Grammar myhill & annabel (2014)

Child Language Teaching and Therapy
2014, Vol. 30(1) 41–62
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0265659013514070
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The role of grammar in the writing
curriculum: A review of the
literature
Debra Myhill
University of Exeter, UK; University of Wollongong, Australia
Annabel Watson
University of Exeter, UK
Abstract
For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of
contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about
the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described
through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995; Locke, 2005), frequently pitting
educational professionals against politicians, but also pitting one professional against another. At
the heart of the debate are differing perspectives on the value of grammar for the language learner
and opposing views of what educational benefits learning grammar may or may not accrue. At the
present time, several jurisdictions, including England and Australia, are creating new mandates for
grammar in the curriculum. This article reviews the literature on the teaching of grammar and its
role in the curriculum and indicates an emerging consensus on a fully-theorized conceptualization
of grammar in the curriculum.
Keywords
Curriculum, grammar, metalanguage, metalinguistic understanding, writing
I Introduction
For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of
contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about
the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described
through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995; Locke, 2005), frequently pitting
Corresponding author:
Debra Myhill, University of Exeter, Heavitree Road, Exeter EX1 2LU, UK.
Email: d.a.myhill@ex.ac.uk
514070CLT30110.1177/0265659013514070Child Language Teaching and TherapyMyhill and Watson
research-article2013
Article

42 Child Language Teaching and Therapy 30(1)
educational professionals against politicians, but also pitting one professional against another. At
the heart of the debate are differing perspectives on the value of grammar for the language learner
and opposing views of what educational benefits learning grammar may or may not accrue. The
debate has been well rehearsed elsewhere (Braddock et al., 1963; Cameron and Bourne, 1988;
Christie, 2004; Hartwell, 1985; Hudson and Walmsley, 2005; Locke, 2009; Myhill and Jones,
2011; QCA, 1998), and only a brief overview will be offered here in order to frame the review that
follows.
The Dartmouth Conference in the USA in 1966 signalled a turning point in educational thinking
about grammar in the curriculum. Funded by the Carnegie Endowment, and organized by the
Modern Language Association (MLA) and the National Conference of Teachers of English
(NCTE), the Dartmouth Conference brought together teachers and educational researchers from
the UK and the USA to discuss the grammar issue. The conference was prompted by growing dis-
satisfaction with classroom practice in grammar teaching, which was largely characterized by
drills and exercises in labelling and identifying word classes and syntactical structures, and which
to many education professionals had no educational relevance and no impact on language develop-
ment. As Muller noted, the general consensus was that grammar teaching was ‘a waste of time’
(1967: 68). As a consequence of the Dartmouth Conference, many educational jurisdictions in the
USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada moved to exclude formal grammar teaching
from the English curriculum, although, of course, there will always have been those teachers who
continued to teach grammar, despite changed policy mandates.
The widespread abandoning of grammar teaching following the Dartmouth Conference
activated two further strands in the grammar debate. First, whilst curriculum policy might
have eschewed the teaching of grammar, an underlying sense of barely disguised outrage at its
abandonment has surfaced repeatedly over the years, often from politicians or the general
public. This strand of discourse tends to have been preoccupied with language standards and
a pervading view that lack of attention to grammar was causing falling standards in language
users (for example, Macdonald, 1995; Paterson, 2010; Truss, 2003; Uttley, 2008). It positions
grammar as a form of ‘verbal hygiene’ (Cameron, 1995), which assumes a moral significance
and acts as guardian to the moral standards of the nation (Cameron, 1994; Pullman, 2005).
Second, the abandoning of grammar has fostered a strand of thinking about the role of knowl-
edge about language in the curriculum. Here linguists have argued for the place of grammar
knowledge, including its associated metalanguage, as a worthy and relevant body of knowl-
edge in its own right (Hudson, 2004). At the same time, a broader view of knowledge about
language places the emphasis on more inductive approaches, which investigate language in
social contexts (for example, Barton, 1999; Carter, 1990; Denham and Lobeck, 2005; Keith,
1990; NATE, 1997).
This article is framed by this debate and by recent international developments that appear to be
re-introducing grammar to the language curriculum. Through a systematic review of the literature,
the article will provide a critical outline of research into the role of grammar in the English or
Language Arts curriculum.
1 Grammar in the first language curriculum
As noted earlier, there appears to be an emerging trend to reintroduce grammar in the teaching of
English, particularly in England, the USA and Australia. In England, the first National Curriculum
for English (DES, 1990) adopted a knowledge about language approach, though with an emphasis
on Standard English, and subsequent iterations of the National Curriculum (DfE, 1995; DfEE,
1999, 2000) have subtly shifted these emphases (for more detail, see Myhill and Jones, 2011). The

