One demonstrates:

‘Well’ said Mr. Johnson, ‘How did you get on?’

‘Not too badly,’ said Jack.

‘It was lovely,’ said Jill. ‘Several of our friends are still with us, in the same class. And the gym has horses and ropes and netball and a badminton court …’

‘And you can hardly see into the lab windows for glass thingamebobs and whatdyecallits,’ said Jack.

‘Did you like the teachers?’ asked Mrs. Johnson.

‘Of course it’s only the first day,’ said Jack cautiously, ‘but I think one or two of them are perfectly smashing.’

‘Smashing. That sounds an odd word. Pass me the dictionary, please, Mother.’ (O’Malley and Thompson 1955)

After more of this period piece recount of ‘Jack and Jill’s’ day at school, including a justification for ‘word study’ and grammar, the book offers its first example of a grammar exercise on the topic of subjects and objects of sentences. And so it goes on…. (Imagine reading such a passage to a group of Year 7 pupils in a modern comprehensive classroom. It would, however, provide excellent material for demonstrating how much the language – and some of our fundamental attitudes to the family, school and language itself – has changed.)

Considerable numbers of English lessons at that time were based on classes working through such texts regularly and steadily, moving slavishly from exercise to exercise chronologically through each book, as if there were some magic formula to their order. The books were divided into sections, each with an introductory passage, focusing the pupils’ attention on some (usually morally ‘improving’) topic. This passage would be followed by a number of exercises, requiring the pupils to answer comprehension questions, copy out sections of text into which they might be expected to add any missing words, or demonstrate their knowledge of grammar by parsing short paragraphs in the style of the Ridout example above (p. 9–10).

In 1963, two quite different textbooks were published that were to influence deeply the work and attitudes of English teachers at that time: English Through Experience by Rowe and Emmens, and Reflections by Clements, Dixon and Stratta. Both books were thematically organised, and English Through Experience dropped the repetitive language exercises, instead including work on improving punctuation in the context of pupils’ own writing. Reflections was even more revolutionary, containing virtually no exercises, but including extracts from established authors arranged in sociologically determined categories (Old Age, Parents and Children, The Home, etc.) offered for the sheer pleasure of reading them! To a great extent, these books shaped the teaching of English for at least the next 20 years, and planned grammar teaching diminished gradually during that period. These books were contemporary with major movements to change the nature of teaching in English.

English teaching was influenced at various stages by progressive teaching methods. Teaching styles, derived from active learning through drama, migrated into English. During the 1960s and 1970s language and equality became a significant issue in English teaching for a brief period raising questions about the dominance of standard English. Educational psychology influenced thinking about language and learning in the 1960s and 1970s. This combination began to give rise to more consciously inclusive and exploratory language practices in English teaching. During this period the trans-Atlantic Dartmouth seminar (1967) took place (written up in John Dixon’s Growth through English (1967)) and advocated creative writing and the use of literature for self-exploration and for exploring the world. (Peim 2000)

A commonly applied interview question fired at prospective candidates for English teaching posts at that time would typically be: ‘How do you teach language skills to the pupils?’, usually answered with the response, ‘Through the teaching of literature.’ But that vague mantra was rarely challenged or expected to be developed further, because nobody else had a better response.

By 1973 the teaching of grammar in many schools was surrounded by much uncertainty. The following was the opening of a chapter on ‘Language Teaching’ contained in a book published by the Assistant Masters Association called The Teaching of English in Secondary Schools:

When we started planning this book, one of the first tasks we set ourselves was for each of us to write a short paper on his attitude to language-teaching. Then we studied and discussed what each of us had written; re-defined, clarified and modified our statements; and continued to exchange ideas more or less regularly until it was no longer possible to delay the writing of this chapter. You see, we were afraid of the chapter. We knew before we began that hardly any two teachers of English agree with one another about what, if anything, should constitute language-teaching in secondary schools. We knew that experts in linguistics, experts in curriculum-development, admissions tutors in higher education, employers and the general public all disagree with one another and with the teachers in the schools about the same thing. (Watkins 1973)

The chapter concludes that teaching traditional grammar will have no benefits, but there is residual evidence that teachers still feel the need to undertake ‘exercises’ of some kind. This ‘close-up’ of teacher thinking at the time was wholly typical of what was happening across the country.

