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Beyond the Grammar Wars: A Resource for Teachers and Students on Developing Language Knowledge in the English/Literacy Classroom
Are there evidence-based answers to the broad question "What explicit knowledge about language in teachers and/or students appears to enhance literacy development in some way"? Distinguished by its global perspective, its currency, and its comprehensiveness, Beyond the Grammar Wars : All of the contributors are acknowledged experts in their field. Activities designed for use in language and literacy education courses actively engage students in reflecting on and applying the content in their own teaching contexts.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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March 9, 2020
This is an edited collection of chapters by a series of academics basically concerned with whether or not teaching grammar is a good idea. And the answer to whether this is a good idea is that there is no one answer to that question, because what we mean by ‘teaching grammar’ changes with whoever is talking. Something which helps explain the ‘grammar wars’ in the title. I’m not going to give a detailed, chapter by chapter review of this book. But I do need to tell you book has four parts that involve: The wars in context, a discussion on how effective teaching grammar has been to date, what teachers have done in integrating grammar into their teaching in the classroom, and the ‘grammar’ of multimodal texts.
Rather than give you a blow by blow, chapter by chapter recount of all this, this review is the McCandless overview. Grammar can be thought of in a number of ways – but that it is mostly taught at schools so as to help children improve their writing. So, one way to think of grammar is as a series rules that help kids identity mistakes they make in their writing and, potentially, how to correct these. Most politicians who talk about schools needing to go back to teaching grammar mean this form or error correction. They are also likely to talk about this as ‘going back to basics’. There is very little evidence that this form of grammar teaching is effective. I mean effective in the sense of actually helping kids to improve their writing.
When I was doing my teaching rounds I found that students in the early years of high school were often given a booklet that they were required to fill out as home work during the week. These would have pages on ‘what is a noun’, ‘what is an adverb’, ‘what is the interrogative mood’. Each page would finish with a set of questions to test that the kids had learnt whatever it was they were supposed to have learnt. ‘Which word in the following sentence is the adjective?’ The problem I had with all this was that none of the ‘homework’ was ever discussed in class or related back to the texts we were reading in ‘real English lessons’. Being able to name the parts of speech, or even parse a sentence (which I assume was the ultimate aim of this stuff) was never related, as far as I could see, to student writing or to the texts they were reading. It never surprised me, then, that the rote learning of something you are never expected to use, beyond completing a five item multiple-choice test at the bottom of the page you learnt it, didn’t stick with you or do all that much to help improve your writing.
Now, this kind of ‘learn the rules of grammar and learn them well’ method is often associated with people on the loony right of politics, and since I’m on the loony left, I guess it is far enough to assume that I’m going to be opposed to this particular form of madness. And you’d be sort of right in assuming that.
Except, I do think it is a good idea to learn how to parse sentences. I can’t think of anyone who has died from learning how to do this – which is more than can be said for, say, scuba diving, and no one seems to want to stop people learning that. The problem is that I don’t think anyone learns how to manipulate sentences in the way the poor kids in the classes I was observing were being taught.
That said, one of the things that being able to name the grammatical units in a sentence will help you with is in understanding how words are grouped together help to create meaning. Now, the grammar that is taught in schools that is sometimes called ‘traditional grammar’, is based on Latin grammar. That is, while it works pretty well if you are learning Latin, it is actually not all that good at describing what good English might look like. This is part of the reason why a lot of the rules that we associate with ‘traditional grammar’ actually work all that well in English. You know, a preposition really isn’t such a bad word to end a sentence with, and the rule to never, ever, ever split an infinitive is true in Latin (since it is impossible in Latin to split one), but not so true in English where you can even split them in Star Trek. Just because you shouldn’t (or can’t) do these in Latin says nothing at all about what you should or can do in English.
In the 1950s and 60s ‘new’ grammars burst onto the scene. Chomsky’s transformational grammar and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. Most of the writers in this book are particularly fond of Halliday’s work. That is because it really does lend itself to helping kids with their writing. Okay, so why? Well, the difficulty with Chomsky’s grammar is that it doesn’t say anything about language at more than the sentence level. Chomsky sees us as having an inbuilt (genetic) ability to learn language (regardless of the papacy of input from our parents). He sees all languages as being related to each other at their deepest levels – and so his grammar looked at the transformations that occurred in sentences and how these impacted on sentence meaning. It’s not that surface transformations were meaningless, quite the opposite, but rather these transformations pointed to a deeper, truer meaning of the deep structure.
Halliday is also happy enough to talk about sentence level structures – but he isn’t happy to stop there. He says that there are text level structures that we can (and need to) say things about. Texts are designed for particular purposes (we call these ‘genres’) and so an office memo serves a different function in society to a poem – and even if the two can be written on a single page, they are different in ways we can say meaningful things about – and those meaningful things help us to understand both what makes a poem or a memo, and so also how students can learn to reproduce one. Genres have distinct textual features that students can learn to identify one from the other. Grammar, then, in this sense, is about teaching students the features associated with these text types and helping them to ‘play’ within these genres.
