Grammar testing: what is it good for?
In this blog Kirsten, Eduqas Domain Leader for Languages, gives a personal take on the teaching of grammar.
To paraphrase an Edwin Starr song, “Absolutely nothing.” Or so some educationalists on social media would have you believe. The grammanistas among you will have spotted that that last sentence started with a co-ordinating conjunction – “or” – usually reserved to join two or more items of equal syntactic value in a sentence; here used to suggest equivalence of worth to the two points of view but as separate sentences to emphasise the difference in perspective. Furthermore, the keen-eyed will have spotted the use of the neologism “grammanistas” (I think I made that up…?) intended to arrest the reader into considering new ways of thinking. Likewise, the parenthetic clause… I won’t go on.
The idea here is certainly not to show off my grammatical knowledge – I am no grammarian – nor to defend the national grammar tests – neither am I a politician – but recent attacks on how grammar is taught to primary school pupils got me thinking about how we as teachers and assessors of English think about grammar in our classrooms.
The labelling of parts of speech is considered by some as an archaic remnant of the 1960s grammar school system. And to some degree this opinion has some credence in the 21 century where, in the wrong hands, the use of grammatical terms can be a dangerous thing. For students attempting to analyse written language it can result in simple feature spotting or the misguided belief that the use of technical language – the more complex the better – has virtue per se. On the contrary, as teachers and assessors of English, we want to see students demonstrate an understanding of how meaning is constructed, not merely labelling words.
As practitioners we don’t shy away from introducing our students to literary terms such as “couplet” and “stanza” and “rhyme scheme” when studying poetry, or “characterisation” and “atmosphere” or even perhaps “pathetic fallacy” when exploring novels. Yet, there is often a reluctance to do the same for linguistic study. Words are the carriers of meaning, some explicit, some implicit. How we put them together can alter meaning significantly. It is these nuances that we hope to awaken in young minds. Compare the use of i) the past progressive (what we used to call past continuous) and ii) the simple past:
- i) They were sitting.
- ii) They sat.
The past progressive indicates that there is ongoing action, something about to happen, whilst the simple past sitters appear static, unmoving. Surely we would be delighted if a student could then connect these to authorial intent: i) the creation of tension and anticipation, ii) perhaps emphasising the boredom of those sitting. It is not just in approaching comprehension, however, where grammar can be a help to the beleaguered teacher of English.
Whilst there are positive messages out there about improving literacy rates, a National Literacy Trust study in 2017 found that only one-third of teenage boys in the UK say they enjoy reading. Well, what does this have to do with grammar, you may ask. Grammar for reading has long been a part of the (antiquated?) teaching of English, yet it is fairly recently that grammar for writing has been explored in our classrooms. I wonder whether all those taking part in the debate fully appreciate the circumstances in which many of our students find themselves.
A different National Literacy Trust study found that, "One in 11 (9.4%) children and young people said they do not have a book of their own at home, rising to one in eight (13.1%) children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Of these children, those who receive free school meals, boys of all ages and teenagers are the most likely to say they have no books of their own at home. "
Many English teachers, myself included, were inducted into the mysteries of the English language through our love of books and reading from a young age. We learnt ‘grammar’ by encountering what the words were doing on the page and building up a subconscious understanding of what worked and why. No-one ever directly taught me different types of sentence structures, so how could I write stories and articles that contain sentences of varied lengths and constructions? Because I had read so many sentences over my formative years that I had built up my own cognitive database. We must face the reality of the situation many of our students are in: they just don’t read that much. Where are they, then, to gain their understanding of how language works, our grammar? We must teach them. It is then that they will have the confidence to play with language in their own writing: “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively,” the Dalai Lama once said.
Understanding that a noun phase – more than one word acting as a noun – can help with accurate punctuation: ‘I bought chocolate doughnuts and apples’ means something different to ‘I bought chocolate, doughnuts and apples.’ Knowing that an adverbial gives additional information about time, manner or place means students can add that all important detail to their writing without resorting to lists of adjectives or tired similes: 'In the early light, Jenna awoke in a haze of confusion.'
We are at the dawn of a significant change in English teaching. Our Key Stage 3 classes are now being filled with students who can identify fronted adverbials et al, which can be a daunting prospect to teachers who do not feel confident in teaching grammar. We need to show them how to use this knowledge to explore meaning and the beauty of the English language.
This shouldn’t be taken to imply that feature spotting, or the use of complex technical terms per se will gain a candidate any advantage in his or her GCE or GCSE exam, but if Harry Potter has taught us anything, it is that sometimes we have to muster the courage to call something by its real name – and good things will happen.