Myhill and Watson 43
1995 version, for example, refers more specifically to grammatical metalanguage, whereas the
2007 version has rather more emphasis on grammar in functional contexts. However, an irony of
the National Curriculum is that, although a statutory instrument, actual classroom practice was
much more significantly influenced by the assessment framework and, as grammar was not tested,
the degree to which it is was taught was largely dependent on individual teachers’ own predilec-
tions. Currently, however, a new draft National Curriculum presents a grammar annex (DfE,
2013a), which outlines, year by year, the grammatical terminology that students must learn and the
grammatical structures that they must master. Moreover, a new national test of grammar, spelling
and punctuation (DfE, 2013b) was introduced in 2013, which as high-stakes assessment will inevi-
tably have a significant impact on what is taught.
A more significant influence on classroom practice in England was the (non-statutory) National
Literacy Strategy, introduced in 1998 (DfE, 1998), which matched to the requirements of the
National Curriculum, but which was also accompanied by substantial training and resources. The
teaching of grammar was strongly encouraged in training materials, including two training DVDs
(Grammar for reading and Grammar for writing) that explicitly addressed grammar and in a man-
ner that was clearly attempting to be contextualized. However, the specified learning objectives
and assessment focuses underpinning the strategy left teachers the freedom to determine an appro-
priate context. This led to many lessons being conducted in the ‘context’ of a writing lesson, but
the lessons effectively de-contextualized grammar (Myhill, 2004, 2006; Wyse, 2006). At sentence
level, in particular, this led to lessons on ‘using complex sentences’ or ‘using connectives’, where
deployment of a particular grammatical feature became more important than any understanding of
a relationship between grammar and meaning.
Perhaps one reason for this discrepancy between policy-level principles and materials and class-
room practice is because in England there has been no clear articulation of a rationale for this
renewed emphasis on grammar. In contrast, in Australia where a National Curriculum is currently
being developed for the first time, the structure of the proposed English curriculum includes a
Language strand that provides for explicit grammatical knowledge: the articulated, purposeful, and
conscious understanding of how language works, which supports learners in ‘knowing how to
choose words and grammatical and textual structures that are more appropriate to the audience or
readership’ (ACARA, 2009: 3). The inclusion of a Language strand is built upon a rationale that
seeks to foster ‘a coherent, dynamic, and evolving body of knowledge about the English language
and how it works’ (ACARA, 2009: 10).
To an extent, the position in the USA is more akin to England than Australia, although there
is no National Curriculum mandating content. Instead, state intervention is principally stand-
ards-driven through the Common Core Standards (CCSSI, 2012), now adopted by all but five
US states. The Common Core Standards specify Language as a discrete standard, and two of the
three Language Anchor standards relate to accuracy and avoidance of error. Language Standard
1 requires command of ‘the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing
or speaking’ and, in similar vein, Language Standard 2 requires command of ‘the conventions
of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing’. However, Language
Strand 3 is considerably more meaning or pragmatics oriented, looking at knowledge of lan-
guage ‘to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices
for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening’ (CCSSI, 2012).
The list of progressive skills in language that students have to master is principally directed
towards accuracy, yet teachers are reminded of the inseparability of language study from read-
ing, writing, speaking and listening contexts, and that students ‘must also be able to make
informed, skillful choices among the many ways to express themselves through language’
(CCSSI, 2012).

What is evident from this brief consideration of three Anglophone jurisdictions is that the peda-
gogical rationale for the re-emergence of grammar is not yet fully clear, particularly in England and
the USA. At policy level, the reasons for maintaining or re-introducing grammar appear to be
neither evidence based, nor clearly articulated. Indeed, many opposed to the re-introduction of
grammar would highlight the substantial body of research (reviewed later in this article) that points
very conclusively to the ineffectiveness of de-contextualized grammar in helping students improve
their writing. The new National Curriculum in England exemplifies this uncertainty, both in terms
of the absence of an evidence base and the ambiguity of the rationale for its inclusion. For example,
it mandates that children ‘learn the correct grammatical terms in English and that these terms are
integrated within teaching’ (DfE, 2013: 5) signalling simultaneously a suggestion that a rationale
for the inclusion of grammar is the learning of a discrete body of linguistic knowledge (which is,
of course, a defensible curriculum position to adopt) but also that this teaching should be ‘inte-
grated within teaching’. The meaning of ‘integrated’ is unclear as it would be impossible to teach
without integrating it into teaching, but it is perhaps implying a sense that the grammar should be
contextualized. If that is the case then the learning purpose of this is not communicated. Elsewhere,
the document argues that:
once pupils are familiar with a grammatical concept [for example ‘modal verb’], they should be encouraged
to apply and explore this concept in the grammar of their own speech and writing and to note where it is
used by others. (DfE, 2013c: 64)
There is no evidence base to support this assertion that learning progresses chronologically from
learning a grammatical concept to being able to apply it.
In non-English speaking countries, however, the position of grammar in the curriculum is
frequently neither contentious nor questioned. In both Europe and Asia, the teaching of gram-
mar as part of first language teaching is largely regarded as the norm; for example, van
Gelderen (2010) notes the routine presence of grammar in Dutch teaching. In the French-
speaking world, grammar is heavily drawn upon in order to develop students’ understanding
of the inflections in French spelling (Fayol et al., 1993, 1994, 2009) and this grammar is
based upon traditional explanations of rules that govern language patterns. However, in
Canada especially, grammaire nouvelle (‘new grammar’) is adopted as an alternative to tra-
ditional grammar teaching in French as a first language. Grammaire nouvelle is essentially
an inductive approach to securing grammatical understanding, with a reduced emphasis on
grammatical metalanguage, and a greater emphasis on fostering student observation, reflec-
tion, and active participation in exploring language (Poulin, 1980). Leger (no date) summa-
rizes the approach as:
a grammar of observation and reasoning based on effective manipulations, amongst other things, of words
and groups of words before analysing them and understanding their function. The teaching offers us
knowledge of French structures and allows us to build authentic procedures of reflection which drive
independence. [my translation] (Leger, no date: p. 3)
The manipulations that learners are encouraged to undertake involve subtraction, substitution, per-
mutation and transformation, designed to help develop independent grammatical understanding
(Boivin, 2009; Boivin and Pinsonneault, 2008; Nadeau and Fisher, 2009, 2011). Curiously,
although there are some resonances between grammaire nouvelle and a ‘grammar in context’
approach, there has been little cross-fertilization of ideas across the English–French language
borders.

