Beyond the Grammar Wars

A Resource for Teachers and Students on Developing Language Knowledge in the English/Literacy Classroom

Terry Locke, Terry Locke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136989971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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:

• provides an historical overview of the debates around grammar and English/literacy teaching in four settings: the US, England, Scotland and Australia

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• offers an up-to-date account of what the research is telling (and not telling) us about the effectiveness of certain kinds of grammar-based pedagogies in English/literacy classrooms

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• takes readers into English/literacy classrooms through a range of examples of language/grammar-based pedagogies which have proven to be successful

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• addresses metalinguistic issues related to changes in textual practices in a digital and multimodal age, and explores the challenges for educators who are committed to finding a "usable grammar" to contribute to teaching and learning in relation to these practices.

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.

Chapter 1
Introduction

“Grammar Wars” and Beyond

Terry Locke

For me as editor, this book has had a multiplicity of prompts. Some of these stem from dilemmas I faced as a classroom teacher and Head of English in a number of New Zealand secondary schools; others stem from conversations subsequent to my involvement as an educational researcher in perhaps the biggest ever review of the impact of two kinds of formal grammar teaching (syntax and sentence-combining) on the quality of student writing (see Andrews et al., 2004a, 2004b). In this introduction, I will be aware of donning a variety of hats at different times: former classroom teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher. This is appropriate, I think, since my co-contributors and I would see ourselves as addressing a broad audience: English/literacy/L1 teachers, pre-service teachers, teacher educators and members of the academic community with an interest in this topic.

The over-riding question driving this book is: What explicit/implicit knowledge about language in teachers and/or students appears to enhance literacy development in some way? It is a question which takes many forms depending on context. It is also the question that has arguably generated more acrimonious debate than any other among English/literacy teachers, linguists and educationalists in the last five decades (see Locke, 2009).

The acrimony is reflected in the kinds of metaphors used to draw attention to the various ways this question has been framed, and the attack and defense mode of much of the argumentation. Urszula Clark (2001) played on this when she entitled her account of language, history and the disciplining of English, War Words. In a Bernsteinian analysis of the “Grammar Wars” in England, Clark (2005 and in this book) views the conflict in terms of Conservative government attempts starting in 1984 to reverse a curriculum trend that “had become increasingly decentralized, relocated from the government to the teaching profession, with both content and assessment becoming increasingly deregularized” and

to pull control over education back towards the centre even more. The curriculum envisaged by this reversal amounted to a restoration of a grammar school curriculum, with the privileged text in English returning to the teaching of Standard English, its grammar and its literature. (2005, p. 37)

In the United States, a major focus of conflict has been the position and positioning of grammar within American classrooms. As Kolln and Hancock argue in their chapter in this book, a range of forces (again, the military metaphor) in the United States signaled the demise of a systematic focus on grammar in US classrooms and a shut-down to dialogue between linguists and educationalists in respect of ways in which grammar could be used in the service of literacy acquisition. For these authors, these forces include NCTE policy, “minimalist” grammar and its anti-knowledge stance, whole-language approaches to language acquisition, the ascendancy of process approaches within composition and the primacy of literature within English curriculums at all levels. Interestingly, Kolln and Hancock view Constance Weaver, who also contributes to this book, as associated with the first two items on this list. In the New Zealand context, as Elizabeth Gordon has described, while there have been pressures to accord traditional grammar knowledge the same kind of status in the educational system as that advocated by conservatives in England, a different kind of “grammar war” was fought in the early 1990s, when it was suggested that the indigenous language, Maaori (an official language), be used as a comparison language for enhancing students’ understandings of the workings of English (see Gordon, 2005).

What makes the “grammar wars” in the Australian context interesting, as Frances Christie explains in her chapter, is that it involved the kind of debate that Kolln and Hancock lament the lack of in the United States. In Australia, the debate was between two versions of subject English, both of which offered a social, “progressive” view of English but which viewed the place of explicit grammatical knowledge and what constituted such knowledge (i.e. whose knowledge) very differently. The central issue, to use Christie’s words, was “What knowledge about language should be taught in the name of subject English?”

