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Document : 497
Title    : From Parsing to Politics: A Brief History of School Grammar
Teaching
Author(s): James McGonigal
           Andrew Philp

Copyright holder(s): University of Glasgow: re-use of Crown Copyright
material

Text

This Position Paper examines the historical context of grammar teaching. 
It considers the influences which have shaped current attitudes to grammar
in schools, including the approach of the "English Language 5-14
Guidelines", and outlines current trends which are likely to influence
developments in the immediate future.  These are not merely academic
questions, but important dimensions of our professional awareness about
what we teach in Language and why. They also raise quite serious issues, as
we shall see, concerning politics, empowerment and ideology.  

The thinking behind traditional views of grammar in schools has its roots
in the work of the prescriptive grammarians of the 18th century, notably
Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray. They tried to ‘fix’ the language by
prescribing exactly what constituted correct usage and, by implication, saw
language as unchanging and any deviation as error or corruption. This
prescriptive tradition is to be distinguished from the descriptive or
analytical approach to grammar. The latter can be traced from such
18th-century grammarians as William Ward through the late 19th and early
20th-century work of Otto Jespersen and others, up to the research of
modern descriptive linguists such as Michael Halliday, which is influencing
the school language curriculum in Britain and in Australia at the present
time.

The prescriptive approach, however, held sway for some two hundred years. 
It was based on fixed attitudes, on forms and rules derived from Latin and
on exercises on the correction of sentences.  Such exercises set up many of
the shibboleths about usage that still remain (for at least some people)
the essence of ‘correct’ grammar. The avoidance of prepositions at the
end of sentences (as in ‘To whom did he give the book?’ rather than
‘Who did he give the book to?’) or the use of ‘It is I’ rather than
‘It is me’, or avoidance of the so-called ‘split infinitive’ (now
immortalised in the Star Trek injunction ‘to boldly go’) are all
examples of the kinds of usage taught to school pupils for many generations
which still cause anxiety among people anxious to observe ‘correct’
grammar.

Most of these prescriptions, and their accompanying rules (‘It is wrong
to split infinitives’) were based on analogy with Latin, even though
English forms of language patterning are very different from Latin.  For
instance, English clearly has more than one word in the infinitive (‘to
go’) unlike Latin, and therefore one is hardly ‘splitting’ the
infinitive by introducing a related word.  Also ‘It is I’ is based on
the practice in Latin to have ‘nominative’ or Subject forms after the
verb ‘to be’, even though English is very largely an uninflected
language and does not normally indicate Objects by means of
‘accusative’ endings at all, far less make exceptions for the verb
‘to be’.  The rule about avoidance of prepositions at the end of
sentences, similarly, derived from a stylistic tendency in Latin to have
verbs at the ends of sentences.  

Such prescriptions about English grammar were reinforced through countless
exercises on the correction of sentences, where pupils were expected to
identify the ‘correct’ form of usage, which was frequently the one they
did not use in their normal speech!  Such rules often seem to run counter
to natural usage in English, certainly in the much less Latinate and less
formal English that most of us now write, even in fairly formal
circumstances.  Moreover, an over-concern with whether pupils can employ
these extremely formal usages seems an odd priority, when they may well
have a very shaky command of Standard English as a whole, even in
situations where it is appropriate.  

These prescriptive attitudes were based upon two central assumptions: 
• that there is a correct standard form of the language, normally only
found in writing
• that the development of pupils’ abilities in written English depends
upon their being taught this grammar explicitly and being trained in its
use.

The first of these assumptions is contradicted by modern policy and
practice, which focus more than ever before on the nature of spoken English
and its differences from Standard written English. The second assumption,
that skill in writing depends upon formal grammar teaching, was seriously
called into question by the findings of a number of research projects (e.g.
Macauley 1947, Harris, 1963);  more recently the work of Elley and his
associates (1999) seems to prove the case beyond any doubt.  Using a
longitudinal study, involving traditional grammar, modern transformational
grammar (associated with Chomsky), and a control group, they showed that
‘English Grammar teaching, whether traditional or transformational, has
virtually no influence on the language growth of typical secondary school
students.’  (Elley, W.B. et al. 1975, ‘The role of grammar in a
secondary school English curriculum’. New Zealand Journal of Educational
Studies 10: 26-42. Quoted in Elley, 1999.)

