Is grammar teachable?
Richard Hudson
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL
(for English 4-11, Spring 1998)
The National Curriculum sets various targets for grammar teaching in primary schools, but are these targets achievable?
What does the National Curriculum ask for?
First, let's see exactly what is required:
 KS1 Speaking and Listening
`some of the features that distinguish standard English, including subject-verb agreement and the use of the verb "to be" in past and present tense.' (This is repeated under KS1 Writing.)
 KS1 Reading
`learn to use their understanding of grammatical structure ... to make sense of print'
`consistent letter patterns including: plurals, spelling patterns in verb endings, relationships between root words and derivatives
(e.g. help, helpful), prefixes and suffixes'
`grammatical knowledge, focusing on the way language is ordered and organised into sentences (syntax). Pupils should be shown how to use their knowledge of word order and the structure of written language to confirm or check meaning. ... They should be taught to check the accuracy of their reading, attending to whether it sounds right and/or makes sense grammatically ...'
 KS1 Writing
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`words with common prefixes and suffixes' should be considered, and `close attention should be paid to word families.'
`how word choice and order are crucial to clarity of meaning ... the organization of more complex texts, and the way sentences link together.'
 KS2 Speaking and Listening
`vocabulary and syntax that enables the communication of more complex meanings.'
`consideration of groups of words, e.g. word families, ..'
 KS2 Reading
`the ... vocabulary and organisation of language in literature'
`dictionaries, glossaries and thesauruses' should be used.
`organisational, structural and presentational features of different types of text'
`understanding of the structure, vocabulary and grammar of standard English'
 KS2 Writing
`In punctuation, .... inverted commas, and apostrophes to mark possession.'
`In spelling, ... the organisation of dictionaries, including headings, abbreviations and other conventions. .... the meaning, use and spelling of common prefixes and suffixes; the relevance of word families, roots and origins of words; .. the spelling of words with inflectional endings.'
`Pupils should be given opportunities to develop their understanding of the grammar of complex sentences, including clauses and phrases. They should be taught how to use paragraphs, linking sentences together coherently. They should be taught to use the standard written forms of nouns, pronouns, verbs,
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adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and verb tenses.'
The grammatical points mentioned here fall into four broad areas; the order in which I present them here is deliberate, as I shall explain below:
1. word structure, described in terms of prefixes, roots and suffixes;
2. word classes, such as `noun' and `verb';
3. word families, i.e. groups of words which are related in both form and meaning, e.g. help (verb), help (noun), helpful, helpless, helpfulness, ...;
4. syntax, including word order, subject-verb agreement and complex sentences.
The curriculum also mentions other topics that we might classify as
`grammar'. For instance, the meanings of words are certainly among the things that any grammarian has to consider; but we already have quite enough in our list, so let's consider it closed.
Can it be done?
How realistic is this wish-list? Well, it all depends ... First, it depends on the teacher's own knowledge. A teacher who knows very little about grammar can (obviously) teach very little compared with one who knows a lot. Second, it depends on which bits of the list you mean. The teachability of word structure is very different from the teachability of syntax. Third, of course, it depends on the pupils; some will take to grammar much more easily than others. And last, it depends on how you measure success - in terms of what the teacher puts into a lesson or in terms of what the pupils get out of it.
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What do UK teachers know about grammar?
I start with the teachers' own knowledge because this is the most obvious constraint. The fact is that the emphasis on grammar in the
National Curriculum is a major innovation in our education system, and the schools that most serving teachers attended were virtually grammar-free zones. Universities generally don't teach grammar either
(not even in an English BA), and there is too little time on a PGCE course to do much, so most teachers know very little about grammar simply because they have never been taught about it.
