If you were asked to come up with a controversial topic, it is unlikely that grammar would be amongst the first to come to mind. However, in a room full of English teachers, the word grammar would be the only thing necessary to dissolve the room into sheer chaos. The teachers wouldn’t be arguing about the merits of the oxford comma, but rather the idea of teaching grammar.
Until the late 1960’s, not having any kind of formal grammar training was unthinkable. Teachers would assign hours upon hours of gruelling exercises, designed to drill grammatical rules into their students’ brains. At the same time, dozens of studies were being conducted by linguists to find newer, more efficient methods to teach language. These studies all led to a startling conclusion. Teaching formal grammar provided a negligible benefit to students. Thus, in the years that followed, the grammar curriculum was ripped apart piece by piece. It was replaced by an ideology that promoted ‘passive’ grammar learning. It was expected that students would naturally pick up on grammar and apply it without ever being formally taught.
Up until recently, this all seemed reasonable to me. We spend our whole lives being surrounded by natural language, it seemed impossible not to pick up grammar along the way. I was under this illusion until I started working as a private English teacher. One day, several months after I initially started working, my co-worker came back from a private lesson with a gr. 12 student looking incredulous. She had just had a lesson with a university-bound gr. 12 student who didn’t know what quotation marks were, much less how to use them. In that moment, I felt my rose-coloured glasses being ripped off my face, shattered, and trampled.
First came shock, then horror. Suddenly, seemingly innocent mistakes made by my own students that I had previously written off as carelessness, appeared to be by-products of a genuine lack of knowledge or misunderstanding. The deeper I dug, the more glaring the problem became. Our students no longer know grammar.
Picking up grammar ‘naturally’ can happen only under certain conditions. Crucially, the student needs to consistently be exposed to the language. This includes oral and written language. To fully understand written language, students would need to be exposed to many different types of texts to pick up the subtle differences between the language used for different types of texts. For example, most English- speakers (and more importantly, writers) would agree that it isn’t appropriate to use the expression “Going back to” in formal writing. However, I have met more than a few gr. 12 academic students who regularly use such expressions in their essays.
This is because often, these conditions aren’t filled the same way we would expect them to be. Many students from immigrant families these days are only exposed to natural English at school. I know more than enough people who grew up speaking Russian at home, with their friends, even in the grocery store (because mama only trusted Russian grocers). These kids would listen to Russian music, play Russian games, and watch Russian tv. They barely had enough exposure to English to speak coherently, let alone absorb any grammar!
Even native English speakers may have problems absorbing grammar naturally due to a lack of exposure to written language. Through my work, I have met more than a few high school students who readily admit to me that they have never read a single book in their lives. When would they have absorbed any grammar?
The result of this is a whole generation of students that struggle to coherently express themselves. Not only do some struggle to build sentences using more complex grammatical structures, they frequently make errors both in spoken language and in writing. While this may seem irrelevant, given that one does not necessarily have to know what quotation marks are to speak or even to understand a text, however it is indispensable for writing.
This does not bode well for their futures. It seems unlikely to me that any potential employers would hire a candidate who made grammatical errors on their resume or during their interview, as most employers still belong to the generation that did have the opportunity to learn grammar, and find the kind of mistakes that today’s students make ridiculous.
Even if deemed necessary, it would be near-impossible to return even bits of grammar into today’s curriculum. Decades of disregard have left the majority of our teachers completely unqualified to teach even the most basic grammar. Most teachers today scarcely know where to put a semicolon, let alone what a clause is.
So why was teaching grammar found to be redundant in the first place then? The answer may lie in the way it was taught as opposed to the redundancy of the subject itself. Back in the 60’s grammar was taught as an isolated entity. It was used purely for mechanical exercises and students were rarely given the opportunity to practice using the rules being taught in the context of writing or speaking. The idea was that if students were given the tools and rules, they would be able to apply it to their writing independently.
While today’s approach might seem like the polar opposite of this, the foundations are much the same. In neither approach is grammar presented as what it truly is, a means to an end- a useful tool that can enrich writing and help present ideas coherently. The answer to our current predicament seems to lie in the middle-ground between the two approaches. In addition to being exposed to grammar, students also need to be taught the rules, but they also need to be taught how to apply these grammatical concepts to their own writing.
We can, of course, continue to close our eyes to the problems staring us right in the face. Saving the freedom of expression for only select intuitive students who do enough reading to pick up on grammar and writing basics themselves. Or, we can close the gap between our students, and bring grammar back into the curriculum.
Concerned about your child’s grammar? Check out our writing classes, and one day your child may be one of our contributors.
Sonia Patrik