According to Dominic Wyse, a professor in early childhood and primary education at UCL Institute of Education, there is an “unusually strong” focus on grammar and learning technical terms in England’s national curriculum, compared with other curricula internationally.
But is this really the case? We don’t think so.
The current national curriculum, combined with the grammar, punctuation and spelling tests, demands more grammar in primary schools than before. And yet, at the same time, the Department for Education offers no systematic support for teachers. This lack of support leaves teachers and teacher trainers in a difficult position: what to do about the grammar gap?
In this context, it’s immensely comforting to conclude that grammar isn’t actually worth teaching, and that, instead, schools should focus on the “normal”, internationally recognised bits of language and literacy that make other countries so much more successful than us.
But however comfortable this view may be, it’s dead wrong. We have two facts in support of this claim.
Fact one: the amount of grammatical terminology that pupils in England are required to learn is actually fairly small: just 40 technical terms spread over six primary years, so six or seven per year. The national curriculum for secondary English requires no grammar at all to be taught.
Top Pisa countries focus on grammar teaching
Contrast this with the Czech Republic, for example, where children study grammar right through primary and secondary school, and a child will learn to use about 30 grammatical terms just in Grade 3 (equivalent to Year 4).
Unfortunately, research evidence related to the age-appropriateness of grammatical concepts is thin on the ground. It could, therefore, be suggested that at least some of the grammar taught in primary school should be left until later. However, the age at which it should be taught is a different issue from the overall amount.
Fact two: most Western countries do, in fact, include formal grammatical instruction in their curricula, with the English-speaking world as a glaring exception.
The Slavic countries teach grammar, as does Estonia, Scandinavia, most of the German states and the Netherlands. In Estonia, Finland and Poland, teaching grammar doesn’t seem to do any harm: all three countries rank higher than us in the international student assessment tests under the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).
By and large, these other countries teach about grammar through secondary school as well as primary (though they may limit it to key stage 2 and KS3), and aim at a much more thorough coverage of grammatical analysis.
The focus on grammar in England, then, is not “unusually strong” if we look beyond Anglophone countries.
What does the research say about teaching grammar?
What is “unusually strong” in England, however, is teaching grammar purely as a means to enhance children’s writing. But as research shows, teaching specific grammatical terms does have other benefits. So what are they?
For many countries, the main point of teaching grammar is to help children to learn foreign languages. Other perceived benefits are improved reading and thinking skills, and increased understanding of the workings of language.
There is a vast amount of research literature showing the benefit that explicit grammatical instruction has on learning foreign languages: and for many countries, this is the driving factor in their decisions around grammatical focus in the classroom.
Another common aim is to improve spelling through a focus on morphology - the structure of words described in terms of roots and affixes. Here too, there is strong research evidence that grammar teaching works. Moreover, reading skills have been shown to improve with a focus on complex syntax.
But research shows other cognitive benefits as well. For example, in a recent study in the Netherlands, children were taught traditional grammatical concepts such as “subject” and “object” but also important meta-concepts such as “valency” - the ability of a verb to “choose” its arguments, such as subjects and objects. This study shows that just four lessons in concepts and meta-concepts improves children’s reasoning about grammatical problems they have never encountered before.
There is also some evidence that goes beyond grammatical reasoning: a US study carried out in the 1990s showed that a two-week course consisting of nine grammar lessons improved children’s general scientific reasoning ability.
Admittedly, these Dutch and American studies involved secondary schoolchildren, and the current debate in the UK mainly focuses on primary school. More research on primary schoolchildren will certainly be welcome, but, in the meantime, simply rejecting grammar teaching as having no benefits at all seems short-sighted.
As academic linguists, then, our view is that grammar merits inclusion in the national curriculum. However, in order to bring everyone around to this view, a few changes are needed.
First of all, we need more research around when exactly it should be taught: we do believe there may be merit in leaving some of the more complex terms until secondary school.
Secondary teachers, too, need more support from the government in this area: if they had more specific training around these grammatical terms, and therefore felt more confident in teaching them, perhaps there would be fewer concerns around grammar’s usefulness.
Ultimately, our children deserve, and need, this education - and there are enough academic linguists keen to jump in and help.
Willem Hollmann is a professor of linguistics at Lancaster University, and Dick Hudson is an emeritus professor of linguistics at UCL