The historical background is worth a quick glance. Until the 1960's most schools taught some grammar in English, and if they offered foreign or classical languages, grammar would be taught there too. The grammar taught in English was often very watered-down and pointless, and was a prime target for the revolutionary years of traditionquestioning. So grammar was removed from the English syllabus in most schools (though it continued in some private schools), and it disappeared from foreign languages a decade or so later, though for somewhat different reasons. In 1973 two experts on English teaching,
Connie and Harold Rosen, could write:
We have assumed that the teaching of grammar in the primary school is as discredited as teaching capes and bays and copperplate. .... What teachers have discovered for themselves is that teaching about the workings of language is not the simple business it was once thought to be (the main `parts of speech') and that the return for trying to teach children about language was very low in terms of its effect on how they used language. It all seems very obvious. Clearly `the more you know about language the better you use it' does not stand up to examination. (Rosen and
Rosen 1973, p. 253).
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How different from the late 1990's!
But whatever the merits of this change, there is no doubt about its effects. Most trainee teachers know hardly anything about grammar.
When John Williamson and Frank Hardman, of the University of
Newcastle Department of Education, tested the grammatical knowledge of a hundred new students on their primary PGCE course, they found that half of them had no idea of what a preposition or conjunction was, only one in five could explain what a subordinate clause was and only one in ten the difference between a clause and a phrase. The good news is that all but ten could recognise a verb, an adjective and a subject - but rejoicing at this would be like celebrating the discovery that most trainee teachers could multiply 3 x 4!
In this situation, is the National Curriculum realistic? The answer is obvious. How can a teacher who herself struggles with the ideas
`clause' and `phrase' teach children `to develop their understanding of the grammar of complex sentences, including clauses and phrases'?
But why should we assume that this situation is permanent? Teachers are just as capable of learning as children are, and can certainly grasp some of the more abstract ideas of grammar much more easily because of their intellectual maturity. This raises two questions.
 Would the National Curriculum be realistic if teachers did know a lot more grammar?
 What should teachers concentrate on while they are learning?
What happens in other countries?
In thinking about these questions it occurred to me that I was short of any kind of international dimension - are there any countries where grammar is regularly taught to all primary children? If there are, I thought, then we can be sure that primary grammar-teaching is
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possible; and we might be able to learn from the achievements and failures of other countries.
This kind of information did not seem to be easily available in publications so I decided to find out for myself, using the wonderful email list called Linguist which unites about 8,000 linguists world-wide.
I broadcast a query asking if anyone knew of a national (or state) educational system in which grammar teaching was a normal part of the national curriculum, and if so, at what age it started. I defined
`grammar' as at least involving the basic word classes (noun, verb, etc) and grammatical functions such as `subject' and `object'.
The outcome of this little research project was a list of countries in which grammar-teaching is part of the national curriculum at secondary level, and a shorter one for primary level (using this term in the English sense of ages 4-11). Here is the shorter list in alphabetical order 1 :
France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Russia and several states of
Germany.
In all these places every primary child learns to classify words both in terms of word classes and in terms of an elementary list of functions; so for example a child could (presumably) take the first clause of the present sentence and tell you that child was a noun and that it was subject of learns, with the noun words as object of classify.
To make the claim more concrete, here are some extracts from the messages I received:
In France, there is a lot of emphasis on grammar in the curriculum
(at least one hour a day in primary school). The grammatical
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My thanks to the following for their contributions: Isabelle Barrière,
Maria Filomena Capucho, Kristine Jensen de Lopez, Natalia
Kondrashova, JoAnn Miller, Ingrid Piller, Fabio Rinaldi, Marina
Yaguello.
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analysis of sentences ... begins at the age of six ... and goes on until age 15.
[In Italy,] you start by doing a little introduction (basically just the classification of words) at the elementary school (5-10), then you do a bit more (including some study of grammatical functions) at the intermediate school (10-13), and much more is normally done at the high school (13-18) ... elementary and intermediate school have a common nationwide curriculum, ...
"formal learning" of Portuguese grammar starts at primary school
(by the second year - average age 8) and goes on until the 9th year of scholarity (average age 14-15). in Russia (and in former USSR) such classes were part of obligatory program. .. Word categories are introduced very early, in first or second grade. Later on, in 6-7th grade and later, the program deals with morphological structure of these categories in greatest detail. Declensional and conjugational morphology is studied even earlier. .. Basic grammatical functions (subject, object, predicate) used to be introduced in grade 3, it may be done earlier now. They gradually introduce all sort of modifiers, attributes, etc. so that by the time students reach 8th grade they get an enormous amount of information about all sorts of structures, describing relations between words and between clauses as well. ... These programs were in force since when the USSR was established and were obligatory for everyone. Recently there has been more flexibility in curricula across schools, so in some schools they might be starting this instruction even earlier (with 5 year olds) but in
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others it may have remained as it used to be. ... But this is a deeprooted tradition and I expect it to last for some time at least.