The early prescriptive approach assumed, falsely, that the forms and
structure needed to describe the grammar of English are simple,
all-embracing and essentially unchanging.  It took over the eight ‘parts
of speech’ from Latin, and took essentially the same approach to syntax,
without trying to modify the system to suit English or to reflect the
complexity of the language.  Some philosophical grammarians of the
18th-century did attempt to describe the language accurately and devised
analytical systems to do so; the serious grammarians of the 19th-century,
such as Curme, Poutsma and Jespersen, tried to describe it comprehensively;
and the linguists of the 20th-century, such as Chomsky and Halliday,
devised new systems to account for the phenomenon of language in all its
detail.

Yet it is the prescriptive, dogmatic approach that has dominated school
grammar, and it still influences the views of many adults who pronounce on
the subject as amateurs.  And of course it still affects the attitudes and
even the approaches of many teachers today, although some teachers in
Britain, America and Australia have, since the 1970s and 1980s, been
introducing their students to a more enquiry-based approach to language,
including grammar.  The former view sees the theory of grammar as simple,
comprehensive and unchanging, whereas the latter sees it as a complex,
speculative undertaking, constantly being honed by grammarians striving to
describe accurately the complexity of the English language as it changes
over time and space (into American or Australian or indeed Scottish
English).

For most school children, however, change came slowly. British pupils at
the end of the 1950s were drilled in grammatical analysis of sentences and
parsing of ‘parts of speech’ from upper primary until the final stages
of compulsory schooling, and this grammatical prowess was tested in British
public examinations at ages 16 or 17.  In 1975 the Bullock Report said of
the GCE O-level examination papers established in the early 1920s:

"Forty years later, in the early sixties, they had changed little.  There
was a précis, letter-writing, paraphrase analysis and other grammatical
exercises, the correction of incorrect sentences, the punctuation of
depunctuated passages, and, of course, an essay."

Parsing and analysis were taught in Scottish primary and secondary schools,
using such comprehensive and scholarly textbooks as "The Approach to
Standard English" (Barclay and Knox) and "The Study of Standard English"
(Barclay, Knox and Ballantyne).  These books and others like them provided
pupils with an education in traditional school grammar which embraced all
the practices and assumptions discussed above. While scholarly, and no
doubt comprehensible to the ablest pupils, they created a detestation and
fear of English for many generations of adults.

It was probably this response from pupils, born out of their inability to
understand ‘grammar’ or its purpose, together with the fact that it
clearly did not transfer to an increased ability to write continuous
English, that led most teachers in England and (rather later) in Scotland
to reject the teaching of traditional grammar and to look for an
alternative approach.

One such approach was the growth of interest in ‘creative writing’.
Here the child’s potential for creativity was to be fostered through a
series of motivating experiences involving talking, reading, and writing. 
Fluency was to be encouraged; consequently, teachers were careful to avoid
attempts to correct or improve the child’s creation, either during or
after the act of writing.  This doctrine clearly ran counter to the
traditional approaches to grammar outlined above, although they did survive
within O-level examinations in England and Wales.  ‘Creative writing’
never really took root in Scottish schools in the 1960s, although a
modified version, focusing on the importance of what James Britton called
transactional, expressive and poetic functions of writing, did become
prominent here in the 1970s and 1980s.  Britton's categories, of course,
became the types of writing termed ‘functional’, ‘personal’ and
‘imaginative’ in the 5-14 Guidelines.

