My sons now talk to me about grammar in the same way I talk to them about money: in the slightly patronising tone of someone schooling the uninitiated.
“No, you can’t buy a house for £5,” I tell them, chuckling at their innocence. “No, it’s a relative clause, Daddy,” they say, amused by my clueless attempts at helping them with their homework.
They pity me. And it would be easy to believe their pity is justified. Without the knowledge of the fundamental structure of communication, how can I ever make myself understood?
I’m part of a generation that moved through primary education without even a whispered mention of a fronted adverbial. We had a surface understanding of nouns, adjectives and verbs, but that was about all that was covered when it came to grammar.
Now, the Department for Education seems to think that an intensive, deep submergence into technical grammar is a prerequisite for being literate and writing well.
Are we getting grammar right in primary schools?
You might expect anyone of my age, then, to be completely incapable of forming even the most basic sentence. And yet, that’s clearly not the case.
So what part does a knowledge of grammar play in the construction of meaningful and coherent communication?
It’s a question that a study published this week sought to answer. Joint research from UCL IoE and the University of York argued that there was little evidence that grammar teaching produced better writers, and concluded that the curriculum “should focus more on what helps children to develop their writing skills at different points in development, using teaching approaches such as sentence combining, strategy instruction and emphasising the processes of writing”.
Grammar and writing
It’s a continuation of an oft repeated assertion that a focus on the technicality of language stifles the ability to put those techniques into practice. And as a person who makes their living out of writing but had no education in grammar, you might expect me to be fully on board with the argument.
But it’s complicated. Despite not being taught grammar, I am confident that my understanding of it is actually very secure. It’s just that rather than being able to label a well-constructed sentence and thus know where different elements should go, I instead have developed an intuitive feel for what “sounds” right.
Indeed, as an editor I am frequently moving around parts of a sentence to make things clearer, more elegant - you might say more grammatical - purely by rolling that sentence around my brain and repeating different versions of it until the parts click into place.
That intuitive sense stems from the fact that while my education may have lacked in technical grammar lessons, it was full of reading and oracy tasks. I had a huge amount of exposure to models of good writing.
If I had received extensive grammar teaching, would it have meant that, as an adult, this trial and error approach to writing would have been streamlined, that I could get to the “right” sentence quicker as I could better diagnose the problem? In some cases, maybe. In others, that knowledge may have made things even more complicated because, sometimes, the technical answer is not the right one.
Would every child in my class have developed the same “grammar by osmosis” intuitive sense that I was fortunate to experience? Certainly not.
A balanced literacy approach
In short, I don’t think the answer is not teaching grammar, but I do think we need to be wary about how far the curriculum focuses on the “what” of grammar and leaves out the “why” and “how”. And we also need to think about how far those models of good writing, and opportunities for oracy, are built into the school day.
As primary headteacher and Tes columnist Michael Tidd said on Twitter, we need to have a serious conversation about the level of grammatical knowledge that is age-appropriate. “I think some of it is just pointless at primary level (I’m looking at you, subjunctive form!) and ends up being overly simplistic because of that,” he wrote. “I think much of it is too soon: expanding on nouns is useful, but teaching ‘expanded noun phrase’ as required terminology to six-year-olds in the same year as the criterion to ‘write capital letters of the right size’ is clearly absurd.”
What we desperately need, as ever, is balance and a bit of common sense. Most teachers strive for this, despite the ideology and curriculum constraints coming from above (and from some quarters of social media). But we should be making it a hell of a lot easier for them.
Jon Severs is editor at Tes. He tweets @jon_severs