The crucial difference between these countries and present-day
Britain is that a trainee teacher has already had a thorough grounding in grammar, which they can use and pass on to the next generation.
Teachers may also have some kind of course in grammar at university level (I didn't ask about that), but even without it they must know enough to cope with the demands of teaching at least primary children.
Our National Curriculum would be (perhaps literally) child's play. This is the answer to our first question: if teachers had the know-how, the grammar requirements of the National Curriculum would be perfectly feasible.
Where should teachers start?
I said earlier that some parts of the grammar curriculum are much easier than others, so it makes sense for teachers to concentrate first on the easy bits while they are getting up to speed on the harder parts.
It is surely unnecessary to add that teachers shouldn't just teach what they know, but will pick the bits that are worth teaching. Nobody these days argues that grammatical analysis should be taught just for its own sake, and I am certainly no exception. I believe there are many good reasons for teaching grammar ranging from practical help with the spelling and punctuation system to high-level `mind-training', as I explain in my book `Teaching Grammar'. However I am skirting round all these questions about why grammar should be taught in order to focus on what can be taught. If I were advising a primary teacher who didn't herself know very much about grammar, what would I recommend as a strategy for coping with the demands of the National
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Curriculum? Where should she start?
You will recall that I summarised the curriculum under four headings: word structure, word classes, word families and syntax.
Should teachers attack them all simultaneously, or in order; and if in order, which order? If asked to arrange these four areas in order of difficulty, starting with the easiest, I think any grammarian would give the same answer:
1. word structure - e.g. cats = cat + s, untidy = un + tidy;
2. word classes - e.g. cats is a noun, hates is a verb;
3. word families - e.g. cat is related to kitten, catty and catlike;
4. syntax - e.g. (our) cat is the subject in Our cat hates dogs, and dogs is the object.
Why this order?
Word structures are easy for any adult to spot on the run, and, thanks to their experience in teaching of literacy, primary teachers are probably experts. There are tricky cases (e.g. female = fe + male? kept
= kep + t? salvation = salv + ation?) but plenty of straightforward ones which are easy to explain to children, and helpful in using dictionaries and understanding spelling.
Word classes are slightly harder because they bring together a host of different characteristics to do with meaning, word structure, word families and syntax; but this means that any of these characteristics provides a way into word classes. (For example, any word that contains the ending s must be either a noun or a verb; and if s could be replaced by ed it must be a verb: hates - hated but not cats - catted.)
Teachers should have no difficulty in learning to recognise the main word classes, `noun', `verb', `adjective' and `adverb' through work on word structure and word families. The effort will be well rewarded later, because these classes are the skeleton that supports most of
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grammar, including syntax.
Word families are harder again because cat is related to cats and to catty in fundamentally different ways. On the one hand, cat and cats are different forms (`inflections') of the same `dictionary word', so they are both covered by the same dictionary entry; technically, they are different inflections of the same lexeme. On the other hand, cat and catty are different lexemes. This distinction is one that primary children have to learn in order to be able to use a dictionary.
The study of word families, then, is the study of collections of lexemes which are related in meaning, but which may belong to different word classes (e.g. cat - catty). Related lexemes may also be related in form, but they need not be; for example, consider the series cat: kitten; dog: puppy, and so on through all the animals.
Syntax is the study of how words fit together in sentences, and is the area of grammar which has the most frightening parts (especially for those who know about modern linguistics). The most ambitious part of the National Curriculum is the reference to `the grammar of complex sentences, including clauses and phrases' under KS2 Writing, but there are plenty of parts of syntax that are quite accessible. The notions
`subject' and `object' are very straightforward in simple examples (and according to my survey they are taught routinely to 9-year olds in
Russia), and it is very easy to show how the distinction affects word order, verb inflection and pronoun forms.