2 Theoretical perspectives on the teaching of grammar
The historical tendency to focus consideration of grammar in the curriculum on whether it should be
included has led to a somewhat impoverished theoretical base for conceptualizing a role for grammar.
Often the ‘grammar debate’ has been framed by polemic (Macdonald, 1995) and claim and counter-
claim (Anderson, 1995; Cameron and Bourne, 1998; Clark, 2010; Crowley, 2003; Harris, 1962;
Hudson, 2004; Robinson, 1959; Sealey, 1999; Tomlinson, 1994; Wyse, 2001), but there is relatively
little coherent and developed articulation of the contribution that grammatical understanding might
make to students’learning about language.As noted earlier, there is a folk theorization of grammar as
central to supporting students’ accuracy as language users and in the eradication of errors from their
speech and writing. In essence, this is a theorization that gives primacy to Standard English and posi-
tions grammar as the tool by which Standard English is maintained. Drawing on historical discourses
that advocated school as the place where the ‘evil habits of speech contracted in the home and the
street’ (Board of Education [Newbolt Report] 1921: 59) could be overcome, and where school can
compensate for the linguistic disadvantage of the home (Bernstein, 1971), this perspective on gram-
mar tends to be adopted by those outside the profession. It is a largely prescriptive view of grammar,
focused on form, and predicated on assumptions that grammar prescribes how language should be
used and acts as the benchmark by which deviations should be judged. Theoretical arguments against
this position are more robust than those for it and include socio-cultural and socio-linguistic analyses
that highlight the cultural hegemony of this stance and its lack of understanding of language variation
and the descriptive grammars advocated by modern linguistics.
In contrast to this rather ill defined, though strongly held, theorization of grammar is the
approach of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the seminal work of Halliday and the
Sydney School. SFL is essentially a meaning-oriented theorization of grammar, concerned to
explore the relationship between text and context, and looking not simply at lexical or syntactical
aspects of grammar but also the discourse elements of organization, development and cohesion
(Christie and Derewianka, 2006; Christie and Unsworth, 2006; Halliday, 1993, 1994, 2003; Hasan,
2002). It regards language as fundamentally a social semiotic system, ‘abstract semiosis’(Halliday,
2003: 5), and is concerned with how language works or functions. Carter (1990), for example,
describes this approach as ‘functionally oriented, related to the study of texts and responsive to
social purposes’ (p. 104). SFL differs from other functional grammars in its emphasis upon what
Halliday (1978) has called the metafunctions of language the ideational, the interpersonal and the
textual. The ideational metafunction refers to the communicative message, i.e. ‘what a text is
about’; the interpersonal metafunction refers to ‘how the self is expressed’ and ‘how the reader is
understood’; and the textual metafunction refers to the structural aspects of text.
From the perspective of the classroom, Halliday’s argument that any act of communication
requires the making of choices and that ‘the power of language resides in its organization as a huge
network of interrelated choices’ (2003: 8) is a direct contrast to the idea of grammar as the arbiter
of accuracy. Derewianka and Jones (2010: 9) sum this up succinctly:
Whereas traditional approaches conceive of grammar as a set of structures which can be assessed as
correct or incorrect, Halliday sees language as a resource, a meaning-making system through which we
interactively shape and interpret our world and ourselves.
Teaching grammar through an SFL theoretical frame supports learners’ ability to think grammati-
cally about language (Freebody et al., 2008; Macken-Horarik et al., 2011; Williams, 2005), and to
understand grammar’s potentiality as a meaning-making resource (Coffin, 2010; Schleppegrell,
2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012).

Clearly, knowledge about language and grammar as a meaning-making resource is at the heart
of SFL. The same emphasis on meaning, rather than form, is evident in the theorization of rhetori-
cal grammar, although it does not adopt the metalanguage of SFL and is a rather more eclectic and
fragmented body of theorization than the strongly coherent work of SFL. The notion of rhetorical
grammar is strong in the USA and stands in contrast to traditional pedagogical approaches that
position grammar as a ‘fix-it approach to weak writing’ (Micciche, 2004: 716). Rhetorical gram-
mar conceives of grammar as a tool for crafting and shaping language and written text, in ways that
connect grammar to ‘rhetorical and stylistic effects’(Paraskevas, 2006: 65) and that enables writers
to ‘understand and control’ (Kolln, 2006: xi). On one level, rhetorical grammar is about explicitly
showing young writers the repertoire that is available to them, what Myhill et al. have called ‘a
repertoire of infinite possibilities’(Myhill, 2011a; Myhill et al., 2011), and supporting the ability to
make conscious choices (Dawkins, 1995; Hancock, 2009; Petit, 2003). On another level, investi-
gating the ways in which meanings are created in texts is about teaching thinking about ‘the inter-
woven relationship between what we say and how we say it’ (Micciche, 2004: 718).
Systemic Functional Linguistics and rhetorical approaches to grammar share a common focus on
developing understanding about how language works, rather than simply regarding grammar as a
body of knowledge that describes, or prescribes, the system of language. Theoretically, the knowl-
edge that these approaches foster is metalinguistic knowledge. The most comprehensive investiga-
tion of metalinguistic knowledge and development is that of Gombert (1992). He suggests that
metalinguistic knowledge moves from an epilinguistic stage, where the knowledge is unconscious or
implicit, to a metalinguistic stage, where it is explicit. Alternative perspectives on the stages of meta-
linguistic development have been offered by Culioli (1990), Karmiloff-Smith (1996) and van Lier
(1998). Gombert categorizes metalinguistic knowledge as addressing one of six areas: metaphono-
logical, metalexical, metasemantic, metasyntactic, metatextual, and metapragmatic, although Myhill
(2011b) suggests that in older readers and writers, this categorization may be less appropriate as they
are principally concerned with the metapragmatic, i.e. how texts communicate in different contexts.
However, the most significant body of work on metalinguistic knowledge or development relates to
second language learners (e.g. Bialystok, 2007; ter Kuile et al., 2011), to young learners acquiring
language (Downing and Oliver, 1974; Karmiloff Smith et al., 1996; Tunmer et al., 1983), to spelling
development (e.g. Bourassa et al., 2006; Caravolas et al., 2005; Nunes et al., 2006; Thévenin et al.,
1999), and to reading comprehension (Heibert et al., 1984; Macgillivray, 1994; Zipke, 2007).
Nonetheless, metalinguistic knowledge and understanding is central to any consideration of the
role of grammar in the English curriculum, particularly the notions of explicit and implicit knowl-
edge, as they underpin the differing views of the value of grammar teaching. Gombert (1992) main-
tained that epilinguistic, implicit, grammatical knowledge precedes metalinguistic knowledge, and it
includes the unconscious knowledge that language users acquire from communication and interac-
tion, such as word order or how to form the past tense. Roehr (2008) contrasts implicit knowledge
that ‘cannot be brought into awareness or articulated’ with explicit metalinguistic knowledge that is
‘declarative knowledge that can be brought into awareness and that is potentially available for verbal
report’ (p. 179). The historical disputes over the value of grammar teaching hinge upon this distinc-
tion and arguments that first language speakers acquire grammar implicitly and therefore need lan-
guage experience rather than grammatical knowledge (Elbow, 1991) or, conversely, that explicit
grammatical knowledge gives writers both choice and control over their language use (Carter, 1990).
II Empirical studies on the teaching of grammar
Although the issue of the value of grammar teaching has often been framed in terms of the rele-
vance of explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge, it is also true that one strong line of

