I have found reports of two research reviews about grammar teaching. The two reviews had some rather controversial findings and want ministers to review National Curriculum guidelines about the teaching of formal grammar teaching. At the moment, younger primary children are required to learn about nouns, verbs and pronouns, and older primary school pupils learn all major parts of speech as well as the grammar of complex sentences.
I have found reports of two research reviews about grammar teaching. The two reviews had some rather controversial findings and want ministers to review National Curriculum guidelines about the teaching of formal grammar teaching. At the moment, younger primary children are required to learn about nouns, verbs and pronouns, and older primary school pupils learn all major parts of speech as well as the grammar of complex sentences. The first research reports comments on this practice whilst the second comments on a process the authors call “sentence combining”.
The research was not new research: these were systematic reviews by the London EPPI-Centre, and involved a systematic research of electronic databases and reference lists for research published between 1900 and 2004 on the subject of grammar teaching. 58 (25 literature reviews and 33 primary studies – so only 33 “real” research) were found for the 1st review and 68 (26 literature reviews and 38 primary studies) were found for the 2nd review on sentence combining.
The first of the two reviews found “there is NO high quality evidence that the teaching of formal grammar is effective at improving the accuracy and quality of young people’s writing”. But, wait – the researchers DID NOT conclude that traditional grammar teaching is “a waste of time” as some reports in the press suggested – just that it didn’t help young people to write well. They DID acknowledge that grammar teaching was likely to give other benefits such as the ability to read with understanding, how to use a dictionary, the learning of other languages or to edit or proof read their writing or others’ texts. I thin that’s a good enough reason anyway ! 2nd research in tomorrow’s blog.
Look for research on http:/eppi.ioe.ac.uk
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