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Essential Grammar The Resource Book Every Secondary English Teacher Will Need 34

The document discusses the evolution of grammar teaching in the UK and its influence on writing outcomes, particularly through the work of Debra Myhill and her team at the University of Exeter. Myhill's research emphasizes the importance of explicit, contextualized grammar instruction that focuses on meaning and language awareness. The authors advocate for a similar approach in their book, highlighting the connection between grammar knowledge and effective writing skills.

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61 views1 page

Essential Grammar The Resource Book Every Secondary English Teacher Will Need 34

The document discusses the evolution of grammar teaching in the UK and its influence on writing outcomes, particularly through the work of Debra Myhill and her team at the University of Exeter. Myhill's research emphasizes the importance of explicit, contextualized grammar instruction that focuses on meaning and language awareness. The authors advocate for a similar approach in their book, highlighting the connection between grammar knowledge and effective writing skills.

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von cauilan
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Which grammar?

and the Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) Project run by Ronald
Carter at the University of Nottingham from 1989–1992. It’s probably an
emphasis that is shared by teachers who have worked on A-level English
Language courses over the last 25 or so years, particularly those run by AQA.
And it’s certainly formed the basis of language work in some parts of Australia,
for example in literacy/writing programmes based on genre-based pedagogies
(efectively a teaching strategy that explicitly focuses on the grammar of
particular genres to teach writing) as well as in the United States in the form of
meaning-centred grammar (Hancock 2005) and rhetorical grammar (Kolln and
Gray 2016). In the UK, the most notable infuence, aside from the National
Strategies in the 2000s, which drew on some ideas from genre-based
pedagogies, has been the work of Debra Myhill and her team at the University
of Exeter. Over many years, Myhill has worked with teachers and students
exploring the ways in which grammar can be taught most efectively to improve
students’ writing. Drawing on a broadly functional approach, Myhill’s research
has demonstrated that the explicit teaching of grammar in a contextualised
way (for real pur-poses, using real texts as models and drawing the idea of
grammar as a set of resources) can have positive efects on students’ ability to
craft their own writing and see the connection between grammatical forms and
possible inter-pretative efects. In her most recent work related to the project,
Myhill and her team have developed a Grammar as Choice pedagogy based
around LEAD principles.
Myhill’s work provides a clear and enabling model that highlights the con-
nection between language awareness broadly and writing outcomes. In par-
ticular she is keen to emphasise that good grammar teaching should allow
students to be attentive to language in a way that is focused on meaning
rather than memorising lists of defnitions, provides plenty of opportunities for
students to explore language and its possible efects in a variety of texts and in
their own writing, and allows students time to discuss language choices
explicitly and view them as a resource which writers draw on to position read-
ers in particular ways.
We share this sentiment and approach in this book. As we argue in Chap-
ter 1, we believe that grammar teaching should be explicit and that language
awareness is at the heart of good English teaching, whatever the content. But
we also take a meaning-centred approach and believe that as Carter (1990:
120) suggests:

Knowing more about how grammar works is to understand more about how
grammar is used and misused. Knowing more about grammar can impart
better choice and control over grammar, as an expressive and interpretive
medium. Knowing more about grammar, as part of KAL [Knowledge About
Language], is to be empowered to respond to and to use grammar as central
to the creation of textual meanings.

17

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