Typical Response from the Reactionary Forces

[andrewducker]

A massive survey has just discovered that the traditional method of teaching children how to write (nouns, verbs, etc) doesn't work very well:

The university says this review "discovered no evidence that the teaching of traditional grammar, specifically word order or syntax, was effective in assisting writing quality or accuracy among five to 16 year olds".
"This does not mean to say that the teaching of formal aspects of grammar is not interesting or useful in its own right," says Professor Andrews.
"However, in a pressured curriculum, where the development of literacy is a high priority, there will be better ways of teaching writing and our findings suggest that the teaching of 'sentence combining' may be one of the more effective approaches."
The teaching technique of "sentence combining" is defined as "combining short sentences into longer ones, and embedding elements into simple sentences to make them more complex".

Which is exactly the kind of research that needs to be done into education - find out what works and what doesn't. Of course, it doesn't help to do these studies if people are going to ignore it. For instance the response from the Conversative Party:

The Shadow Education Secretary Tim Collins said it was surprising that this report should come to a different conclusion to the "tried-and-trusted methods" of helping children to improve their writing skills.

"At the very least parents should have the choice of sending their children to schools where traditional approaches to literacy have been adopted," he said.

i.e. "I don't care if it's proved to be crap, that's how it's always been done, so that's what I'm in favour of."

Whole article here.

Comments

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

I suppose the same people would have favored people having the choice to go to hospitals where doctors don't wash their hands before performing surgery, in the late 19th century, since that was "tradition"...

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Two comments, one silly and one serious:

Silly: judging by their conclusion, "the teaching of formal grammar (and its derivatives) are ineffective", perhaps some formal grammar teaching would have done the authors some good.

Serious: It's all very well to see this in isolation, and say that other methods of teaching literacy are better. But the lack of formal grammar teaching in English is one of the reasons why the British are so bad at learning other languages - students find it hard to get to grips with how to build another language without understanding the basic components.

But then I'm a product of the 70s education, when such ideas weren't emphasized.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I agree (and so does the professor in the article) that grammar is important.

But I think that it's important _afterwards_.

Teach them to speak, then teach them how it works once they have the basics. That way they have something to work with, which they should have an intuitive grasp of.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

"Formal grammar" is an after-the-fact invention -- you work out what grammar is by watching how people speak and write. So the best way to learn to write effective prose is to read tons of it.

Me, I just make do with LJ, Slashdot, Macsurfer...

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

My understanding that the best way to teach kids other languages is through immersion at as young an age as possible. This is when the capacity for learning language is at its greatest, and when the components of a language (grammar, phonetics, vocabulary) will be processed mostly unconsciously.
Trying to teach 14-year-olds with two or three 1 hour lessons per week is not going to get them very far (at least, I remember no more than a handful of phrases of the German I was taught around that age).

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I'm also a product of 70's education :-)

My grammar is generally pretty good (when I exert the effort - which is not all the time!), and I have a large vocabulary. I can tell you with a fair probability which bits of which English words derive from Latin or Greek despite never having studied either. Certain words or word parts just seem to belong to a particular group. I was/am pretty good at picking up foreign languages, aided (with European languages at least) by guesses based on the common roots, I guess.

Bear with me, there is more to this than blowing my own trumpet!

I attribute all this to being a compulsive reader, and having been so since I was about 2 or 2.5 (I started reading shop signs, apparently, obviously connecting what my mum was saying with the strange symbols). I read adult books including a LOT of factual books all the time (still do). I also started programming at 9, which entails learning many different computer languages with widely varying syntax (and to learing and paying attention to their syntactical rules). Of course, computer languages are not like natural languages, but I'd say that it's the same analytical skillset that you bring to bear in learning them.

However, although I can use a lot of words perfectly in the correct context, so that the sentence/paragraph means what I intend, I often cannot give a precise definition of many of them. (Partly that's because the word is exactly what I mean and any definition will be less accurate).

Also, although I can construct grammatically sound sentences (in various languages - though I couldn't do it now in anything but English from lack of practice), I would have trouble telling you the parts of speech I'm using beyond 'noun', 'verb', 'adjective'.

I recall being annoyed when I was learning Japanese (and eventually giving it up) that we were tested on naming the parts of speech - I thought it was totally pointless when I could consistently say/write what I meant and be grammatically correct in so doing.

I suppose that I'm saying that it is perfectly possible to get to grips with the basic components and patterns of foreign languages without needing formal terminology at all. If using the formal terminology isn't the best way of teaching English (as the article indicates that research says), then it's not going to be the best way to teach other languages either! (I may have misunderstood you on this point).

I think that the British are bad at learning foreign languages for one basic reason - English is the default 2nd language for most of the world. Why learn other languages when everybody wants to learn yours? Not teaching languages early enough, for long enough is just the consequence of this situation.

[neriedes.livejournal.com]

I learned more about the structure of a language in my French class than I did in my English class. And in my experience people that I have met who don't speak English as their first language tend to have a more technical grasp of the language because they were taught it as a second language.

It annoys me how people see something doesn't work and want to dismiss it entirely and replace it with something else completely. When parts of it or all of it does work if combined with something else to compliment it.

So I think both come hand in hand, the technical and grammatical side is vitally important to write effectively as well as other techniques like 'sentence combining'.