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Parents, don’t worry if your child knows more about grammar than you do
Debra Myhill
Good grammar lessons help children become better writers, and you don’t need to know what a fronted adverbial is to help
One unanticipated consequence of school closures and remote learning has been a focus on the teaching of grammar. While supporting their children with home learning, many parents have been confronted with their own lack of knowledge of the basics. What exactly is a fronted adverbial you may ask, or how do you spot a past continuous verb form?
From my point of view, as someone who has been researching the teaching of writing for more than 20 years, this can only be a good thing as it surfaces many misunderstandings and confusions about grammar, which merit discussion. As a nation, we remain both divided and uncertain about what teaching grammar is for.
Much of this stems from the history of grammar in English schools over the past 50 years. In 1966, a major international conference of English educators in Dartmouth, in the US, came to the conclusion that teaching grammar was pointless because there was no evidence that it benefited children’s writing. This was highly influential in forming a strong voice in the UK against the teaching of grammar, and the subject was largely dropped from English lessons throughout the 70s and 80s. But grammar schools and public schools often retained it – I recall, not with great affection, lessons of parsing and six-column analysis at my grammar school in the 1970s
Debra Myhill
Good grammar lessons help children become better writers, and you don’t need to know what a fronted adverbial is to help
One unanticipated consequence of school closures and remote learning has been a focus on the teaching of grammar. While supporting their children with home learning, many parents have been confronted with their own lack of knowledge of the basics. What exactly is a fronted adverbial you may ask, or how do you spot a past continuous verb form?
From my point of view, as someone who has been researching the teaching of writing for more than 20 years, this can only be a good thing as it surfaces many misunderstandings and confusions about grammar, which merit discussion. As a nation, we remain both divided and uncertain about what teaching grammar is for.
Much of this stems from the history of grammar in English schools over the past 50 years. In 1966, a major international conference of English educators in Dartmouth, in the US, came to the conclusion that teaching grammar was pointless because there was no evidence that it benefited children’s writing. This was highly influential in forming a strong voice in the UK against the teaching of grammar, and the subject was largely dropped from English lessons throughout the 70s and 80s. But grammar schools and public schools often retained it – I recall, not with great affection, lessons of parsing and six-column analysis at my grammar school in the 1970s
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