argument has been located in discussions of the impact of teaching grammar on students’ language
use, particularly writing. In other words, does explicit knowledge of grammar support writing
development and attainment in writing, or as Elbow argued, ‘nothing helps your writing so much
as ignoring grammar’ (Elbow, 1981).
Over the past 50 years, there have been a number of research reviews or meta-analyses address-
ing the effect of grammar teaching on students’ learning (Andrews, 2005; Andrews et al., 2006;
Braddock et al., 1963; Hillocks, 1984; Wyse, 2001), all of which have concluded that ‘the teaching
of school grammar has little or no effect on students’(Hillocks and Smith, 1991) or even that it has
a ‘harmful effect on the improvement of writing’ (Braddock et al., 1963: 37). Indeed, Graham and
Perin’s (2007) meta-analysis investigating effective strategies for teaching writing found a nega-
tive effect for ‘the explicit and systematic teaching of the parts of speech and structure of sen-
tences’and the authors argue that this finding challenges ‘some educators’enthusiasm for traditional
grammar instruction as a focus of writing instruction for adolescents’ (2007: 21). A review by the
Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI, 2004) concluded
that it could find no evidence for any benefit of grammar teaching on writing quality, although the
authors did also note that ‘the quality of seven out of ten of the primary studies included in the in-
depth review on the teaching of syntax is a limitation on the review, as is the lack of recent research’
(Andrews et al., 2006: 51).
In the end, the EPPI review draws its conclusions based on the analysis of just three studies:
Bateman and Zidonis (1966), Elley et al. (1975, 1979), and Fogel and Ehri (2000). It is worth look-
ing at these three studies more closely. The Bateman and Zidonis study, in the USA, focused on
sentence production in writing and investigated whether high school students could ‘learn to apply
the transformational rules of a generative grammar in their writing?’ (1966: 3). The sample size
was rather small: 50 students assigned to either the control or intervention, of whom only 41 were
still in the sample at the end of the study. The intervention group were taught explicitly about syn-
tactical structures for sentences, and written compositions from the two groups were analysed
using an analytical tool that captured the generative transformational grammar rules of sentence
construction and allowed them to compare development pre-treatment and post-treatment. An out-
come of the analysis was a structural complexity score for each piece of writing (1966: 8). The
statistical results were not conclusive, but the authors suggest that they did indicate a relationship
between ‘a knowledge of generative grammar and an ability to produce well-formed sentences of
greater structural complexity’(1966: 39). In contrast to this small-scale study, the Elley et al. study
is arguably the most robust research conducted in this field. They conducted a three-year longitu-
dinal study in New Zealand, involving a sample of 250 secondary-aged students of average ability
with eight classes, matched for ability. There were three treatment groups:
• Treatment 1: a transformational grammar course focusing on discovering facts about lan-
guage and its use. The course included teaching of sentence-combining, subordination, par-
ticiple modifiers, and deep and surface structures.
• Treatment 2: a reading–writing course with 40% spent free reading, 40% spent using a class
reader, and 20% spent writing, especially creative writing.
• Treatment 3: a course typical of New Zealand secondary English classes at the time, involv-
ing functional grammar, comprehension, and writing.
They found that there were no significant differences in the quality of writing produced post-test,
although the transformational grammar group did improve in their sentence-combining ability.
The Fogel and Ehri study (2000) was different from the previous two studies as it took as its
starting point an identified writing problem, the use of Black English Vernacular (BEV) in the

