200 Years of Grammar: A History of Grammar Teaching in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, 1800-2000

by Dr. Laurence Walker

Overview

Since 1800, students have spent millions of hours learning English grammar. Students and teachers have toiled at parsing and analysis, dreading the English exam at the end of the year, as debate over the real value of learning grammar has raged. Nowhere have these arguments been as passionate as in the English-speaking colonies of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

In 200 Years of Grammar, author Dr. Laurence Walker narrates a detailed history of the origins and evolution of grammar education and its relationship to English usage in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Walker presents a discussion of grammar’s educational signi?cance and provides a framework for how the context of the politics surrounding grammar teaching a?ects students and teachers.

O?ering many applicable examples, 200 Years of Grammar gives insight into the issues with which English teachers around the world have grappled for years. It provides teachers, students, and those interested in the English language with an engaging history of grammar education from the introduction of state curriculum through to the twenty-?rst century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781462051663
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/29/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

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200 Years of Grammar

A History of Grammar Teaching in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, 1800–2000

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By Laurence Walker

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Dr. Laurence Walker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5165-6

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Chapter One

The School Grammar Debate

Enquiry into grammar

Grammar was once the most autonomous of that loose aggregation of subjects that grew into English in the school timetable. Grammar was indispensable to the timetable, appearing as a separate subject or in combination with composition, dictation, rhetoric, or even orthoepy. Its rationale, implicit or explicit, was assured as a commonplace of educational theory. Its demise since roughly 1960 has left a curious void in the subject of English. On the one hand, in the face of apparently unanimous research evidence that the teaching of formal categories and rules, exercised through the analysis of sentences, produces no benefits in expression or comprehension, it is hard to make a serious and well-informed case for a return to traditional grammar teaching.

On the other hand, to omit it leaves the English program vulnerable to the question of how the study of language as an important and defining part of human experience can be properly conducted without learning the language used to talk and think about language. In no other school subject, it is claimed, are you not allowed to use a technical vocabulary. It is, as one issue of the Guardian newspaper described, like trying to discuss painting without being able to use the names of the colors (Guardian, 1988).

The dilemma is to find an appropriate technical vocabulary about language to replace traditional school grammar, now discredited. Attempts to develop an alternative curriculum strand from the "new grammars," structural grammar and transformational grammar, failed in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1984 British report English from 5 to 16 observed that although there appeared to be a broad consensus that some knowledge about language should be included in school English programs, there was a lack of professional unity that would be required to implement any specific policy. (This report is discussed in detail later in this book.)

There is a temptation to think that grammar as it existed as a school subject at the height of its popularity in, say 1875, or prior to its removal from English, was a homogeneous thing, consisting of defining and identifying the parts of speech and analyzing sentences. This was not so. Apart from problems of definition within English, which have variously included under grammar the mechanics of punctuation and the social etiquette of usage alongside propositional information about language structure, the more parsimonious term, grammar, was constantly being transformed in its content, method, and rationale through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

For example, as many as 297 different enumerations of the parts of speech in English grammars were published before 1801 (Michael, 1987). Parsing as a teaching method was not widely established until about 1800. Sentence analysis did not stabilize until after 1850, when the linguistic concepts of clause and subordination were established, permitting the distinction between compound and complex sentence and the division of the latter type into principal and subordinate clauses. A succession of justifications attended grammar teaching: its value as a mental discipline; its necessity as a foundation for correct usage; its assistance in the discrimination of good from bad usage; its value to the subsequent study of a second language; and its provision of a technical language, or meta-language, with which to think and talk about writing.

Perhaps there is less revolution and more evolution in the changes that have affected English teaching since the 1960s. It may be helpful to consider the vexed question of what information about English may, or even should, be usefully taught to school children in the light of the history of grammar teaching.

THE DEBATE ABOUT GRAMMAR AND THE VALUE OF A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In 1987 the New Zealand Listener reported the claim by an Australian writer in her forties that her generation was the last one schooled in English syntax (McLeod, 1987). The claim implied that her ability to earn a living by writing owed something to her Geelong primary teacher, who had drilled her sixth- grade classes in parsing and analysis. It also implied that the benefits of instruction in syntax had been denied to later generations of school children by the elimination of grammar teaching from the school English curriculum, presumably in the 1960s and 1970s.

Confronted with such a charge, education officials in New Zealand, Canada, or Australia could have made two responses to the claim: first, that children's control over English syntax is an important objective of modern programs for teaching English even though its explicit teaching as a separate part of the subject is not recommended; and second, that there is no evidence that teaching the rules of English syntax separately and directly produces any benefit in either speaking or writing. The same officials might also point out that some teachers do continue to teach grammar in the traditional, formal sense, in spite of official disapproval.