But it is also more than this – it is about helping students see that the meanings of these genres are essentially social and therefore ‘relational’. That is, who can say things, where it is appropriate for them to say those things, who is likely to listen, who is allowed to respond – all of these questions tell you something important about the ‘meaning’ of the text. And that relational meaning isn’t always at all clear from the position of the noun in the sentence, say. Well, with that said, once you understand the relational meaning of the text, then the position of the noun might become very important. Because the sentence level realisation of the text is passive or active, or burdened with adjectives or with Greco-Latinates, or as dense as a jungle with nominalisation – all of these are likely to tell you important things about how the text is constructing meaning.
But all this implies that students learn their grammar from their own active engagement with language – not least, with their active engagement with how language creates meaning. This is likely to be a much more powerful learning experience for students than error correction or abstractly naming parts of speech. It also seems much more likely to teach students something that might actively improve their writing. There was a nice bit in this where students were asked what their next learning task ought to be. Some of them said they really needed to learn how to use more complex sentences (no prizes for guessing how this popped into their heads). You know, they felt they needed to work some subordinate clauses into those sentences. Except, what this often produced was sentences where the student had totally lost control of the meaning of the sentence (if the meaning of the sentence was ever actually the issue) and so the formal concern became an end in itself.
Part of my life at the moment involves reading over Masters and PhD candidate chapters and trying to give them some advice. One of the things I’ve been noticing is the number of compound sentences that people write – you know, count the ‘ands’. In one case ‘and’ made up 10% of all words in a paragraph of about 150 words. The problem with using ‘and’ a lot is that you really can’t show any relationships between the clauses you are piling up on the page – and really, showing relationships is pretty much the point of writing at higher degree level, I think.
My other pet hate is periodic sentences – everyone has their favourite ‘nails on a blackboard’ problem, that’s mine. I really can’t get over how often academics use periodic sentences. These have a string of prepositional phrases before you get to the subject of the sentence. And so, you can’t tell what the hell the sentence is going to be about until you finally get to the subject of the sentence. It generally builds suspense. But, why would you want to build suspense in an academic paper? At the end of the day, after reading endlessly dense text, pulled together supposedly to communicate something worth knowing, the use of periodic sentences strikes me as a confusion of genres.
The chapters on multimodal texts are likely to be the ones that people will say, ‘hey, that’s not real grammar’ – but I think these are the bits that are particularly important for teachers to read. We are no longer just the consumers of visual and multimodal texts, but their producers too. I read somewhere that the occupation of choice for many kids now is YouTuber/Influencer – that is, someone who puts a video of themselves up on YouTube. Yeah, I know, they might as well say that they want to become a lottery winner (and that might even be a more likely occupation) – but this does mean that kids today feel they are at least as likely to produce video or multimedia texts as they are to produce a page of written text. That means we really need to teach them the structures of those texts.
Some of the chapters of this book have lovely examples of exercises teachers can bring into their classrooms. This is a highly recommended read, particularly for teachers.
Rather than give you a blow by blow, chapter by chapter recount of all this, this review is the McCandless overview. Grammar can be thought of in a number of ways – but that it is mostly taught at schools so as to help children improve their writing. So, one way to think of grammar is as a series rules that help kids identity mistakes they make in their writing and, potentially, how to correct these. Most politicians who talk about schools needing to go back to teaching grammar mean this form or error correction. They are also likely to talk about this as ‘going back to basics’. There is very little evidence that this form of grammar teaching is effective. I mean effective in the sense of actually helping kids to improve their writing.
When I was doing my teaching rounds I found that students in the early years of high school were often given a booklet that they were required to fill out as home work during the week. These would have pages on ‘what is a noun’, ‘what is an adverb’, ‘what is the interrogative mood’. Each page would finish with a set of questions to test that the kids had learnt whatever it was they were supposed to have learnt. ‘Which word in the following sentence is the adjective?’ The problem I had with all this was that none of the ‘homework’ was ever discussed in class or related back to the texts we were reading in ‘real English lessons’. Being able to name the parts of speech, or even parse a sentence (which I assume was the ultimate aim of this stuff) was never related, as far as I could see, to student writing or to the texts they were reading. It never surprised me, then, that the rote learning of something you are never expected to use, beyond completing a five item multiple-choice test at the bottom of the page you learnt it, didn’t stick with you or do all that much to help improve your writing.
Now, this kind of ‘learn the rules of grammar and learn them well’ method is often associated with people on the loony right of politics, and since I’m on the loony left, I guess it is far enough to assume that I’m going to be opposed to this particular form of madness. And you’d be sort of right in assuming that.
Except, I do think it is a good idea to learn how to parse sentences. I can’t think of anyone who has died from learning how to do this – which is more than can be said for, say, scuba diving, and no one seems to want to stop people learning that. The problem is that I don’t think anyone learns how to manipulate sentences in the way the poor kids in the classes I was observing were being taught.