Yet, contrary to some widely shared myths about the subject, grammar teaching did not disappear entirely. A book about English written in the mid-1970s illustrates an increasingly common view about the teaching of language at that time. In a section tellingly entitled ‘English language – can it be taught? If so how?’ the author writes:

As we have seen, distinctions between language and literature persist in the deliberations of educationists, in spite of the passionate advocacy of a unitary approach from the progressive quarter. Producers of textbooks, too, however contemporary in style, as often as not distinguish between ‘language’ work and other activities and so do those responsible for timetables. The practice of designating Tuesday period three as ‘grammar’, and Thursday period five as ‘composition’ is not a thing of the past as many would wish. (Saunders 1976)

What the author really objects to, however, is the paucity and sheer inadequacy of the grammar programme taught in most English classrooms at the time.

The facts are that the grammar expounded in the majority of school course books is over simple as a description of the ways in which language works, and that anyway it is based upon false premises. Whereas modern linguistics attempts to build up models for describing and analysing language as it exists in its complex variety of contexts and uses, the traditional school grammar prescribes, stating rules of ‘correctness’ which have only to be learned to render the pupil literate.

(ibid.)

The committee serving under Sir Alan Bullock was commissioned in 1972 by the then Secretary of State for Education Margaret Thatcher, among other things, to consider in relation to schools:

1. all aspects of teaching the use of English, including reading, writing and speech;

2. how present practice might be improved and the role that initial and in-service training might play

It confirmed, to a great extent, what Michael Saunders had suggested was indeed the broad picture. In its survey of English teaching in schools the Bullock committee found:

The traditional view of language teaching was, and indeed in many schools still is, prescriptive. It identified a set of correct forms and prescribed that these should be taught. As they were mastered the pupil would become a more competent writer and aspire to a standard of ‘correctness’ that would serve him (sic) for all occasions. Such a prescriptive view of language was based on a comparison with classical Latin, and it also mistakenly assumed an unchanging quality in both grammatical rules and word meaning in English. In fact the view still prevails. (Bullock 1974)

After magisterially commenting on the teaching of language through time, the committee then recounts:

In our visits to schools we found that the teaching of language through weekly exercises was still commonly to be found at all age levels, but particularly in the primary school… In our discussion with secondary English teachers we found a good deal of uncertainty about the teaching of language. Some regarded language improvement as a by-product of the talk, writing and literature which formed the core of their work; and they gave it no specific attention. Others set aside one period a week for it, usually working from a course book. A substantial number considered that the express teaching of prescriptive language forms had been discredited, but that nothing had been put in its place. They could no longer subscribe to the weekly period of exercises, but they felt uneasy because they were not giving language regular attention. It seems to us that this uncertainty is fairly widespread, and that what many teachers now require is a readiness to develop fresh approaches to the teaching of language. (ibid.)

These findings were a fair summary of what took place for more than 20 years. When I began teaching in 1970, there were still periodic attacks by individual teachers on the teaching of grammar, but they were not systematic. Every so often, the teachers in the English department in which I worked – and, I was regularly led to understand through regional meetings, similarly in other departments – would bemoan the pupils’ inability to punctuate correctly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• A Short Grammar
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Grammar Wars’: Grammar Teaching Since 1950
• 2 What Sort of Grammar Study Could Improve Language Use?
• 3 Creating a School Context for Language Teaching
• 4 An Outline of the Sorts of Grammar that Pupils and Their Teachers Need to Know
• 5 Using Grammar to Improve Reading
• 6 Using Grammar to Improve Writing
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index