The place of grammar in the L1 curriculum in the Netherlands
Position paper
Gert Rijlaarsdam
University of Amsterdam
November 30th 2011
G.C.W.Rijlaarsdam@uva.nl
Issues: how, if at all, is it linked with the teaching of writing, and professional or political
attitudes to the teaching of grammar.
The teaching of grammar is compulsory in The Netherlands in primary and lower
secondary education. Of the twelve key aims for the end of primary education, three are
on oral communication, six on written communication and three are labelled under the
heading of Linguistics. These key aims define what schools should teach, and the
Inspection of Education monitors whether school do meet these requirements:
Linguistics, including strategies
10 The pupils learn to recognise, express, use, and assess strategies in the objectives for ‘oral language
education’ and ‘written language education’.
11 The pupils learn a number of linguistic principles and rules. Within a sentence, they are able to
distinguish between subject, verbal predicate, and parts of a predicate. The pupils know the rules for
spelling of verbs, the rules for spelling of other words besides verbs, and the rules for the use of
punctuation marks.
12 The pupils acquire an adequate vocabulary and strategies for the understanding of words as yet
unknown to them. ‘Vocabulary’ includes terms that allow pupils to think and talk about language.
For lower and upper secondary, no explicit key aims are formulated about grammar. Of
the ten key aims for Dutch Language, key aim 2 concerns correct language use:
02 The student learns to meet conventions (spelling, grammatical correct sentences, vocabulary)
and learns why conventions are important.
In the sub goals that accompany this aim grammar is seen as subsidiary for spelling,
punctuation, the learning of foreign languages, formation of correct sentences and
socio-cultural awareness: when is it that correct language use is important, and why.
What these educational policy documents show, is very little attention to grammar or
language structure and system as such, and if grammar is taught, it is because of spelling
and correct sentences, knowledge to be applied in written language production. What
students must know for correct spelling is very little, so officially little attention to
grammar would be sufficient, as long as students show correct spelling and write correct
sentences, which is not the case. Legitimating of grammar teaching as subsidiary for
foreign language teaching has lost its ground, as modern foreign language instruction is
semantically-communicative oriented, stimulating language use in communicative
situations while using chunks and formulaic speech.
In the 1970’s the debate about grammar teaching was quite strong in the Netherlands.
Coming from a grammar-literature curriculum tradition, a more pragmalinguistic
curriculum orientation came to the foreground, with a focus on language use instead of
language structure. Analyzing and producing sentences was replaced by analyzing and
producing texts. Ultimate goal of writing was to produce texts that affected readers,
instead of writing texts that show a command of linguistic competence.
One of the consequences was a stronger focus on text structures and argumentation
structures then on sentence structures. Instruction in writing was sometimes related to
reading instruction (analyzing and producing ‘effective’ texts an argumentation), but in
most textbooks the curriculum Dutch is divided in many sub curricula, mostly weakly of
not interrelated. A textbook unit consists of reading, writing, listening, speaking, fiction,
spelling, grammar. Optionally there is subunit on information about language
phenomena (something like ‘language awareness’).
Interestingly, most textbooks in upper primary and lower secondary offer more
grammar items than necessary if we relate these items to the key aims stated in the
beginning of this paper. Teachers seem to like to teach grammar, although they know
that it is not related to the quality of written production. Even in lower secondary,
vocational tracks, which cater for the less cognitive advanced students, the amount of
time spent on grammar is relatively large. One of the reasons might be that only in
grammar teaching the teacher can show her disciplinary competency, being educated as
a teacher of Dutch -- teachers in secondary education are trained in one school subject.
The curricular development from grammar-literature to communication has caused that
the definition of the school subject Dutch and therefore the professional identity of the
teacher of Dutch became vague, not longer related to a certain academic discipline.
Nowadays, a big debate in society on the quality of language use of teachers and
teacher trainees – especially at primary level – has caused that the Ministry of Education
set up a frame of reference, something similar as the European Common Framework for
Foreign Languages, and implemented is by law. It means that schools will pay more
attention and time to correct use of language, in all school subjects. I will no imply that
grammar will be back in the curriculum as backbone knowledge for all kind of written
production exercises. The role of grammar teaching will be that of something almost
completely unrelated to written production, while we will see more exercises on the
sentence, between sentence and paragraph level in written production to create a
closer connection between knowledge and production then was realized between
grammar and production.