Take the example that I quoted earlier:
Our cat hates dogs.
The subject and object are both nouns (or noun-like words such as pronouns), but they are clearly marked as subject and object:
 The most obvious difference is that the subject stands before the verb and the object stands after it, so (ignoring our) cat is subject and
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dogs is object.
 If we add s to cat (giving cats), we have to remove the s on hates:
Our cats hate dogs.
But if we change dogs to a dog, the verb stays the same. This is the
National Curriculum's favourite grammar rule, subject-verb agreement.
 If you replace both the nouns by a pronoun, the pronoun has different forms according to whether it is the subject or object - e.g. she and they versus her and them.
She hates them.
They hate her.
Nothing very demanding there, I hope, though simple grammar can lead gradually to more complicated patterns, as I explain in my introduction to syntactic analysis `English Grammar'.
To summarise, I recommend a gradual progression from the easiest parts of word structure, through the main word classes and some word families, to easy syntax. Don't be afraid to move back and forward between the areas - let word families take you back into word structure and word classes, and let syntax take you back into all the other areas. Let one thing lead naturally to another, and you will see your picture of grammar growing not only in your pupils, but also in yourself. One of the most striking characteristics of grammar is the way that everything is linked to (and defined by) everything else. It is less like a very long, straight, road than a very complicated network, so the secret of success lies in finding the links among existing ideas, not in opening up new ones.
The benefits of a new beginning?
In this paper I have painted a gloomy picture of the legacy of the 1960's
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in our grammar-free schools and almost grammar-free teachers, which contrasts both with the situation in many other countries and with what the National Curriculum requires. However I have tried to be cheerful about the prospects for the future. By and large I think the National
Curriculum for grammar is reasonable, and I think primary school teachers should be able to cope with grammar quite easily provided they follow a sensible route through its different strands. Meanwhile the
Teacher-Training Agency's new national curriculum for primary teachers (TTA 1997) is a step in the right direction.
I should like to finish on an even more up-beat note by returning to my international survey. What I have not yet reported is that several of my correspondents were quite gloomy about the intellectual framework within which grammar was taught in their country.
Grammar-teaching can be unpleasantly prescriptive, by which I mean that it is built around various patterns that pupils must learn to avoid under all circumstances. These are generally selected precisely because they are the non-standard forms that pupils normally do use
(like our I ain't doing nothing). This is very different from the approach to teaching standard English defined in the National Curriculum, which recognises standard and non-standard forms as complementary rather than conflicting. Equally depressingly, grammar-teaching can be just as boring as any other subject when it loses sight of its purposes - exercises are useful, but they should not go on for ever.
The current scene in the UK includes great uncertainty and diversity of views in the public at large, but also an intense debate among teachers and educational planners which seems to be moving towards some kind of general consensus on matters such as the importance of knowledge about language and of respecting children's home language, the importance of integrating different strands of
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study, and the importance of advanced literacy and oracy skills. The dust hasn't settled yet, and it may never do so completely, but if it does
I am convinced that the outcome will not be a simple return to `basics', with grammar reinstated in the position it held until it died out, but a much more healthy framework of ideas in which grammar is seen as essential for the achievement of a range of worthwhile goals which were much less clear before the revolution.
References
Hudson, Richard. (1992) Teaching Grammar: A Guide for the National
Curriculum. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hudson, Richard. (1998) English Grammar. London: Routledge.
Rosen, Connie and Rosen, Harold. (1973) The Language of Primary
School Children. Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin.
TTA. (1997) Initial Teacher Training National Curriculum for Primary
English. http://www.teach-tta.gov.uk/docs/eng.doc.
Williamson, John and Hardman, Frank. (1995) Time for refilling the bath? A study of primary student-teachers' grammatical knowledge.
Language and Education Vol 9. 117-34.
Professor Richard Hudson,
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
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Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
0171 419 3152 (work); 0181 340 1253 (home) dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk
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