Testing Times
Testing Times
Testing Times
Let’s be clear from the outset: being against grammar tests doesn’t mean being against grammar.
I am opposed to the proposed Year 6 tests of grammar, spelling and punctuation announced on the DfE website last week. That’s not because I think our students shouldn’t be taught grammar; it’s because I don’t believe these tests will help them to become better readers or writers. And I suspect they will lead to some very poor teaching. (1)
First: the background. I have a degree in English and Linguistics. From a school education that taught me a fair bit about literature but where only in French and German did we ever talk about English grammar, I found that at university I developed a real interest in how a deeper knowledge of grammar, punctuation and English usage can help us to communicate more precisely, more elegantly, and more accurately.
I was fortunate in being taught by a terrific team at Lancaster University who were pioneering ‘stylistics’, the interface between linguistics and literature, an approach which (in those days) applied grammatical knowledge within the context of written texts. This, I now see, has shaped my approach to teaching about grammar.
The various English textbooks I have since written have usually contained a lot of grammatical content. My latest includes chapters on using non-finite clauses, front-shifting and the passive voice, plus a usage guide containing advice about spelling ‘practice/practise’, ‘discreet/discrete’, ‘led/lead’, and a glossary of grammatical terms including ‘adverbial’, ‘subordination’ and ‘postmodification’. The book, please note, is aimed at 11-14 year olds.
So no: being against grammar tests doesn’t mean being against grammar.
It’s just that I want my students to use grammar so that they read and write better, and (2) not in order to pass some dreary little grammar test.
Because (3) I learnt early on - from my fledgling days as an English teacher - that I could train my students to dutifully (4) score ten out of ten in a spelling test or punctuation exercise and then, maddeningly, see them write stuff that was riddled with basic errors. More often than not they were getting wrong the very skill we had covered in the exercise just half an hour earlier.
It’s something I’ve thought about and experimented with ever since I trained to teach at Leicester University in 1985. There, the prevailing ethos was a kind of Leavisite / post-Romantic notion that the English teacher was ‘a preacher of culture’ (indeed, my brilliant tutor, Professor Margaret Mathieson, (5) had written a book called precisely that). (6)
The idea was that by reading aloud and studying lots of good quality stories, plays and poems, our pupils would absorb the structures and rhythms of good English writing. Then they would replicate it.
It’s something I still believe in: our students must (7) get a sense of the rhythms of great English prose if they are themselves to write well.
But (8) I also learnt that this approach isn’t enough.
Once, in a seminar, I nervously asked about how we should teach our students to use full stops properly. The group fell silent and cast down their eyes. In asking a question so functional, so mechanistic, I had almost, it seems, committed some deeply anti-social act, the equivalent perhaps of breaking wind in a half-full lift. (9)
So as a rookie English teacher in Leeds I furtively tried out different techniques. I noticed that one of the most heavily thumbed textbooks in the stock-cupboard was Smudge & Chewpen. It was essentially a collection of decontextualised exercises in which students would be taught a rule of grammar or usage - for example, the apostrophe for possession - and then be expected to work through lots of examples, practising (10) the skill repeatedly with an underlying assumption that this would then ensure that they got that skill right in their own writing.
They didn’t. (11)
It was then I learnt - as I have over many years of teaching English to all levels and abilities - (12) that decontextualised exercises have many uses, including appeasing parents, heads of department, headteachers, politicians that we’re strong on the basics; giving students the satisfaction that in a subject where there often seem to be no right answers there are in fact right (and wrong) answers; and, of course, keeping students quiet, making them passive, asserting our teacherly authority. (13)
In themselves, these tests and exercises don’t make children better readers or writers.
Which (14 ) isn’t to say that I don’t use exercises and tests. This past year I’ve been teaching Years 9, 10 and 11, and, as ever, I have used lots of grammar, spelling and punctuation exercises; (15) but I do so for a purpose. They are part of a teaching approach that leads up to students doing real reading and real writing.
Thus if I’m expecting students to write a report, we’ll look at various reports in different styles from different contexts. We’ll analyse their language and tone, exploring their linguistic nuts and bolts to ascertain the writer makes the style impersonal or formal. (16) We might examine the use of tense, the deployment of the passive voice, the use of Latinate vocabulary, the avoidance of contractions (using ‘is not’ rather than ‘isn’t), and perhaps the expansion of noun phrases to add detail or precision.
I might use some of those technical terms or I might not. Usually, I will - because I want my students to become more confident in language and - as in Science (17) - knowing that there are technical terms which help us to express ideas is a part of them developing a richer metalanguage. (18)
But we won’t leave it at that. They won’t be better readers or writers yet. We’re not tiptoeing up to the shrine of textual analysis, bowing, (19) and then retreating. I want grammar to be grubby and hands-on. Students will therefore do stuff that gets them playing around with style, writing phrases and sentences and (later) paragraphs using the various techniques we’ve been exploring. In groups, they’ll compare which approach works best.
