In my last blog I groused that successive governments, while insisting on science being a mandatory part of the schools curriculum, do not apply scientific methods to their consideration of what the language part of the same curriculum should contain.

When we come to the dreaded word “grammar”, policy seems to be derived from old gentlemen in Conservative clubs grumbling about the inadequacies of the younger generation in writing formal styles of English. In some cases they themselves learned to write in the prescribed way and put this down to their being made to learn old-fashioned grammar. Their argument is rather like the one advanced by the people still demanding corporal punishment in schools – “It never did me any harm!”

Scientific studies have shown that direct teaching of “grammar” has no effect on the command of formal written English. Nevertheless, there must (one hopes) be more than dogged conservatism in the hankering after the shibboleths of a bygone age. In this blog I examine what the purely linguistic benefits of the old grammar school teaching were. Continue reading →

One of the most dismaying features of the debate about the English curriculum is that the Government pays no attention to research. It has been clearly established in project after project that teaching grammar has no effect on pupils’ ability to write correct formal English. This does not mean that explicit teaching of the relevant genres of formal written English has no effect. Continue reading →

Last week I received this response to my article for Creative Teaching and Learning from *Professor Michael Bassey

Professor Bassey is Emeritus Professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University. He has been President of the British Educational Research Association, and from 2001 an Academician of the Academy of Social Science. He is the author of many publications on education and the environment. Continue reading →

I’ve had some very exciting responses to my last blog:

(1) From a maths teacher who is thinking of an exhibition on maths as a modern foreign language – spot on! (See reply to Death of a Great Idea.)

(2) The secondary school referred to by Howard is one I worked in twenty years ago preparing what became Breakthrough to Learning! Two of the photoes in Book 1 chapter 3 are of young people in that school (now middle-aged!). When I know more about the project they’re developing I’ll put the details up here. I hope to visit the school in April.

(3) A visit from Urszula Clark at Aston University bringing me up to date on changing attitudes to explicit language teaching. One of the Government-led initiatives is to make a condition of an Outstanding evaluation with Ofsted that the school show how they are meeting the language demands of the subjects.

I hope that some of my work can be used in training teachers in the linguistic knowledge they need to fulfill this criterion, particularly

www.languageofideas.co.uk

and Knowledge About Language (I hope this will be up as part of this website in the near future.)

“The times they are a-changing!”

Last year I wrote an article about the Wigan Language Project for Creative Teaching and Learning, an excellent journal published by Imaginative Minds.

This was a follow-up to a piece I wrote for them ten years ago called Mind Your Language. The Director of the company, Howard Sharron, had  suggested that it was time for a review of why my course Breakthrough to Learning had not been widely adopted (even though the test results showed that it doubled the percentage of pupils in a comprehensive school gaining 5 or more GSCE’s grades A – C in 1991 – from the national average of 30% to 57%). This second article has now appeared under the title Death of a great idea.*

Howard has had one of his good ideas based on conversations with teachers in secondary schools about the problems pupils encounter in mastering the language of particular subjects, especially science and maths. He suggests that I write a series of articles examining the language of specific subjects.

I told him I could only do this if I could work with a teacher in each subject, who would at least give me materials to work on. We are both thinking of people we can contact to initiate such a project.

*www.imaginativeminds.co.uk        www.teachingtimes.com

Tel: 0121 224 7599