Is grammar instruction really important when teaching children to write?

Great Debates
1

Believe it or not, the predominant theory in American education is that that drilling children on grammar not only doesn’t improve their writing skills, in many cases it is detrimental. I discovered this while doing graduate work on grammar instruction. As a former newspaper reporter and editor, I was astounded that this theory even existed, and is even supported by the National Council of Teachers of English (see NCTE position statements here and here.

Whattaya’ think? Is the teaching of grammar essential to teaching kids to read and write, to develop critical thinking and communication skills?

2

It’s as useful as sentence diagramming.
Wish is too say, ergo, not as much as.

3

[QUOTE=jeffrice]
Believe it or not, the predominant theory in American education is that that drilling children on grammar not only doesn’t improve their writing skills, in many cases it is detrimental. I discovered this while doing graduate work on grammar instruction. As a former newspaper reporter and editor, I was astounded that this theory even existed, and is even supported by the National Council of Teachers of English (see NCTE position statements here and here.
[/QUOTE]

Key phrases from those statements:

They’re not saying at all that kids shouldn’t learn grammar. They’re saying that drilling grammar in isolation of real language usage is poor form.

I absolutely agree. I learned most of my grammar from a fantastic sixth-grade teacher. He taught us from a textbook, but the textbook’s exercises were always topically coherent: if you were circling the direct objects in ten sentences, you’d also be reading a paragraph about the Empire State Building, for example. That’s sort of what the NCTE seems to be recommending, if I’m reading their statements correctly. Don’t give random dumb sentences for drills: give students instances of language used to communicate ideas, and have them analyze those instances for grammar.

Daniel

4

I tend to agree with Daniel, and I’d also note that fluency and effectiveness in writing one’s own native tongue have little to do with technical grammatical knowledge. Knowing technical terms like “direct object” or “predicate nominative” doesn’t do much to help you construct a well-written sentence. Composition skills—knowing what you want to say and how to say it well—may be slightly improved by a good grounding in grammar, but they don’t really depend on it.

However, where grammar is tremendously important is when you’re preparing to learn a different language. Unless you’re going to teach a second language strictly “by ear”, that is, by natural linguistic immersion with no formal instruction (which doesn’t really work very efficiently except for young children), a basic understanding of grammar makes a huge difference.

In modern education where we should be preparing more children to learn a second language, even if we don’t always have the resources to actually teach foreign languages in schools, English or language-arts education definitely ought to include a thorough knowledge of basic grammar.

:confused: Unless you’re whooshing us here, I’m afraid that this is not such a great example of successful communication.

5

I agree that grammar drills are useless when it comes to English. Might some basic knowledge of terms like subject and object make it a little easier for students to learn a foreign language, though?

6

There’s also the idea that correct spelling is not as important as kids getting their thoughts down on paper. Once correct grammar and correct spelling become optional, what’s the use of standardized writing at all? Of course that is the bitter end; couldn’t there be a compromise along the way?

As far as diagramming sentences, I may not remember the details anymore, but the concept has proven useful to me in analyzing sentence flow and grammar.

7

[QUOTE=gigi]
There’s also the idea that correct spelling is not as important as kids getting their thoughts down on paper.
[/QUOTE]

Spelling is not the first thing kids need to be taught, but as long as kids do work on computers and computers have spell-check options, I don’t see this going down the path to “no standardized writing.”

8

[QUOTE=Kimstu]
However, where grammar is tremendously important is when you’re preparing to learn a different language. Unless you’re going to teach a second language strictly “by ear”, that is, by natural linguistic immersion with no formal instruction (which doesn’t really work very efficiently except for young children), a basic understanding of grammar makes a huge difference.

In modern education where we should be preparing more children to learn a second language, even if we don’t always have the resources to actually teach foreign languages in schools, English or language-arts education definitely ought to include a thorough knowledge of basic grammar.
[/QUOTE]

By the time people are learning foreign languages, they’ve forgotten the grammer.

And really, people should be leraning foreign languages in childhood, anyway. The basic fact that we teach kids foreign lanuages when they are too old to ever be fully fluent kind of negates any other groundwork we may want to lay.