writing of low-attaining ethnic minority students in primary school. The study set out to ‘examine
how to structure dialect instruction so that it is effective in teaching SE [Standard English] forms
to students who use BEV in their writing’ (2000: 215). An experimental design was adopted with
three treatment groups:
• exposure plus text;
• exposure plus explicit instruction in strategies; and
• exposure, strategies, and guided practice in transforming BEV to SE and feedback (ESP)
According to the authors, treatments 1 and 2 mirror typical classroom practice. The results indi-
cated a statistically significant positive effect for group 3, leading the authors to conclude that the
guided practice had ‘clarified for students the link between features in their own non-standard
writing and features in SE’ (2000: 231). However, because of the small sample size, the EPPI
review does not rate this as strong evidence for a positive benefit.
The EPPI review noted the dearth of research in this area, but a much more recent study, con-
ducted in primary schools in the UK by Sheard et al. (2012), would appear to confirm its conclu-
sions. They investigated whether teaching grammar using electronic handsets that provided
students with instant feedback would improve their learning of grammatical terminology and
whether it would improve their writing. They conducted a 12 week study, drawing on a sample of
42 primary schools, half of which were randomly assigned to use the electronic handsets and the
other as a control group. Grammatical knowledge was tested before and after the intervention using
discrete grammar questions and a paragraph revision writing task to ascertain whether the grammar
knowledge transferred to writing. The results indicated a strongly significant positive impact on
grammar knowledge on the experimental group, using the handsets, but no impact on writing.
However, one aspect of grammar teaching that has been repeatedly identified as successful is
sentence-combining, the practice of ‘teaching students to construct more complex and sophisti-
cated sentences through exercises in which two or more basic sentences are combined into a single
sentence’(Graham and Perin, 2007: 18). The EPPI review (2004; Andrews et al., 2006) maintained
that there was good evidence for the efficacy of sentence-combining, and it was one of the 11
instructional strategies identified by Graham and Perin (2007) as beneficial to writing. Sentence-
combining has a long history in the USA with a chain of studies (Daiker et al., 1978; Hake and
Williams, 1979; Hillocks and Mavrognes, 1986; Kinneavy, 1979; Marzano, 1976; O’Hare, 1971;
Phillips, 1996; Saddler and Graham, 2005; Savage, 1980) all reporting the success of sentence-
combining. Most were conducted in high schools or even at university level. The studies were
themselves followed by a flurry of similar studies (for an overview of this, see Connors, 2000),
most agreeing and confirming the efficacy of the technique. The only UK study to look at this, with
secondary school students (Keen, 2004), also found a positive impact. But despite this apparent
consistency in results, sentence-combining is problematic in terms of both the studies and the
teaching of writing. In general, the studies measure whether teaching students to combine sen-
tences, largely through exercises, improves their ability to create effectively combined sentences,
with very few studies looking at whether writing quality is improved. Several critics have pointed
out the shortcomings in these studies (Connors, 2000; Faigley, 1980; Witte, 1980), and Crowhurst
(1980) conducted a study that demonstrated that increased syntactic complexity, such as that
achieved through sentence-combining, was not correlated with writing quality. In addition, critics
have suggested that any success deriving from sentence-combining is attributable to discussions
about the ‘rhetorical principles characteristic of good writing’(1980: 298), not to the strategy itself.
Significantly, for example, Keen’s study included a considerable amount of contextualized discus-
sion of the effectiveness of different sentences. Summarizing the approach, Andrews et al. argued

that ‘sentence-combining suggests a pedagogy of applied knowledge – at its best, applied in situa-
tions of contextualized learning; at its worst, drilling’ (2006: 52), and it is probable that Andrews’
notion of applied knowledge rooted in contextualized learning is central to this issue.
Andrews’ observation that the success of sentence-combining might owe more to its contextu-
alization than to the approach per se is important. More recently, research in this area has begun to
look at the benefits of teaching grammar that is contextualized or embedded within the teaching of
writing. In the USA, Fearn and Farnan (2007) found strong positive effects on students’ writing in
high schools when teaching made connections between the grammar being taught and children’s
writing, and they claimed that ‘grammar instruction influences writing performance when gram-
mar and writing share one instructional context’(Fearn and Farnan, 2007: 16). In England, a mixed
method study, involving 13–14 year olds, and combining a large randomized controlled trial with
a qualitative design has found a strongly significant benefit for students of a contextualized
approach (Jones et al., 2013; Myhill et al., 2012). In this study, the instructional focus was the
teaching of writing, and the teaching materials were designed around a consideration of what
grammatical understanding might support learners in making authorial decisions in the composi-
tion of a particular text. It is the first robust study that has provided evidence of a positive impact
of grammar teaching on writing, but it is important to note that the learning focus was writing, not
grammar. Nonetheless, it offers a coherent and evidenced rationale for developing a purposeful
role for grammar in the curriculum.
III Teacher perspectives on the teaching of grammar
Further insights into the role of grammar in the curriculum are provided by research studies or
professional publications that attend to teachers’ perspectives on the topic. Professional perspec-
tives on grammar are evident in numerous articles by teachers and teacher-educators, particularly
in the special ‘grammar’ editions of the English Journal, namely volume 85 (1996), volume 92
(2003) and volume 95 (2006). These articles tend to fall in to two camps: those which position
grammar predominantly as a matter of rule-learning and error-correction (e.g. Benjamin et al.,
2006; Brown, 1996; Rose, 1996), and those which position grammar as a tool for promoting meta-
linguistic awareness and rhetorical choice (e.g. Ehrenworth, 2003; Gold, 2006; Hagemann, 2003;
Jayman et al., 2006). The latter position is often informed, in articles from US practitioners, by
Weaver’s concept of contextualized grammar (1996, 2006) and Kolln’s concept of rhetorical gram-
mar (2006).
The professional literature reflects the complexity of defining what is meant by the terms ‘gram-
mar’ and ‘grammar teaching’, as Vavra (1996) notes. A handful of studies have explored how
teachers define or conceptualize grammar. The largest, a survey of 137 primary and secondary
school teachers in the UK, reported that teachers lacked confidence in defining grammar, particu-
larly in understanding ‘the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge of language’, and
noted a strong association of explicit grammar teaching with prescriptivism and old-fashioned
teaching methods (QCA, 1998: 26). A similar problem of definition has been reported in the USA
from a smaller-scale study by Petruzella which noted confusion between grammatical rules, issues
of usage, and spelling and punctuation (1996: 69). This finding was echoed in Cajkler and Hislam’s
interviews with trainee primary teachers in the UK, with participants associating grammar with
phonics, spelling and punctuation (2002). UK studies by Pomphrey and Moger (1999) and Watson
(2012) report tension or inconsistency between prescriptive/descriptive and prescriptive/rhetorical
conceptualizations of grammar teaching among trainee and practising secondary English teachers
respectively, with the latter finding that teachers tend to immediately conceptualize grammar as
prescriptive, rule-bound and focused on correctness, while conversely offering a rhetorical view

