The National Association for the Teaching of English says a revised focus on spelling, grammar and punctuation will “impoverish” teaching.
What? Yes, really, these people do think that. English is my native language and I was fortunate to be in the the last generation that learned some grammar and spelling in school. Not that it was very much because the new progressive methods were already starting to take hold. Much of what I have learned has consequently been gleaned after I left school.
Grammar and spelling are the building blocks and mortar of language. Sure, you can scrape by without them. However, if you expect others to grasp your thoughts from the muddled morass of semi-literate, un-punctuated, un-capitalised leet speek that you subsequently use, then don’t be too surprised if your readers can’t be bothered to decipher it and write you off as an uneducated buffoon.
If you want to learn a foreign language, spelling and grammar are crucial to the learning process. You cannot learn a language if you do not understand how it is structured and how it works in practice. For this, you need grammar and spelling. Get them wrong and the results can be anything from embarrassingly funny to disastrous.
So, yes a focus on teaching those basics of grammar and spelling is a good thing, not a bad one.
[Dr Gibbons] He told the BBC News website: “Most English teachers try to teach grammar in context rather than through formal exercises. There’s very little evidence of a benefit to teaching grammar in that way.”
It sure as hell helped me with my French. It also gave me a better understanding than those who followed me of how to use my own language. If Gibbons wants to see the benefits of his preferred way, a look at some of the outpourings on Internet fora or Facebook walls (especially those dreadful tribute pages) might help.
Maybe we will even see people using “there”, “their” and “they’re” correctly at last. Or perhaps “your” and “you’re”. Don’t even get me started on “its” and “it’s”. When that’s done, we can move onto the grocer’s apostrophe, eh?
You could borrow them one of your old grammar books… 😆
That’ll learn ’em right.
Keep on fighting the good fight – you have many supporting your cause. But I have to say that I believe the “its”/”it’s” battle is well and truly lost, even in the MSM with paid sub editors.
Although the ignorance of the writer is at fault, some of the blame must lie with word-processing packages which have difficulty with this rule and fail to highlight it as an error.
An unswerving faith in spellcheck means that, even at a high level, these mistakes are making it through the system to production – it must be right; the little tin god says so.
Thus I have seen ‘it’s’ as a possessive pronoun not only in newspapers but also on product labels in supermarkets, tourist brochures and traffic signs (though I don’t do anything about it – unlike my Mother-in-law, who has been known to circle the offending punctuation firmly with red pen).
More power to your MIL 😉
Don’t know when you were at school, but me, I was there 1965 onwards.
We had, in my entire school time, sometime in November 1970, an hour lesson, where we were told what nouns, verbs, and adverbs are.
That was IT. The subject was NEVER again mentioned.
O.K. But then it came to learning Swedish. GOD-DAMMIT! I had to learn ENGLISH first, because I did not have a bloody CLUE what a “Supine article”, or even a “Pronoun”, was. Then, “Future perfekt subjunctive”, “Dative”, “Accusative”, “Gene….WTF??!!??
Thank you VERY fucking much, British “education” sytem!
63 – 76
Then basically the same time. Different education areas, I suspect.
I wonder if these teachers who are so proud of their teaching methods would care to explain why two generations of schoolchildren have left school knowing there is such a thing as an apostrophe but 80% of whom have absolutely no clue as to how to use one?
Thought not.
Here’s a wonderful example of irony; given your figure of 80%, I set out to discover what proportion of British pupils are educated in independent or grammar schools (suspecting it might account for most of the remaining 20% – as indeed it does).
Thus it was that, in a House of Commons official document, no less, I stumbled across the following:
‘There was a modest increase in the number of grammar schools in England in the early/mid 1990s. There number has remained at 164 for a number of years.’
Priceless.
Macheath’s mention of road signs reminded me of one in Hull that directs drivers to the “Waste bailing plant”. Presumably the waste has to stump up some cash as security so that it can be let out of prison until its case comes up.
Maybe it’s got something to do with cricket.
Having had time to think about this post, I have a few more observations. I was not taught grammar formerly at school, so I don’t know what terms such as pronoun actually mean. I think that my ability to write and speak in a more or less grammatically correct way is due to my having read lots of books.
As a second year student at a comprehensive school in the mid seventies I can recall classes where we took it in turns to read aloud in class. There were roughly a third of thirteen year olds who could not read fluently and would read at a rate of maybe one word every three seconds and get stuck on words of two syllables. For this reason I am often suspicious of those who claim that things are always getting worse. Forty years ago we were turning out barely literate kids from our schools.
I have similar recollections. That would probably be the time when the rot really set in.
XX I can recall classes where we took it in turns to read aloud in class. There were roughly a third of thirteen year olds who could not read fluently and would read at a rate of maybe one word every three seconds and get stuck on words of two syllables.XX
Aye. Same in our school.
But something else I noticed. It was always the thick bastards that were the greatest football fans/players.
Sais all you need to know about football fans and players really. 😐
I’m thinking about that “impoverish teaching” bit.
Surely we should be more concerned about whether or not these proposale would impoverish education.
I don’t think that they would. They may make education harder for both teachers and pupils, but I always thought that that was part of the point of being educated – some of it was going to be hard.
This is a valid point – the needs of the learners must come first and using the basic building blocks to teach language fits with that ethos.
At a prestigious past-grad teacher training establishment in the mid-80s, students were firmly told to avoid correcting pupils’ grammar – to do so, particularly in the case of pupils of afro-caribbean descent – could be seen as discrimination on grounds of cultural or regional identity.
This was an era in which teaching journals carried articles warning against ‘imposing on pupils middle-class values such as respect for property’, and red pens were anathematised – green being so much less ‘confrontational’. In any case, only three mistakes per exercise wcould be highlighted; the rest must be ignored, to avoid damaging the pupil’s self-esteem.
Art teachers were told to treat graffiti as a valid form of expression – never mind about teaching them to draw – and a student who suggested her pupils read a short story by Kipling narrowly escaped being thrown out of the college amid accusations of closet racism.
Since most of those approaching the profession today were themselves educated in that atmosphere, small wonder that good grammar and correct English are increasingly rare – at least in the state sector.
The private sector, of course, carries on much as it always has done. With supreme irony, privately educated students are given such a hard time in teacher training (the course tutors having access to academic records, they are easily identified) that those who want to teach are far more likely to return to the private sector to do so.
The issue in EFL texts is that the surrounding material takes centre stage and the rules take a back seat, with very little follow up. Many texts have supplementary books you have to purchase to get follow up exercises.
Macheath – “avoid correcting pupils’ grammar
See now there’s an abuse of the English language, right there. In an educational setting to “correct” is to “educate”.
Otherwise, it isn’t “education” at all. 😐
Indeed. Following that logic, when I observed my learner turn into a road on the right hand side, having misread the road markings, I shouldn’t have damaged his self esteem by telling him (somewhat briskly) to move to the left.
I am reminded of the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant and Absent Apostrophe (AAAAA). Founded by Keith Waterhouse.