FWIW, I think a few grammer lessons don’t hurt, but it’s better to teach and correct grammer in the context of writing, not in drills.

9

Learn grammar, they must, or fall will the Jedi.

10

[QUOTE=gigi]
There’s also the idea that correct spelling is not as important as kids getting their thoughts down on paper. Once correct grammar and correct spelling become optional, what’s the use of standardized writing at all? Of course that is the bitter end; couldn’t there be a compromise along the way?
[/QUOTE]

This is a straw man. My wife is a Language Arts teacher (High school), and my kids are in elementary school. I’ve yet to meet a teacher who says spelling, punctuation, and other technical conventions of writing are unimportant. But, especially in the early grades, focusing too much on mechanics tends to stifle the kids’ ability to get anything down at all. With practice, the kids learn that clearly expressing oneself in writing requires standards, and the kids are assessed, as part of the standards-based report cards we use here, on both the content and the mechanics of their writing.

And one other thing: spelling in English is a mess. We have very few rules (and none that I can think of have no exceptions). My kids have plenty of “No Excuses” spelling words at each grade, but other than these, the teachers would rather the kids write something with an invented spelling than write nothing at all (which many kids will do if they think everything has to be right).

Rick

11

I’m really torn on this. I understand where those who warn against rote drills are coming from, but then I think about my students. I work at the college level, and I receive some truly pitiful papers. One of the brightest students I’ve ever worked with–I mean, this kid is whip-smart–writes like he is barely literate. He and I will have very intense conversations about course material, and then I will receive an incoherent paper. While I think I know what he wants to say, I can’t know for sure (because it is truly that bad), so I have to mark him down. My sister, who was taught reading and writing with “whole language” English (which I know is not the same thing as NCTE) is also quite smart. I discussed her first set of college papers with her and offered to proof them. It was unbelieveable. If she was not my sister and I had not had a conversation with her 20 minutes prior to reading the paper, I would have assumed that a)English was not her first language and b)she hadn’t done the reading. (FWIW, my sister received As in advanced English in high school.)

These are not isolated cases. Between my grading and my experience tutoring in my college’s writing center (fn.1), I have seen plenty of horror stories. I freely admit, everyone makes mistakes (I’ll bet I have some in this post). I’m not asking for perfection, and I don’t generally take off points for scattered errors. Indeed, I like to “grade on content.” However, at a very basic level, content and usage are conjoined. If I truly cannot tell what a student is trying to communicate to me, I have no “content” on which to grade. Then, I have to deduct for usage. It is simply unfair for me to read the incoherent paper of a student that I know is smart (becuase she visits me and talks about the material with me) and give it the benefit of the doubt, while fully penalizing another incoherent paper because I do not know the student (perhaps the student has a class or a job that prevents her from coming to see me regularly). This really stinks, because I have given B grades to students that I know can speak about the material at an A-level. My assignments vary (my classes are well over 100 students; oral examinations are simply not an option)–participation and class presentations are a key component of every class I teach, and I am willing to sit down and help students with grammar problems. However, I cannot fix profound problems with grammar and usage in a few sessions, and it, in a junior/senior seminar you need to be able to write!

In conclusion, perhaps we shouldn’t be drilling first graders, but there needs to be a point in the K-12 journey (in the US, anyway) where someone provides structure and discipline to students’ writing. As K-12 curriculum design is not my speciality, I will be watching this thread with interest to see what I can learn (I also know that there is great variation in curricula by nation and state (in a country like the US)). I’m just trying to provide perspective from my frustrated vantage point.
Footnote

The writing center at my University, after years of refusing to teach grammar, finally caved to the demands of the faculty and now offers instruction in grammar.

12

[QUOTE=RickG]
This is a straw man. My wife is a Language Arts teacher (High school), and my kids are in elementary school. I’ve yet to meet a teacher who says spelling, punctuation, and other technical conventions of writing are unimportant. But, especially in the early grades, focusing too much on mechanics tends to stifle the kids’ ability to get anything down at all. With practice, the kids learn that clearly expressing oneself in writing requires standards, and the kids are assessed, as part of the standards-based report cards we use here, on both the content and the mechanics of their writing.