In England, ‘creative writing’ approaches and ‘Leavisite’ views of
the central importance of literature as a force for moral and linguistic
development held sway throughout the 1960s, coupled with an extreme
antipathy to anything remotely connected with grammar teaching. Two other
approaches to language teaching which developed in the 1960s became more
prominent during the 1970s and 1980s.  The first was associated with the
work of Britton, Barnes, Dixon and Rosen.  This approach saw the
development of the child, as language user and mature human being, as being
rooted in ‘exploratory talk’ and ‘expressive writing’, as the child
strove to find his or her individual voice and in the process developed as
a person.  Its proponents saw literature and language study as equally
important in this process but they took a stance against the explicit and
systematic use of terminology from linguistics.  They concentrated instead
on developing their own eclectic approaches to how meanings are made in
talk and writing.  In Barnes’ words:

"Discussion of the audience’s needs and whether they are being fulfilled
is often valuable, but this is discussion in terms of content or style. 
Such discussion, though it necessarily refers to particular features in
texts, need not demand that pupils first master an extensive generalised
system for describing those features." (1988: 37-38)

A more explicit approach had its genesis in the "Programme in Linguistics
and English Teaching", directed by M. A. K. Halliday at University College
London, from 1964 to 1969.  This drew directly upon the insights of
linguistics and considered their implications for mother-tongue teaching. 
The "Language in Use" materials which emerged involve pupils in
investigations into a wide range of aspects of language as it is used in
society: the relations between spoken and written language;  language in
social situations;  patterning in language, and so on. The focus is not
upon ‘teaching grammar’ but upon creating knowledge about language as
pupils meet it in daily life, and upon their using a range of registers as
they investigate these concerns.  Thus "Language in Use" instituted the
broad approach which has become the Knowledge about Language aspect of both
the Scottish 5-14 Guidelines and the National Curriculum in England.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was considerable discussion of the
methodology of teaching grammar, as opposed to the actual form of grammar
taught.  In 1972 the Scottish Central Committee on English published their
Bulletin "The Teaching of English Language". This put forward a view of the
role of grammar in language teaching which was essentially to be advocated
by all the Language reports of the next twenty years (Bullock, Kingman,
5-14 and Cox), at least up until the revisions of English in the National
Curriculum by the Department of Education and Science from 1992 onwards. 
The view of the SCCE Bulletin could be summed up in the following
quotation:

"The sorts of language work described here will be facilitated by the use
of a suitable grammatical vocabulary, some of which will have been acquired
earlier by means of ‘mention’.... The vital point is that grammatical
terminology should be produced only in response to need. The grammar to be
taught should be limited only to what pupil and teacher require."

Grammatical concepts and terminology may be drawn upon by teachers as they
discuss with pupils what meaning is being created in written texts, and how
it is being created, but this is not the same as teaching grammar on the
assumption that the pupil has to be taught the forms in order to be able to
use them.  In fact, they potentially know most of the grammar already. 
What they have to be taught is how to utilise this knowledge appropriately.
 In such teaching it may be beneficial for teachers to draw upon
grammatical terminology, if they consider it appropriate.

The Bullock Committee, perhaps surprisingly, took a broadly similar stance
to the Scottish Central Committee on English on explicit rules and facts
about language, saying that these have direct practical value to pupils
when they solve particular problems in the tasks they are engaged on, or
when pupils are able to reconstruct for themselves the analysis that led to
the rule: 

"What we are suggesting then, is that children should learn about language
by experiencing it and experimenting with its use.  There will be occasions
when the whole class might receive specific instruction in some aspect of
language.  More frequently, however, the teacher will operate on the
child’s language competence at the point of need by individual or small
group discussion.  As a background to all this activity, he should have in
his own mind a clear picture of how far and in what directions this
competence should be extended."

A very similar view of the process of grammar teaching was advocated some
fifteen years later by Carter (1994), who suggested that Knowledge about
Language ‘requires a methodology which is not transmissive and
teacher-centred but investigative and project-based’.  Thus the emphasis
in grammar teaching should not be upon the teacher instructing pupils about
concepts and terminology that they do not know, but upon helping them to
discover explicitly what they already do know unconsciously about language.
The process of making such knowledge explicit 

"should not be imposed or engineered but rather fostered and supported as
naturally as possible, as needed in specific contexts and in ways which
reinforce the process as one of positive achievement with language. There
can be no return to decontexualised exercises or gap fillings or to the
deficiency pedagogies in which such procedures are grounded."