Activity: Reflecting on the Teaching of Grammar as Controversial

Is the teaching of grammar a controversial issue in your own educational setting? If so, identify some of the positions that appear to be in conflict in your setting. What sorts of beliefs about the teaching of grammar do advocates of opposing positions have?

Some of my own prompts in initiating this project have their origins close to home – in my experiences as a teacher, teacher educator and researcher in the New Zealand context. It is a context that has had its own share of social upheaval and educational “reform” in the last 20 years (Locke, 2001, 2004). As in other settings, reform drivers were often underpinned by discourses of crisis and a panic about falling standards, especially literacy standards. In the New Zealand setting, the panacea was less a turn back to traditional grammar (as educational conservatives would have it), but rather a turn to a focus on pre-specified learning outcomes (as neo-liberals driving an extrinsic accountability agenda would have it). In the larger context of struggles over administrative, curriculum and assessment policy and practice, questions of “grammar” and “language” were minor blips on the radar screen.

I was, however, one of a generation of teachers that was asked to implement a sociolinguistic approach to language study in the senior secondary English class in the 1980s. My university English degree had not prepared me for this role, though the core degree still required majors to do “language” papers and had yet to suffer the slings and arrows of critical theory. The sociolinguistic resources teachers worked with came with plenty of terminological baggage – you couldn’t analyze the language of conversation without talking about anacoluthons, could you? This metalanguage was certainly a different breed from the traditional grammar I was subjected to as a student in the 1950s and 1960s as I worked my way through endless, decontextualized parsing exercises. But while it aroused in some students and teachers an interest in the way language worked in situ, it didn’t appear to be designed to help students write better and seemed marginally related to reading, especially literary reading.

As a secondary teacher in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had little linguistic training, some knowledge of traditional grammar (augmented by my learning of additional languages) and no clue whatsoever in respect of the place of knowledge about language in the English/literacy classroom. I identify with a recollection of Richard Andrews (2005), who writes: “As a practicing English teacher … I created my own mix of top-down (research-informed) and bottom-up (pragmatic, inventive, intuitive) approaches to the teaching of writing, and employed whichever method seemed right for the learners I was teaching” (p. 69). Nevertheless, in 1992, as a recently appointed HOD English of a large, rather multilingual secondary school, I was struck by the realization that ignorance about language was widespread. Undeterred by my own shortcomings, I wrote and published a small book entitled Every Student’s English Language Manual. The first part of the book covered “Elements of Language” (morphology, diction, spelling, punctuation, word classes and syntax) and the second “Applications”, by relating language use to particular genres (for example, formal letters, reports, essays, display ads and lyric poems). If you had asked me to indicate how “research-informed” the book was, I would have mentioned Halliday and Hasan (1985), Andrews’ work on rhetoric and argumentation (1992, 1993) and the work of Australian genre theorists such as Jim Martin that had snuck across the Tasman Sea in the dead of night (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993). But I couldn’t have told you whether or not English teachers should teach “grammar” in their classrooms.

Activity: Identifying Sources of Knowledge

Do you identify with the quotation from Richard Andrews above? Identify a course of action you took as a teacher in relation to your language/English teaching that you might describe as intuitive. In addition, identify a “top-down” source that has influenced your teaching or your thinking about teaching. This source might be a textbook, or a model lesson you have observed, or some other kind of document or practice.