And one other thing: spelling in English is a mess. We have very few rules (and none that I can think of have no exceptions). My kids have plenty of “No Excuses” spelling words at each grade, but other than these, the teachers would rather the kids write something with an invented spelling than write nothing at all (which many kids will do if they think everything has to be right).

Rick
[/QUOTE]

I thought there were many spelling rules in English. They do not seem to be taught very well.
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/pluralsv.htm
http://www.all-about-spelling.com/spelling-rules.html
I was taught with a spelling reader with 1000 words in it. The words seemed to be in random order.
Why are students not taught the spelling rules of English ?

13

[QUOTE=jeffrice]
Believe it or not, the predominant theory in American education is that that drilling children on grammar not only doesn’t improve their writing skills, in many cases it is detrimental. I discovered this while doing graduate work on grammar instruction. As a former newspaper reporter and editor, I was astounded that this theory even existed, and is even supported by the National Council of Teachers of English (see NCTE position statements here and here.

Whattaya’ think? Is the teaching of grammar essential to teaching kids to read and write, to develop critical thinking and communication skills?
[/QUOTE]

I’ll tell you what, something is detrimental to their writing skills. In the early '70s I was a graduate assistant. My first assignment was to mark essays written by freshman composition students. I was supposed to go through them checking for misspellings, improper grammar and punctuation, non sequiturs, non-parallel construction, and bad logic. I was not grading the papers (and I had to do all this in a soft blue pencil, with the sharp red pencil being reserved for someone who actually was grading the papers).

These papers were such a total mess, and displayed such an astounding lack of basic skills, that I assumed they were some kind of test of me. I figured they were the very worst examples of bad writing ever seen in the English department, or at least the worst examples from the current semester, culled from much better examples. I said as much when I returned them. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

These essays were a representative sample of the failure of high schools to teach students how to write; how to arrange their thoughts in a way that made sense; how to construct a metaphor; how to follow a line of reasoning. Every single one had some kind of problem. About half of them had the fatal problem that I couldn’t even guess what they were trying to say.

These were freshman in college! All of them, in order to get into college, had to have semi-decent SAT or ACT scores, fairly good grades, and they had to write an essay. Ah–but the difference was that the essays I marked had been written in class. Apparently a significant difference.

Oddly enough, most of these college freshman were perfectly understandable when they talked.

The other sad thing was that the goal of freshman comp was not to give these students writing skills and access to tools for clear communication. It was to get rid of a certain percentage of the freshman class to make way for serious scholars. Anyway that’s how it was in the early '70s.

14

I have limited credentials to speak to this issue, but a) I have always been a top-notch English and foreign language student with very high verbal standardized test scores and b) I have recently seen several really frightening freshman English papers.

I don’t see a problem with drills, even out of context. To me, context could be distracting from the main point. Let me see a wide variety of direct objects, and forget the Empire State Building theme. I also really benefitted from learning sentence diagramming. Just knowing that ANY valid sentence CAN be diagrammed is significant. True, this is just my experience. But I don’t think the point of grammar is that it can be made interesting. Grammar is what it is. Writing and reading and speaking are interesting.

One thing I would argue is key is that the students do a lot of reading at an appropriately challenging level. This way they model their writing on other writing, not on conversations.

By the time you’re in college, you should be writing to show you understand the material, not to show that you can write. Freshman English is a chance to become familiar with the academic conventions for communicating about the subject matter.

I guess what I’d like to see is for (US) universities to require proficiency in written English to progress. No passing kids from Freshman Comp. based on their ability to have a conversation about literature. Maybe give an entrance proficiency test and and require students who do poorly to co-register for a remedial semester of grammar.

15

[QUOTE=Hilarity N. Suze]

These essays were a representative sample of the failure of high schools to teach students how to write; how to arrange their thoughts in a way that made sense; how to construct a metaphor; how to follow a line of reasoning. Every single one had some kind of problem. About half of them had the fatal problem that I couldn’t even guess what they were trying to say.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, but these arn’t grammer problems. I agree that writing instruction (research, citation, formatting, transition, providing eveidence) needs to be the main focus of high school Enlgish.