focused on exploration, choice and effects when asked about how it might be useful in supporting
students’ writing development. All of these studies indicate that some degree of conceptual confu-
sion persists within the profession.
Research into teachers’ beliefs about grammar more generally provide evidence that UK teach-
ers tend to associate grammar with negative discourses of ‘old-fashioned’ teaching (QCA, 1998;
Watson, 2012), and that these ‘neo-conservative associations’(Myhill, 2006: 78) can occur even in
countries in which grammar is not such a contested subject, such as Flanders and the Netherlands
(van Gelderen, 2006). Investigations into teachers’ affective responses to grammar have typically
reported ‘anxiety’ (QCA, 1998: 26) and ‘apprehension’ (Watson, 2012), and a general lack of con-
fidence when it comes to dealing with grammar in the classroom, in both the UK (Kelly and
Safford, 2009) and USA (Hadjioannou and Hutchinson, 2010). Teachers and trainee teachers have
tended to be disparaging and hyper-critical in their self-evaluations (Pomphrey and Moger, 1999;
Watson, 2012), and Cajkler and Hislam have found that anxiety remains high even when trainee
teachers made improvements in their linguistic subject knowledge (2002). Teachers who feel anx-
ious or insecure about their own declarative grammatical knowledge are also more likely to hold
prescriptivist, rule-bound views of grammar (Harper and Rennie, 2009; Kamler, 1995; Macken-
Horarik, 2001). However, studies have also reported more positive attitudes. Both Turvey (2000),
working with secondary-level trainee teachers, and Cajkler and Hislam with primary-level (2002)
found that, regardless of their anxieties about subject knowledge, trainees valued the idea of gram-
mar teaching: Turvey found that her students felt that they had ‘missed out on something’ by not
being taught grammar themselves at school, and that this made it ‘all the more important that their
pupils should have it’ (2000: 143). Similarly, Watson found that some secondary English teachers
felt passionately that the negative discourse around grammar teaching is misleading, and that far
from being ‘the pit of doom’, grammar is actually ‘where freedom lies’, thanks to its focus on mak-
ing knowledge about language and the choices involved in writing explicit (2012: 32). Such reports
indicate that there may be willingness to learn about and practise grammar teaching even where
teachers or trainees are insecure in their own linguistic or pedagogical knowledge. The most recent
research into teachers’ beliefs has found that teachers tend to value the potential that a rhetorical
approach to grammar teaching focused on experimentation has to increase students’ metalinguistic
awareness and support them in consciously crafting their writing (Watson, 2012). There still per-
sists, however, a tendency to associate grammar with a restrictive discourse of rules and accuracy
(Watson, 2012) and to position grammar ‘as antipathetic to freedom and creativity’ (Wilson and
Myhill, 2012: 11).
Attitudes to the use of grammatical terminology have been explored in three studies. Two of
these indicate a belief that it is more suitable for use with higher rather than lower ability students
(Petruzella, 1996; QCA, 1998). The third study examined teachers’ personal epistemologies, their
‘beliefs about what knowledge is relevant and valuable in learning to write’ (Wilson and Myhill,
2012: 4), in relation to literary and linguistic metalanguage and poetry writing. This reported a
recurrent epistemological argument that ‘linguistic metalanguage was rule-bound and constrain-
ing, limiting young people’s writing in an unconstructive fashion’ (Wilson and Myhill, 2012: 10),
which counterpointed a view that literary metalanguage is ‘a valuable part of learning about litera-
ture’ (p. 13). This is consistent with Findlay’s findings that UK teachers regard grammar as ‘a
chore’ (2010: 4), and that they consistently value the literary aspects of the subject above the
linguistic.
The literature, therefore, indicates a continuing trend amongst practitioners to view grammar as
reactionary and restrictive, to value it less than literary aspects of the subject, and to be anxious
about teaching it. However, there is also evidence of a countervailing belief that grammar taught

with an exploratory and rhetorical approach can be valuable in increasing students’ metalinguistic
understanding and ability to consciously craft or design their writing.
IV Teaching grammar and the demands on content and
pedagogical subject knowledge
While teachers’knowledge about grammar is not generally raised as a concern in non-Anglophone
countries, historical factors mean that it is a significant issue for many first-language English
teachers. Shulman (1987) has distinguished between subject content knowledge (knowledge of an
academic domain) and pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge of how to teach that academic
domain). The demands on teachers’ subject content knowledge about grammar have become
increasingly specific in Anglophone countries: in the USA, the Common Core State Standards for
Language Arts are heavily focused on grammatical constructions that students are expected to
master; in the UK grammar was made a mandatory part of the curriculum in 1988, with the non-
statutory but widely adopted National Strategies guidance (DfEE, 1998; DfES, 2001) including
detailed teaching objectives for students aged 5–14; Australia is currently developing a new
National Curriculum that includes a strand on Knowledge about Language aiming to foster ‘a
coherent, dynamic, and evolving body of knowledge about the English language and how it works’
(ACARA, 2009: 1); and in New Zealand, problems have occurred in trying to implement an inno-
vative syllabus with a strong grammar focus due to teachers’ ‘lack of knowledge about language’
(Gordon, 2005: 63).
While the extent to which students need to explicitly know about grammar is still hotly debated
(Locke, 2010), there is widespread agreement that teachers’ grammatical knowledge needs to be
richer and more substantive than the grammar they may need to teach to students. Teacher subject
knowledge requires ‘a higher degree of grammar consciousness than most direct learners are likely
to need or want’(Leech, 1994: 18), with an ability to be ‘conscious analysts of linguistic processes’
(Brumfit, 1997: 163) and possess ‘conscious awareness’ (Armstrong, 2004: 223) of how texts are
structured. It has been argued that teachers who understand grammatical forms may be better
placed to support developing writers (Andrews, 2005), to identify linguistic development in their
students (Gordon, 2005), and to ‘make the analysis explicit’ (Hudson, 2004: 113) when examining
texts with their students.
The problem that current English teachers have with attaining the level of grammatical subject
knowledge outlined above has arisen for two reasons: first, the fall from favour of grammar teach-
ing in Anglophone countries following the Dartmouth Conference in the USA in 1966, due to the
widespread view that the formal teaching of grammar had no beneficial impact on students’ lin-
guistic facility (Hudson and Walmsley, 2005); second, the tendency in the UK for teachers to fol-
low a literature degree route into teaching, along with is a shortage of applicants from a linguistics
route (Shortis and Blake, 2010). As a result, many current English teachers were not taught gram-
mar at school or university, a point also noted in the US context by Kolln and Hancock (2005), and
by Gordon in New Zealand (2005). Of course, teachers who have literature degrees and are keen
readers themselves do have a lot of knowledge about texts that they can draw on in language teach-
ing, and they also have a substantial amount of implicit grammatical knowledge about texts.
However, as Andrews (2005) points out, it is likely that ‘a teacher with a rich knowledge of gram-
matical constructions and a more general awareness of the forms and varieties of the language will
be in a better position to help young writers’ (2005: 75).
This subject knowledge problem extends into initial teacher training courses, with Kolln and
Hancock (2005) complaining that most pre-service programs for English teachers in the USA do