By the 1970s and 1980s, curriculum guides for English or English language arts published by provincial, state, or national departments of education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were unanimous in their exclusion of grammar as an explicit, identifiable component in authorized or recommended programs. Nova Scotia's 1983 program for secondary school English includes a categorical denial that teaching formal grammar leads to any benefit in language use. The 1987 Alberta guide for junior high school language arts relegates it to a very minor role in the editing phase of the writing process.

Recent documents on the teaching of English published by the New Zealand Department of Education fail to even mention grammar, an indication that the policy based on an alternative ideology of language learning is so widely established that denials of the value of grammar teaching are no longer necessary in that country. In Australia, curriculum guides for English embrace the ideology of the personal growth model of English teaching, which, from the late 1960s, took over from the cultural heritage and the skills models under which grammar had been maintained. In both Australia and New Zealand, any treatment of language as an object of study in the higher grades leading to propositional understandings about it has been broadened beyond a narrow set of structural categories and rules to focus on characteristics of language as it is actually used in various social situations.

In 1987 the Canadian Council for the Teaching of English held its annual meeting in Winnipeg. The extent to which grammar teaching was out of favor with the English teaching establishment was evident when a motion from the Council's Resolutions Committee was passed. It read as follows:

Whereas there is no evidence that teaching any grammar at all of any theoretical persuasion has any beneficial effects on students' use of language; and whereas there is considerable evidence from research that the level of abstraction in grammatical study is so high that it remains incomprehensible to most students; and whereas the time wasted on formal study of grammar could be better used to develop fluency in the use of writing and speaking English or studying literature; move that the teaching of grammar be replaced by activities that are known to foster literacy. (1987)

It would be fair to say that the confident consensus against grammar represented by this successful motion still prevails in the authorized discourse in English language arts education, particularly as found in the deliberations of curriculum committees, in most of the pages of contemporary language arts journals, and in the official and unofficial substance and business of English language arts conferences. Grammar teaching is beyond the pale.

However, there is occasional evidence that the wider community does not accept the curriculum demise of grammar. The Listener reference above was an expression of anxiety that an important part of literacy learning is being neglected. That anxiety emerged in a 1986 Canadian radio discussion about literacy on CBC's national program "Morningside." In response to a university student's claim that she had not studied grammar in school, host Peter Gzowski asked, in apparent astonishment, "If you didn't study grammar in your English program, what did you study?" (1986)

The assumed neglect of grammar in school programs is implicated in popular concerns about linguistic deterioration and a retreat from language standards on contemporary usage. This is frequently attributed to a failure of schools to thoroughly teach the basics. Business organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, have criticized school English programs on these grounds. Universities have expressed concerns about the literacy abilities of their freshman intakes from the schools, and the media have been quick to publicize such criticisms. Some teachers share this disquiet and, under official curriculum policies that are permissive rather than prescriptive, continue to teach grammar in spite of prevailing professional opinion.

While it is possible for professional consensus to set aside the contrary opinions of some practitioners as unscientific and the reports of "establishment journalists" as sensational, there is also an academic dissent that has been largely ignored rather than countered. This dissent has criticized the claim that research findings show that grammar teaching does not achieve better performance in speaking and writing. That claim was articulated in a 1963 review of the research, one section of which has gained the status of a manifesto against grammar teaching:

In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing. (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, & Schoer, 1963, pp. 37–38)

This fifty-six-word quotation "has appeared over and over again in books, articles, convention papers, classroom, and casual conversations" (Kolln, 1981). However, as Neuleib (1977) pointed out, it was preceded in the article by a cautionary statement that is usually overlooked: "Uncommon, however, is carefully conducted research which studies the effect of formal grammar on actual composition over an extended period of time." Without taking that statement into consideration, others have claimed that the studies reviewed by Braddock et al. were representative of the best kind of thoroughly designed educational research.

As one of the apparently most dependable propositions about the teaching of English, the Braddock et al. conclusion about the absence of transfer between traditional grammar teaching and composition was extended to the transformational-generative version of grammar. On the basis of findings from a three-year investigation in New Zealand by Elley et al., the conclusion drawn was that the effects of transformational-generative grammar study are negligible (Elley, Barham, Lamb, & Wyllie, 1976). Several researchers judged the validity of this conclusion to be unquestionable, but others disagreed; Newkirk (1986) argued that the authors went beyond their data in claiming that grammar teaching was ineffective. He turned the authors' conclusion around to say, "The grammar groups read and wrote as proficiently as the group which free read and wrote extensively." After considering the diverse judgments, Hartwell (1985, p. 107) concluded that "it may well be that the grammar question is not open to resolution by experimental research." The issue of whether or not grammar should be taught in school may not, therefore, have been resolved as satisfactorily as official policies on English teaching suggest. The empirical foundation of the visible consensus of the English teaching establishment may be more fragile than its rhetoric admits.