Such an approach to the role of grammar as terminology introduced at the
point of need is clearly established in the English Language 5-14
Guidelines: 

"…there is still a need for the teacher to help pupils with word choice,
with a turn of phrase, with sorting out the meaning or punctuation of a
sentence.  In doing so the grammatical terminology of the sentence, the
word (noun, verb, etc.) and punctuation should be introduced as the
technical terms by which teachers and pupils discuss such matters." 

And, as has been suggested in our LILT Booklet A 5-14, pupils’ awareness
of relevant concepts and terms can also be reinforced effectively through
games or the discovery of meaningful patterns in texts.

The question of explicit knowledge about language being imparted to pupils
leads to the related issue of the teacher’s own linguistic knowledge. 
The SCCE Bulletin claimed that the teacher 

"…must be in possession of a much more explicit knowledge (than his
pupils) about language in gener


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Information about document and author:

Text
Text audience
Adults (18+): Specialists: Audience size: 1000+

Text details
Method of composition: Handwritten
Year of composition: 1998
Word count: 2544
General description: One of a series of position papers on current educational developments in relation to language education

Text medium
Book: Other: CD Rom of teacher materials (LILT)

Text publication details
Part of larger text: Contained in: CD Rom: LILT Materials
Editor: J McGonigal / C Kay
Part of a longer series of texts: Name of series: Position Papers: CD Rom: LILT Materials

Text setting
Education: 
Text type
Prose: nonfiction: Report: 

Author
Author details
Author id: 60
Forenames: Andrew
Surname: Philp
Gender: Male
Decade of birth: 1930
Educational attainment: University
Age left school: 17
Upbringing/religious beliefs: Catholicism
Occupation: Retired Lecturer in Education
Place of birth: Londonderry
Region of birth: Co. Londonderry
Country of birth: Northern Ireland
Place of residence: Airdrie
Region of residence: Lanark
Residence CSD dialect area: Lnk
Country of residence: Scotland
Father's occupation: Tool Fitter
Father's place of birth: Auchterarder
Father's region of birth: E & SE Perthshire
Father's birthplace CSD dialect area: Per
Father's country of birth: Scotland
Mother's occupation: Seamstress in shirt factory
Mother's place of birth: Ture
Mother's region of birth: Co. Donegal
Mother's country of birth: Ireland

Languages:
Language: English
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: At work, at home
Language: Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Evening classes and immersion
Language: Italian
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: No
Understand: No
Circumstances: Elementary
Language: Japanese
Speak: Yes
Read: No
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Very elementary
Language: Scots
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Elementary - intermediate
Language: Urdu
Speak: Yes
Read: No
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Elementary


Author
Author details
Author id: 78
Forenames: James
Surname: McGonigal
Gender: Male
Decade of birth: 1940
Educational attainment: University
Age left school: 18
Upbringing/religious beliefs: Catholicism
Occupation: University lecturer
Place of birth: Dumfries
Region of birth: E & Mid Dumfries
Birthplace CSD dialect area: Dmf
Country of birth: Scotland
Place of residence: Glasgow
Region of residence: Glasgow
Residence CSD dialect area: Gsw
Country of residence: Scotland
Father's occupation: F.E. Lecturer
Father's place of birth: Cleland
Father's region of birth: Lanark
Father's birthplace CSD dialect area: Lnk
Father's country of birth: Scotland
Mother's occupation: Primary School teacher
Mother's place of birth: Midcalder
Mother's region of birth: West Lothian
Mother's birthplace CSD dialect area: wLoth
Mother's country of birth: Scotland

Languages:
Language: English
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Work and home
Language: French
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Used occasionally
Language: Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic
Speak: No
Read: No
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Very limited vocabulary
Language: German
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Used occasionally
Language: Scots
Speak: No
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Work (language study) and creative writing
Language: Spanish; Castilian
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Used occasionally