not address grammatical knowledge, and a number of UK studies reporting weaknesses in gram-
matical knowledge (Andrews, 1994, 1999; Bloor, 1986; Burgess et al., 2000; Chandler et al., 1988;
Hislam and Cajkler, 2006; Williamson and Hardman, 1995; Wray, 1993). In Australia, Louden et
al. (2005) conducted a survey which indicated that teachers do not feel confident about teaching
grammar when they complete their training, and Harper and Rennie’s pre-service teachers (2009)
‘showed limited understandings in their ability to analyse the parts and structure of sentences, and
their knowledge of metalinguistic terms did not seem to extend past the basic concepts of “noun”,
“verb” and “adjective” ’ (2009: 27). However, studies in the UK and Australia have indicated that
some teachers may be over-critical or over-anxious in their self-evaluations, with Cajkler and
Hislam (2002) finding that primary trainee teachers in the UK had reasonable knowledge of gram-
mar despite being anxious about their subject knowledge, and Hammond and Macken-Horarik
finding that primary teachers in Australia were confident in their knowledge of genres and text
types despite expressing a lack of confidence in their own knowledge of ‘rules of traditional gram-
mar’ (2001: 125). At the same time, in England, there has been criticism of the accuracy or appro-
priacy of curriculum materials prepared to support teaching grammar (Cajkler, 1999, 2002, 2004;
Cameron, 1997).
The combination of curricular expectation that students will have explicit knowledge of gram-
mar, and the tendency towards an absence of grammatical knowledge in the academic experiences
of English teachers, creates a clear challenge for pedagogical practice and student learning.
Research into teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge related to grammar teaching is limited, yet
there is evidence from second-language research that strong declarative grammatical knowledge
does not necessarily translate simply into effective teaching of language (Andrews, 2001; Borg,
1999, 2001, 2003). Pedagogical content knowledge is dependent upon teachers having a clear
understanding of the role that grammatical knowledge can play in the classroom, without which
teachers may generate mismatches between their own use of grammatical metalanguage and stu-
dents’ understanding (Berry, 1997) or unwittingly convey inappropriate messages to learners.
Lefstein (2009), for example, illustrates how teachers using policy materials underpinned by a
principally rhetorical notion of grammar can use them in meaningless or rule-bound prescriptive
ways, while the trainees in Cajkler and Hislam’s study (2002) understood grammatical knowledge
as essentially about the naming of grammatical constructions but did not understand that pedagogi-
cally ‘grammatical awareness is about making available a range of choices for writers to use for
particular purposes in particular contexts’ (2002: 176). In a more recent UK study, Myhill et al.
(2013) have identified a range of pedagogical problems faced by teachers who attempt to address
grammar. These include:
• the difficulty of defining and explaining grammatical terms, exacerbated by teachers’ ten-
dency to use semantic rather than functional definitions; also reported by Paraskevas
(2004);
• the difficulty of explaining sentences and syntactical features, exacerbated by the tendency to
reduce explanations of sentence types to issues of length and to use other non-grammatical
explanations;
• the difficulty of making meaningful connections between grammar and writing, seen par-
ticularly in the tendency to communicate highly generalized principles for writing that are
difficult for learners to operationalize meaningfully, such as ‘vary your sentences’, and the
tendency to talk vaguely and non-specifically about ‘effects’; and
• the difficulty of fostering metalinguistic discussion, a risky activity that requires teachers to
deal with misunderstandings, unexpected questions and unexpected answers without
advance preparation.