That is not to be more critical of that establishment than of others in education, nor to be more skeptical of that consensus than of others. It is no longer fashionable in educational research (itself prone to fragile consensus) to put faith in a positivistic view of social science's ability to reveal stable and enduring laws of human learning. To state that research shows that teaching formal grammar does not transfer to speaking and writing would indicate a wish for an abiding and dependable truth, which an anthropologically-based view of social science would deny. Knowledge is not a mirror of an absolute reality that exists separately from the knower but is culturally and socially formed. Within this science, the nature of a relationship between propositional knowledge about language and language performance would be necessarily local and transient, depending on where you were looking from and what you were looking with. Or, as James put it many years ago, truth is "what it is better for us to believe," not "the accurate representation of reality" (Rorty, 1979). Convictions, according to this view, emerge not from the findings of research but from some other construction of reality by whatever communities we belong to or seek to join.

From this perspective of the cultural relativism of knowledge and hence of professional conviction, grammar, in its exclusion from the modern English curriculum, has been an ideological victim of shifting conceptions of English as a school subject. Its demise is the result of a particular social formation of subject English; its pre-eminence in that loose aggregation of subjects that constituted English studies one hundred years ago was the result of a different social formation. As Morgan (1987) noted, older social formations or paradigms of school subjects are not wiped cleanly off the syllabus by new visions: they deposit residues in the folklore of schooling. According to Kliebard (1986), the curriculum is a site of struggle among different visions, paradigms, or social formations. A better explanation of the current English curriculum is to attribute its form to the temporary ascendancy of one vision over others than to the march of progress within a liberal, celebratory view of curriculum history.

COMPETING VISIONS OF GRAMMAR TEACHING

With regard to the teaching of English grammar, we have a clear recent example of different ascendancies in current practice. On one hand, there is the conservative return to the mandated study of grammar in the late 1990s in the National Curriculum in British schools. On the other hand, in sharp contrast, is the survival of a progressive orientation to grammar's role in the English curriculum that had been established in school programs in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in the 1970s and 1980s (an idea which had actually originated in Britain). Britain had made a 180-degree change. Interestingly, grammar failed to make a comeback in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia when conservative outcome-based models of the English curriculum became the vogue in those countries in the 1990s.

In the early years of the development of colonial education in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, it was natural that officials and teachers should look to the mother country for guidance. Indeed, as far as teaching the mother tongue was concerned, there was a special anxiety about language standards in the face of the natural development of nonstandard dialects to represent new experiences. Immigrants wanted their children to learn only the Queen's English, and they thought that learning English grammar from English textbooks was the only way to safeguard the British language and culture, as well as their children's prosperity and social standing. British theory and practice about language learning continued to be influential through the 1970s-for example, the 1975 report A Language for Life (also referred to as the Bullock Report) was enormously popular in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

Ironically, curriculum ascendancies have now diverged. Progressive ideas about language learning (with emphasis on child-centered personal growth and integration) have continued to guide curriculum policies in these three countries. This survival has occurred despite the outcomes movement of the 1990s, a conservative shift that might have brought grammar back into the mainstream curriculum. Not so in Britain: in the 1980s the Thatcher government began a process of bringing grammar back into the public school curriculum.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Copyright....................vi
Acknowledgments....................vii
Author's Note....................viii
Compiler's note....................ix
Introduction....................xvii
Chapter 1 The School Grammar Debate....................1
Chapter 2 The Rules of Grammar....................15
Chapter 3 Grammar and Good Usage....................25
Chapter 4 State Grammar in Mid-Century....................36
Chapter 5 Parsing versus Sentence Analysis....................43
Chapter 6 The Rationales Supporting State Grammar....................59
Chapter 7 Purity of Language....................68
Chapter 8 The Nature of Formal Grammar Instruction....................75
Chapter 9 The New Education: Functional Grammar....................99
Chapter 10 The "Handmaid of Composition"....................109
Chapter 11 Reform in New Zealand & Australia....................126
Chapter 12 The Revival of Formal Grammar Teaching....................134
Chapter 13 The New Thinking about Grammar....................148
Chapter 14 The Effect of Examinations on Grammar Teaching....................162
Chapter 15 The Tyranny of the Textbook....................185
Chapter 16 Grammar and Progressive Education....................195
Chapter 17 Reform in New Zealand and Australia 1943-1959....................219
Chapter 18 Final Word....................228
Works Cited....................231
Other Sources of Data....................245
Appendix A: A Discussion of H. G. Martyn....................247