I will be forever thankful to my freshman-year high school teacher for making us write twenty essays in ten weeks, each according to an iron formate and each graded mercilessly (one mistake was a zero). It was like boot camp, but after that we never produced rambling, padded, incoherent essays again.

16

[QUOTE=Marley23]
Spelling is not the first thing kids need to be taught, but as long as kids do work on computers and computers have spell-check options, I don’t see this going down the path to “no standardized writing.”
[/QUOTE]

Spell-check?? So how many kids actually register what the correct spelling is? When they choose which of the proposed substitutes to use?

17

[QUOTE=gigi]
Spell-check?? So how many kids actually register what the correct spelling is? When they choose which of the proposed substitutes to use?
[/QUOTE]

Y dew u think Eye kant chews the core-wrecked spelling?

Seriously though, I would have loved it if the teachers had focused more on writing. It seemed to me that every year we started with nouns, then moved to verbs, adjectives, adverbs, maybe prepositions and maybe one year out of the first eight years of my schooling even mentioned things like direct objects. If it weren’t for writers like Richard Lederer and Lynn Truss, I’d have no idea about even the basics of grammar, punctuation, and syntax. I am a junior in high school now, and I truly feel that I was cheated.

And on preview, even that short paragraph is terrible.

18

[QUOTE=gigi]
Spell-check?? So how many kids actually register what the correct spelling is? When they choose which of the proposed substitutes to use?
[/QUOTE]

A surprising number don’t even bother to use Spell-Check. I figure it’s because spelling was never important in the papers they wrote in high school, so they don’t think it will be in college, either. On occasion, I come across a paper in which the student went with the computer’s choices on Spell-Check, and it becomes like reading Mad-Libs. (I assume proof-reading is a practice long since abandoned.)

From my purely non-scientific observations, fully thirty percent of students in my area cannot write a coherent paper. An additional forty percent have serious flaws such as switching tenses in midstream.

It’s not only students who have this problem. My husband also works in a prison, and must read incident reports turned in by the staff after there’s a disturbance. Some of them are completely incomprehensible.

I’m sure everyone can tell by my posts that I’m no stickler for grammar or spelling, as long as the flaws don’t interfere with the reader’s ability to comprehend what is being said. I know some Dopers compose their posts in Word before submitting them so they can run them through Spell-Check, but I don’t see a need for perfection in a non-academic or non-professional setting. However, it seems that a lot of people don’t see the need for higher standards in any setting.

19

Good grammar is essential to meaning. It allows a superior writer to communicate clearly. Does that sound snooty? Try this.

Grammar, like punctuation, is a courtesy a writer pays to the reader. It is a way to be polite.

20

I teach AP Language and Compositon (comperable to a Freshman Comp class) to high school Juniors, and I teach grammar. I do this for three reasons: one, the AP Language exam demands some level of syntactical analysis: how is a piece of writing persuasive on the sentence level? They can’t do that if they have never thought about sentences as having any sort of underlying structural principle, and most of them haven’t. I also do it because I think that understanding the sentences have some sort of pattern–really believing it–helps you break down really long, complex sentences as you read. Lastly, I teach grammar because commenting on their writing is much more efficient if they know some vocabulary: it’s so much more meaningful to be able to say “excellent parallel structure here” or “this verb isn’t transative, reword that” or “this whole paragraph is full of short, choppy sentences. Maybe make some of them into participial phrases?.”; the alternative is just to grunt and point and say “do it again” without being able to explain what is wrong, or getting so bogged down in the explaination that you lose them.

Now, I don’t drill, but there is explicit instruction in grammar: they find grammatical structures in quotes they pick out from anywhere (it’s like a scavenger hunt, they get increasing point values for increasingly complex structures), on weekly vocabulary quizes they have to parse how the vocabulary word is used in the sentence with increasing complexity, we play games where teams construct silly sentences that use specific grammatical structures, and every time we talk about literature, we are talking about grammar.

And again, the fact that the AP exam demands syntactical analysis suggests that the idea of grammar instruction is not dead. Grammar is, of course, only part of syntactical analysis, but you can’t have the latter without some formal understanding of the latter.