This study also, however, reported examples of teachers who were able to make meaningful con-
nections between the linguistic features being studied and specific context-relevant effects or pur-
poses, and who responded sensitively to students’ writing by explicitly drawing out effective
grammatical choices and challenging students to reflect metalinguistically on their own writing.
This focus on the relationship between teachers’ subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge
relating to grammar is mirrored in Australia by Jones and Chen (2012), who have demonstrated
how teachers have been able to evolve new understandings of both grammatical knowledge and
pedagogical practice through participatory collaboration with a research team. Current research
therefore indicates the vital importance of addressing teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge
alongside subject knowledge of grammar.
V Discussion
To an extent, what this review signals most clearly is that consideration of a fully theorized role for
grammar within the writing curriculum has largely been hijacked by political–professional debates
about grammar’s inclusion or not, and that the debate has not substantially developed since it
began in the early 1960s. The same arguments are voiced and re-voiced over time, but with little
re-theorization or advancement. Silently underpinning this long-standing debate, and perhaps
perpetuating it, is the fundamental distinction between prescriptive and descriptive views of
grammar. Whilst linguists have long theorized grammar as a description of language which will
change and evolve as language changes, public and political views of grammar have tended
strongly to prescriptive views of grammar. Hudson and Walmsley, in their analysis of the separate
development of academic linguistics and grammar teaching, draw attention to ‘an ever-widening
gap in England between the practice of professional grammarians, on the one hand, and the lay
public and practice in schools on the other’ (Hudson and Walmsley, 2005: 595). However, this
binary division between linguistics and educational perspectives on grammar is not wholly correct.
Following the eschewing of grammar teaching in Anglophone countries in the 1960s, an alterna-
tive view of grammar emerged that was characterized by a view of grammar as ‘knowledge about
language’, a view that was significantly influenced by sociolinguistics (e.g. the work of Peter
Trudgill; see, for example, Trudgill, 2000) and was descriptive in theorization. In England, the
emphasis in the Bullock Report (DES, 1975) on the importance of developing students’ under-
standing of language and its rejection of traditional grammar teaching was highly influential, and
more fully realized in the late 1980s in the government-commissioned national project, Language
in the National Curriculum (LINC), to investigate classroom approaches to developing knowledge
about language. The resultant materials, subsequently rejected by the government, drew heavily on
the work of Britton and Halliday, focusing on functionally oriented understandings of language in
context and on placing meaning at the centre of attention. These materials have had a significant
legacy: the dominant professional view of grammar within the writing curriculum is strongly ori-
ented towards a descriptive approach (Watson, 2012; Wyse, 2006). Therefore, it is possible to
argue that, despite the prolonged debate, one element of the theorization of grammar in the writing
curriculum from both a linguistic and theoretical perspective is that it is founded upon a theory of
descriptive, functionally oriented grammar. Given this foundation, the review also points to ways
in which this theorization may be developed further.
Within the theoretical perspectives offered by Systemic Functional Linguistics, and rhetorical
grammar – and the recent empirical work of Fearn and Farnan (2007), Macken-Horarik et al.
(2011), Myhill et al. (2012), and Schleppegrell (2007) – there are signs of an emerging consensus
that grammar may be important in developing learners’ understanding of how language works
and, specifically, how grammar choices are significant in shaping and constructing meaning.

Cameron argued theoretically that ‘knowing grammar is knowing how more than knowing what’
(1997: 236), pointing out that grammatical terminology is simply the tool that facilitates lan-
guage investigation and analysis. To set this in a classroom context, this means that it is more
important to know how a passive construction alters the emphasis in information conveyed than
it is to know that it is a passive construction. The recent empirical work, described above, is
providing evidence of how this knowledge is realized in practice and how young writers develop
understanding that ‘it is through the rhetorical and syntactic forms they choose that the content
is constructed and evaluated’ (Schleppegrell, 2007: 122). This consensus is less concerned with
grammar as an arbiter of accuracy, and more concerned with ‘insights that go well beyond the
minimum needed to write conventionally or correctly’ (Hancock, 2009: 194). Carter and
McCarthy (2006: 7) draw attention to the notion of grammar as choice, as well as a grammar of
structure, and Myhill et al. (2011) have conceptualized the contextual teaching of grammar
within the writing curriculum as one that seeks to open up to young writers ‘a repertoire of infi-
nite possibilities’.
Taking this theorization one step further, fostering young writers’ awareness of the linguistic
choices available to them in writing and how those choices differently shape meaning is develop-
ing their metalinguistic knowledge of writing. Gombert’s (1992) taxonomy of metalinguistic
knowledge, as noted earlier, relates principally to oral language development, but the category of
metapragmatic knowledge is concerned with language in use, e.g. language in social contexts.
Arguably, adopting descriptive approaches to grammar and nurturing students’ abilities to make
choices and decisions in their writing is developing this metapragmatic knowledge, and rendering
it available to inform the process of writing. Such knowledge is explicit, what Roehr described as
‘declarative knowledge that can be brought into awareness’ (Roehr, 2008: 179) and goes beyond
the use of linguistic metalanguage to label and identify to include explicit knowledge of how lin-
guistic choices subtly shape or alter meanings. It may also be significant that the empirical studies
of Keen (2004) on sentence-combining, of Wyse (2006) on vocabulary choices, and Myhill et al.
(2011) all seem to be highlighting the importance of talk, or metalinguistic discussion, in enabling
this explicit metalinguistic knowledge of writing. Thus a more coherent theorization of a role for
grammar in the curriculum might be framed as the teaching of grammar which promotes students’
explicit metalinguistic understanding of how grammar choices shape meaning in texts and of the
writing choices available to them, founded upon a descriptive, functionally oriented understanding
of grammar.
VI Conclusions
This review of the literature has illustrated clearly that the role of grammar in first language teach-
ing remains a source of dispute, a conclusion underlined by the political/professional debate in
England at present about the grammar test at age 11 and the emphasis on grammar in the revised
National Curriculum. The review also signals that robust empirical studies in this area are limited
and – apart from indicating that simply teaching grammar as the isolated naming and labelling of
word classes and syntactical structures is of little obvious benefit – the research is rather impover-
ished in offering any theoretically-grounded understanding of children’s learning of grammar and
how they transfer that learning to their own language use. It offers a way forward in theorizing a
role for grammar in the writing curriculum as a functionally oriented endeavour, developing stu-
dents’ metalinguistic thinking and decision-making in writing. It is also clear, however, that more
well designed studies in this area are much needed to provide richer and broader understanding of
how children develop metalinguistic understanding, how that learning transfers into their own
language use, and the pedagogies that support the development of that understanding.

Declaration of conflicting interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.
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