Traditional grammar
teaching is waste of time, say academics
Times Online
January 19, 2005
TEACHING formal English grammar to children does not help to improve their
writing skills, a government-funded study concluded yesterday. Teachers were wasting their time explaining the meaning of nouns, verbs and
pronouns to pupils as part of the national literacy strategy in primary schools,
academics at the University of York said. They were more likely to improve children’s compositions by abandoning the
rules of syntax and encouraging them to try experimental methods of sentence
construction. The study by the English review group at York was funded by the Department
for Education and Skills, which did not distance itself from the conclusions,
even though the literacy strategy emphasises “the centrality of grammar in the
teaching of writing”. A DfES spokeswoman said that the national curriculum
“supports a range of approaches to teaching of grammar”. The review group said that the curriculum should be revised to take account
of its conclusions. They emerged from what the group called the largest
systematic review of research from the past 100 years into the effect of grammar
teaching on writing in English-speaking countries for children aged 5 to 16. It found “no high-quality evidence that the teaching of grammar . . . is
worth the time if the aim is the improvement of the quality and/or accuracy of
written composition”. Richard Andrews, the group’s joint co-ordinator, said: “I
would not like this to be seen as a swing back of the pendulum to 1960s
liberalism. I would like to see it as a clearing of the ground to put behind us
the notion that teaching formal grammar would help to improve the writing of the
nation. “We should have a series of studies evaluating different approaches to see
which of them are the most effective. I would not want to feel that teachers and
pupils are wasting their time learning formal grammar when there would be better
ways of teaching writing.” Professor Andrews said that the Government was frustrated by the failure of
the literacy strategy to achieve targets for achievement in English by pupils at
age 11. He suggested that it placed too much emphasis on grammar. “I am not saying that grammar is not interesting in its own right, but there
is no evidence over 100 years to show that there is a strong connection between
the teaching of formal grammar and improvement in writing,” he said. “There will
be better ways of teaching writing and our findings suggest that the teaching of
sentence combining may be one of the more effective approaches.” “Sentence combining” has been used in America since the 1960s. It had been
shown to achieve sustained improvements in writing. Children practised ways of
combining simple sentences and “embedding” elements of language into them to
express more complex ideas. Michael Plumbe, chairman of the Queen’s English Society, described the
research as “absolute balderdash”. He said: “I hated being taught grammar at
school, but I now appreciate in later life that it is extremely useful. If the
tools of language are instilled at a young age in primary school, then children
don’t even have to think about using language because it comes naturally. Lack
of grammatical knowledge is also a key reason for the failure to learn a foreign
language.” Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education pressure group,
said: “This research looks like it is advocating a return to the laissez-faire
attitudes of the 1960s, when youngsters were not taught grammar because teachers
thought it would restrict their creativity. Now we are left with a generation of
teachers who don’t know grammar.” LEARNING CURVES