The “Exploring Language” project was initiated by the New Zealand Association for the Teaching of English (NZATE)¹ and led to a book of the same title (Ministry of Education, 1996). However, there was never an adequate professional development program, underpinned by coherent theory and sound research, to help teachers know how to use in classrooms that “knowledge about language” the big blue book contained. Meanwhile, as I write, pedagogical practice in respect of language in New Zealand schools is being increasingly shaped by the availability of cheap, write-on, “basic English” texts, diagnostic testing regimes such as AsTTle² and ways in which worthwhile knowledge (including knowledge about language) is being shaped by high-stakes, summative assessment regimes such as the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

So much for prompts from my own backyard. In respect of the bigger stage, I was (perhaps) fortunate enough to be involved in an English Review team, based at the University of York and chaired by Richard Andrews, which undertook two systematic reviews in association with the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre) on (1) whether the formal teaching of sentence grammar or (2) whether instruction in sentence-combining was effective in helping 5- to 16-year-olds write better (see Andrews et al., 2004a, 2004b). Andrews’ take on this project and the debate that has occurred in its aftermath are a focus of his chapter in this book.

For my own part, involvement in the project raised many questions in my own mind about the virtues of systematic reviews and how they construct “best evidence”.³ In respect of grammar and knowledge about language, I was left with the uneasy sense that our published reviews begged a lot of questions. For instance, the framing of our research questions encouraged a separation of sentence-level grammar considerations from a wider view of what “grammar knowledge” might mean. A definition such as the following from Cope and Kalantzis (1993, p. 20) would have fallen outside this frame:

“Grammar” is a term that describes the relation of language to metalanguage; of text to generalizations about text; of experience to theory; of the concrete world of human discursive activity to abstractions which generalize about the regularities and irregularities in that world.

In addition, because the focus of the review was on effectiveness, there was a tendency to favor studies reporting trials that were controlled in various ways, but whose measures of writing effectiveness were constrained, narrow and sometimes fatuous. This tendency also led to a selection of studies which focused on

1. NZATE is the professional association of New Zealand secondary English teachers and is equivalent to such organizations as AATE, NATE and NCTE.

2. AsTTle is a system of diagnostic testing for a range of competencies, including reading comprehension.

3. I am broadly sympathetic to Maggie MacLure’s assault on systemic reviews in MacLure, M. (2005). “Clarity bordering on stupidity”: Where’s the quality in systematic review? Journal of Education Policy, 20(4), 393–416.

the intervention proper, as if such interventions were neutral and separable from the classroom teacher and his/her professional knowledge (including knowledge about language) and value system.

My own list of questions subsequent to the English Review Group’s having done its work was included in the rationale for a special issue on “Knowledge about Language in the English/Literacy Classroom” for the journal English Teaching: Practice and Critique.⁴ They were:

• What is meant by “knowledge about language”?

• Whose knowledges are we talking about when we refer to “knowledge about language”?

• In what ways is “knowledge about grammar” subsumed under the term “knowledge about language”?

• What relationships exist (as productive or non-productive) between the development of linguistics as an academic domain and educational policy and practice in respect of the presence of “knowledge about language” in the English/literacy classroom?

• What (if any) justifications exist for the inclusion of “knowledge about language” in an “intended” curriculum as knowledge worth knowing for itself?

• How is knowledge about language affected by the technologized nature of its object?

• Put another way, how does metalanguage need to change under pressure from the increased digitizing and graphicization of texts and text-based practice?

• Are there any sustainable arguments for a positive relationship between knowledge about language (however understood) and increased effectiveness in some aspect of textual practice (reading/viewing or production)?

• What is the relationship between metalanguage and metacognition?

• What pedagogical frameworks or approaches appear to render “knowledge about language” effective or ineffective as a component of literacy teaching and learning?

The chapters in this book address these questions and others in different ways and out of different contexts. The pivotal question, of course, is: What is meant by knowledge about language? Once a meaning is attributed to the term, then claims can be made for a relationship between either explicit or implicit knowledge and the enhancement of some aspect of literacy acquisition, for example, writing. If a positive relationship is claimed, more particular claims can be made in respect of whether explicit or simply implicit knowledge is needed for students to develop the sorts of literacies deemed to be desirable in terms of an intended curriculum or the requirements of a fulfilling life and citizenship, and the kinds of explicit knowledge deemed to be a desirable aspect of a teacher’s content a...