Teaching About Language in the Primary Years

Rebecca Bunting

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134119370
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2001. This book is for teachers and student teachers who are interested in language, in children's understanding of language and in the teacher's role in developing children's knowledge about language. It suggests activities for the primary classroom which help children to look at language, at how it is used and how it works. It contextualises the approaches underpinning these activities so that their intentions and purposes are made clear.

PART 1

Language, Language Education and Linguistics

Chapter 1

Principles of language study

A LITTLE HISTORY

Two negatives make a positive, so you must never say I didn’t do nothing. Never start a sentence with and or but, or finish one with a preposition. There is no such word as ain’t.

This is me talking to my class when I first began teaching English. I made these pronouncements, and many just like them, with the best of intentions – I wanted the children to do well and progress in English, and particularly in their writing. I wanted to help them to understand some of the conventions and to ensure that they used grammatically correct forms in their written work. I recognised that even though these were conventions of changing usage and not laws cast in stone for all time, conventions do come to be seen as rules and I felt that, since people conformed to these rules, I had to ensure that the children could understand them and use them, so that they would become proficient language users. We did some exercises designed to improve specific aspects of their writing. They learned how to identify main and subordinate clauses, and they happily filled in gaps and spotted grammatical mistakes in passages I gave them.

I knew these rules because I myself had been taught them at school and now it was my turn to pass them on. I believed that this was what English teachers were supposed to do. Somewhere there existed accepted standards of written and spoken language, and I expected my class to aspire to and achieve those standards. I believed my role was to keep out all corrupting influences (such as the way they spoke at home), to correct the incorrect and make perfect the imperfect. Although at that point I had not read the Newbolt Report, The Teaching of English in England (HMSO 1921), or even heard of it actually, my attitudes and approaches are signalled there:

The great difficulty of teachers in elementary schools in many districts is that they have to fight against the powerful influences of evil habits of speech contracted in home and street. (p. 59)

Children’s language experiences and expertise from outside school were considered to be dangerous and to impede what schools were trying to do. The language children brought into school from home was seen as a dirty habit, as debased and evil. The teacher’s role was to compensate for these bad influences from home. The use of the word ‘evil’ and the sense of moral opprobrium in this quotation is shocking to us today.

We can compare this with a quotation from a very influential report published 54 years later, A Language for Life, known as the Bullock Report (DES 1975), initially commissioned by the then Secretary of State, Margaret Thatcher, to advise on the teaching of reading, but actually including all aspects of language development in its remit. Here we can see a change in attitude to the language children bring to school and to the status of non-standard dialects of English.

No child should be expected to cast off the language and culture of the home as he [sic] crosses the school threshold and the curriculum should reflect these aspects of his life. (para 20.5)

Although it was referring to the needs of what were called ‘overseas’ children, the report marked the beginnings of a recognition of the value of every child’s home culture. We can trace the influence of such beliefs in the report of the National Curriculum English Working Group, English For Ages 5–16, (DES 1989) known as the Cox Report, where there is a clear recognition of the political complexities of this educational issue and the potential psychological trauma for children who are made to change the way they speak. As Cox (1991) later argued:

Teaching Standard English demands great sensitivity from the teacher. It is dangerous to tell a 5-year-old girl or boy that his or her mother uses language incorrectly. Adolescents are going to be embarrassed and ashamed if a teacher suggests that their dialect, which is part of their identity, must be radically changed. (p. 33)

Although the authors of both the Bullock and the Cox reports demonstrate greater sensitivity to the needs of the child and to the political and cultural implications of outlawing the child’s natural speech than was evident in 1921, the extent to which these reports influenced the attitudes of parents, politicians and others outside the teaching profession is open to question. The belief that non-standard English equates with bad English has prevailed and the best efforts of linguists and teachers have not significantly changed public attitudes. As a beginning teacher, I didn’t blame the children for not being able to write as well as I wanted them to. I approached my teaching and marking with missionary zeal, repelling a split infinitive (Star Trek was only just establishing its cult status, so the split infinitive had not really come to people’s attention: one was yet to boldly go anywhere) and fending off a ‘lend/borrow’ or a ‘teach/learn’ mistake with my trusty bible, the dictionary.

My purpose was to teach the children explicitly about the forms of written Standard English so that they would use this knowledge to improve their writing skills. I wanted to teach them how to use language, what was allowed and what forbidden. I was acting as editor of all their work, making it better. I was also trying to give the children, at least minimally, a language for talking about language – metalanguage. This involved teaching them the names of the parts of speech and I would try to enliven this by playing ‘spot the adverb’ in a poem, or ‘underline all the prepositions’. Using their mental checklist in English tests and examinations, the children would write ‘There are no adverbs of time in this passage’ and I would feel a glow of pride.

I did come to realise that I didn’t know enough about whether there was a relationship between knowing about language and being able to use it appropriately and effectively. I also realised that spoken language and written language, though sharing many similarities, differ grammatically; that there is a complex relationship between spoken language and written language; and that I was not accounting for this. Did children actually write as they spoke, as so many people seemed to be arguing at the time? Well, yes and no. How could I talk about this with the children? What was my role here? Did knowledge of grammar apply only to writing or was there a connection with reading? Was knowledge about grammar all there was to know about language? And (never start a sentence with ‘and’) most significantly, I realised that all my proscribing of their language was not encouraging the children in their development as writers: if anything I was impeding their creativity and skill. I watched as they rubbed holes in their paper in an effort to get something right and ended up writing hardly anything at all. How could I deal with this? Teaching children about language was an uphill struggle.

