The English Patient: English grammar and teaching in the twentieth century

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, English grammar disappeared from the curriculum of most schools in England, but since the 1960s it has gradually been reconceptualised, under the influence of linguistics, and now once again has a central place in the official curriculum. Our aim is not only to document these changes, but also to explain them. We suggest that the decline of grammar in schools was linked to a similar gap in English universities, where there was virtually no serious research or teaching on English grammar. Conversely, the upsurge of academic research since the 1960s has provided a healthy foundation for school-level work and has prevented a simple return to old-fashioned grammar-teaching now that grammar is once again fashionable. We argue that linguists should be more aware of the links between their research and the school curriculum.

Becoming an English language teacher: linguistic knowledge, anxieties and the shifting sense of identity

“…However, the relative paucity of research in educationally-oriented linguistics before 1960, debates about the relative value of English undergraduate degree content, and the rise of English literature to the centre of school and university English study -and the subsequent marginalisation of language and linguistics from the English curriculum -all contributed to a relatively impoverished existence for language based work. Expertise in language and linguistics among secondary English teachers is generally limited, and debates on the binaries of prescription/ description, correctness/creativity, and on whether the explicit teaching of grammar has any measurable impact on students' writing, and therefore value have tended to dominate educational discourse (see Hudson and Walmsley [2005]). Despite numerous government initiatives over the last twenty-five years, there still appears to be a lack of knowledge among secondary English teachers about how best to teach grammar (Bell 2015), or even which model of language is best applied to classroom pedagogy (Macken-Horarik 2009;Clark 2010;Giovanelli 2014).…”

Frederick W. Westaway and Science Education: An Endless Quest

“…See Anon (1927). 35 For context, see Hudson & Walmsley (2005). 36 Unfortunately, because in most scholarly libraries books are catalogued by authorship, it is not possible to identify all the books in the series except serendipitously.…”

Parts of speech: Solid citizens or slippery customers?

“…PoS are widely used in foreign language teaching in schools. They have been used in schools for the teaching of English language-apart from an interruption from the 1960s to 1999 or so (Hudson & Walmsley 2005). Surely a concept in such wide and varied use must be both useful and workable?…”