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.
I am old enough to have learned (and enjoyed) old-fashioned grammar in my Grammar School. I also attempted to teach it as a young teacher of English in grammar schools in the fifties. I am therefore in a position to examine how I and others of my generation benefited from it.
(1) It made us stand back from language and recognise that it had rules. Since we also studied at least one modern foreign language and possibly Latin as well, we could see that other languages also were similarly rule-governed.
(2) The analysis of the structure of the clause (subject – verb – object – adverb) was the basis for analysing the structure of complex sentences with multiple subordinate clauses, a characteristic of formal English at a high level – academic, legal, political.
(3) I would add that making little boys in preparatory schools learn Latin was of positive value in demystifying the hard words of Latin and Greek origin that are the staple of academic English.
In my next blog I will consider linguistically (i.e. scientifically) based models of how these benefits can be achieved.