That said, one of the things that being able to name the grammatical units in a sentence will help you with is in understanding how words are grouped together help to create meaning. Now, the grammar that is taught in schools that is sometimes called ‘traditional grammar’, is based on Latin grammar. That is, while it works pretty well if you are learning Latin, it is actually not all that good at describing what good English might look like. This is part of the reason why a lot of the rules that we associate with ‘traditional grammar’ actually work all that well in English. You know, a preposition really isn’t such a bad word to end a sentence with, and the rule to never, ever, ever split an infinitive is true in Latin (since it is impossible in Latin to split one), but not so true in English where you can even split them in Star Trek. Just because you shouldn’t (or can’t) do these in Latin says nothing at all about what you should or can do in English.
In the 1950s and 60s ‘new’ grammars burst onto the scene. Chomsky’s transformational grammar and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. Most of the writers in this book are particularly fond of Halliday’s work. That is because it really does lend itself to helping kids with their writing. Okay, so why? Well, the difficulty with Chomsky’s grammar is that it doesn’t say anything about language at more than the sentence level. Chomsky sees us as having an inbuilt (genetic) ability to learn language (regardless of the papacy of input from our parents). He sees all languages as being related to each other at their deepest levels – and so his grammar looked at the transformations that occurred in sentences and how these impacted on sentence meaning. It’s not that surface transformations were meaningless, quite the opposite, but rather these transformations pointed to a deeper, truer meaning of the deep structure.
Halliday is also happy enough to talk about sentence level structures – but he isn’t happy to stop there. He says that there are text level structures that we can (and need to) say things about. Texts are designed for particular purposes (we call these ‘genres’) and so an office memo serves a different function in society to a poem – and even if the two can be written on a single page, they are different in ways we can say meaningful things about – and those meaningful things help us to understand both what makes a poem or a memo, and so also how students can learn to reproduce one. Genres have distinct textual features that students can learn to identify one from the other. Grammar, then, in this sense, is about teaching students the features associated with these text types and helping them to ‘play’ within these genres.
But it is also more than this – it is about helping students see that the meanings of these genres are essentially social and therefore ‘relational’. That is, who can say things, where it is appropriate for them to say those things, who is likely to listen, who is allowed to respond – all of these questions tell you something important about the ‘meaning’ of the text. And that relational meaning isn’t always at all clear from the position of the noun in the sentence, say. Well, with that said, once you understand the relational meaning of the text, then the position of the noun might become very important. Because the sentence level realisation of the text is passive or active, or burdened with adjectives or with Greco-Latinates, or as dense as a jungle with nominalisation – all of these are likely to tell you important things about how the text is constructing meaning.
But all this implies that students learn their grammar from their own active engagement with language – not least, with their active engagement with how language creates meaning. This is likely to be a much more powerful learning experience for students than error correction or abstractly naming parts of speech. It also seems much more likely to teach students something that might actively improve their writing. There was a nice bit in this where students were asked what their next learning task ought to be. Some of them said they really needed to learn how to use more complex sentences (no prizes for guessing how this popped into their heads). You know, they felt they needed to work some subordinate clauses into those sentences. Except, what this often produced was sentences where the student had totally lost control of the meaning of the sentence (if the meaning of the sentence was ever actually the issue) and so the formal concern became an end in itself.
Part of my life at the moment involves reading over Masters and PhD candidate chapters and trying to give them some advice. One of the things I’ve been noticing is the number of compound sentences that people write – you know, count the ‘ands’. In one case ‘and’ made up 10% of all words in a paragraph of about 150 words. The problem with using ‘and’ a lot is that you really can’t show any relationships between the clauses you are piling up on the page – and really, showing relationships is pretty much the point of writing at higher degree level, I think.
My other pet hate is periodic sentences – everyone has their favourite ‘nails on a blackboard’ problem, that’s mine. I really can’t get over how often academics use periodic sentences. These have a string of prepositional phrases before you get to the subject of the sentence. And so, you can’t tell what the hell the sentence is going to be about until you finally get to the subject of the sentence. It generally builds suspense. But, why would you want to build suspense in an academic paper? At the end of the day, after reading endlessly dense text, pulled together supposedly to communicate something worth knowing, the use of periodic sentences strikes me as a confusion of genres.
The chapters on multimodal texts are likely to be the ones that people will say, ‘hey, that’s not real grammar’ – but I think these are the bits that are particularly important for teachers to read. We are no longer just the consumers of visual and multimodal texts, but their producers too. I read somewhere that the occupation of choice for many kids now is YouTuber/Influencer – that is, someone who puts a video of themselves up on YouTube. Yeah, I know, they might as well say that they want to become a lottery winner (and that might even be a more likely occupation) – but this does mean that kids today feel they are at least as likely to produce video or multimedia texts as they are to produce a page of written text. That means we really need to teach them the structures of those texts.
Some of the chapters of this book have lovely examples of exercises teachers can bring into their classrooms. This is a highly recommended read, particularly for teachers.
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