This brief autobiographical vignette comes not from the 1950s as you might have thought but from the early 1980s. I don’t think it is unusual or exceptional. I was taking my place in a tradition of English-language teaching which had a long history, largely because I did not know any other way. What I knew most about was not linguistics but literature, because I had studied that at university. I was not well-equipped to teach language.

I doubt that many children developed a lasting interest in language as a result of my teaching, though many of them would carry the rules uncritically around with them and no doubt pass them on to their own children. When I look back on my language teaching I see myself as a fond Mrs Chips, graciously smiling, a tear in my eye, on all the generations of children who had come under my influence. Or perhaps it was more like Chinese whispers, with the message becoming more and more mangled?

LAY AND PROFESSIONAL PERSPECTIVES: THE GREAT GRAMMAR DEBATE

In my teaching of English I treated language as a fixed system with rules to be learned and applied. I focused on the forms of language, usually the written forms, and on standard written English. I assumed that if children learned certain rules, they would become better users of language. I assumed that without this explicit knowledge, there could be no real fluency or quality of expression in writing. In other words, I took for granted that to be competent, you need to know first how the thing (language) works, that to know how it works and to make it work requires a knowledge of the internal mechanisms, in this case the grammar of the English language. This is a belief often uncritically expounded whenever questions about deteriorating standards of literacy are raised. The argument goes that if standards are declining, it must be because teachers are not teaching grammar: it assumes that there is a direct causal relation between competence in writing and knowledge of grammar.

The analogous counter-argument which is frequently marshalled is that we do not need to know precisely how a car works in order to drive it. Nor do we need to understand the physiology of the human balance mechanism, or the workings of gears, in order to ride a bicycle. However, for many people, it is only in driving a car that they become interested at all in how one works, and then only so far, just enough to satisfy a particular need. This may be especially true when something goes wrong. Drivers do not need specialist engineering knowledge, but there are some things they may need to know in certain circumstances, or are interested in knowing purely for interest’s sake.

To take this analogy into language, being able to use language with pleasure and some success may bring about an interest in how language works, but knowledge of how it works is certainly not a prerequisite for fluency and is not the main element in teaching effective writing. One of the problems is that there is little research evidence to draw on because the relation of children’s knowledge about grammar to their proficiency in language has received relatively little attention. What evidence there is seems to be flawed, and as David Tomlinson (1994) argues, many of the studies turn out to be little more than polemic:

They (researchers and supervisors) are usually so convinced in their own minds that grammar teaching is pointless that, as long as the research findings are consonant with their opinions, they do not look closely at how those findings are obtained. (p. 20)

Tomlinson was asked to submit a paper to the National Curriculum Council. His summary of that paper is to be found in English in Education (Tomlinson 1994). This paper reports his investigation of two influential and much cited research projects on the teaching of formal grammar, one an MEd dissertation and the other a PhD thesis, neither of which was formally published and both of which, he argues, are methodologically flawed. The main question he raises relates to the meaning of ‘formal grammar teaching’, which both researchers claimed to be investigating: Does it mean the formal teaching of grammar, or the teaching of formal grammar?

In the more significant piece of research of the two (Harris 1962), secondary school children across five London schools were given formal grammar lessons, using a traditional textbook; their written compositions were assessed and then compared with a control group ostensibly taught no grammar, but which did have a writing class each week. However, Tomlinson points out that this control group was invalid because the children were in fact taught about grammar, although not in the formal way of the main group. Although they did not have separate lessons on grammar, their teacher discussed their work with them and drew attention to grammatical features, such as the re-phrasing of a sentence, without recourse to the formal terminology of grammar. In addition, in some of the schools it was necessary for the same teacher to take both groups; Tomlinson argues that it is inconceivable that these teachers adopted entirely different approaches to each class. He concludes that it is misleading to label the control groups as non-grammar groups and that the findings – that the nongrammar classes tended to improve because they were given more practice in writing – are therefore invalid in respect of the research carried out.

Similarly, research by Macauley, carried out over 50 years ago, is often referred to as evidence of the uselessness of formal grammar teaching. In his article ‘The difficulty of grammar’ (1947) he set out to assess to what extent children knew the parts of speech. His tests showed that on the whole children did not know them, except, not surprisingly, for children in the top sets. However, the only conclusion that can be drawn from his work is that teaching a particular kind of grammar was a waste of time – the study focused on children’s knowledge of word classes (being able to identify parts of speech), rather than on syntax. In later studies, where children were asked to identify larger units of language which would constitute the core pattern of a sentence, the results were much better. That is to say, looking at isolated words and being able to say what part of speech they are is not a good indicator of grammatical knowledge. Looking at the meaning of a whole unit of language, such as a sentence, and identifying what the main grammatical processes are, is more relevant.

Hudson (2000) summarises the debates about whether there is any benefit to writing competence from teaching grammar and concludes that the question is still open, since he discusses studies which suggest there is and there isn’t. There is clearly a need for more research into this issue, and particularly in relation to beginning writers and readers, because most of the research that does exist, however dated, refers to secondary age pupils and public examination success.

Both the examples above show that research into the teaching of grammar and its effects on the learner is interesting but often flawed by poor methodologies; results are sometimes used to endorse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Language, Language Education and Linguistics
• Part 2 Language Activities
• Endnote
• Glossary
• Children’s literature
• References
• Index