So we’ll build the students’ own texts, writing small bits first, evaluating them for accuracy and precision, talking about them, writing a bit more. We’ll move from examining the language of a text, through modelling and shared and guided writing, until - for most of them - we’ll give them the independence to write, knowing that the meddling with texts we’ve been doing and, crucially, the talk will help build their skills as writers. (20) Others won’t have ‘got it’ yet: they’ll need more help, more direct instruction, or possibly a writing frame or a literacy coach from Year 12.
As part of this approach, all of these students will have been working through various exercises in grammar and punctuation, though I’m inclined not to call them exercises. They are activities designed to build skills and knowledge.
For some students, we’ll have been taking the linguistic patterns they implicitly know and making them explicit: they are the word-rich. With the word-poor we’ll be doing something more important - teaching them how to read and write in styles they may not have encountered at home.
This, for some, is what we preachers of culture do: we liberate children by sharing with them our most powerful human gift - the power of language.
That’s what I believe and it’s what I try to do. But I do it through a process that leads from exploration to production of language, from reading and talking ‘about’ to making and critiquing and practising and evaluating.
But notice how I don’t do it: (21) I don’t and wouldn’t inflict on students a stand-alone grammar test which, in the hands of many teachers, cowed by the heavy-handed accountability culture of our education system, will be allowed to drive their teaching and reduce classrooms to places where drills and exercises set out of context will be used to train students to quack dutiful answers and fill miserable gaps.
If we want teachers to teach grammar more explicitly, let’s show them how to do it (most know all of this but may lack confidence in teaching it). Most emphatically, let’s not use students, via a squalid little test, as stalking-horses to bring about pedagogical change. They deserve better. (22)
Geoff Barton (23)
Sunday 8 July 2012
(1)First rule broken: I’ve started this sentence with the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ because I think it adds impact to the point I make. That said, I advise my students that as a general rule it’s not necessary to start a sentence with ‘and’. Here, I think it works - a reminder that in writing we constantly need to make decisions, a fact that will be severely distorted by the introduction of a cut-and-dried grammar test.
(2)I’m using the ‘Oxford comma’ here, a comma placed before the conjunction ‘and’. I’m doing so because I’ve just used ‘and’ to link two words in the phrase ‘read and write’ and I think the comma indicates that I’m not just adding another word to the list. I suspect for close readers, it adds precision and stops us having to re-read that part of the sentence in order to adjust our comprehension.
(3)This, I’m afraid, is becoming a habit. I’ve started the sentence with a subordinating conjunction (‘because’, knowing that grammatically I’m on thin ice: we would normally expect it to occur as the conjunction in the middle, or possibly at the start, of a complex sentence, signalling the start of a subordinate clause. But (and there I go again) I think it gives my point more impact by foregrounding the causal connective in this way.
(4)I’ve split an infinitive here knowingly and brazenly because I think it creates a more natural rhythm and is less tortuous than writing ‘dutifully to’ or some other mangled alternative to fend off critics.
(5)All of the students I teach, whatever their age or ability, get taught by me about parenthetical commas - that is, commas that work in pairs (like brackets or parentheses). These are great for pushing information into the background, for making writing more subtle. And, yes, I teach them the term ‘parenthetical commas’. I’d hate them to be tested on whether they know the label, but I want them to understand the concept and, of course, to use it in their writing.
(6)I put the full stop outside the brackets there, because it’s terminating the whole sentence, not just the bit in the brackets. In modelling writing, I’d explain that decision to my students.
(7)Notice that ‘must’. It’s a modal verb, if anyone’s interested, but more important is the convention about how to give it special emphasis. In handwriting, I would underline it, but online that could prove misleading because it would suggest a hyperlink. I could have made it bold, but thought that a bit garish; so - as in all writing - I make a decision: I decide that italics will give a sense that I’m wanting to put some intellectual heft behind the idea. Many readers won’t notice it, but the most astute will, and my meaning, I suspect, will have been more precisely conveyed.
(8)Naughty? I use the coordinating conjunction ‘but’ to kick-start the sentence rather than to join clauses. I think it emphasises the strong contrast with the earlier idea. For extra emphasis I also make the sentence a paragraph on its own. If I was writing something like this with students watching, then I’d explain aloud my thought processes. That, in my opinion, is the single most important element in teaching writing. It’s something that won’t be enhanced by a stand-alone (or is it standalone?) grammar test
(9)In a lesson I’d use the word ‘lift’ to explore standard English and American English. We’d talk about words like ‘elevator’ that are used on both sides of the Atlantic; others that aren’t transferable (they cling on to the archaic ‘gotten’ which we abandoned years ago); and explore reasons for why there’s divergence and similarities in the way we speak and the way we write. I’d hate a test that asked a question about this simply in order to force teachers to teach students about standard English. Notice that I think the ‘standard’ in ‘standard English’ doesn’t need capitalising. Notice also that I say nothing about breaking wind (a euphemism, surely?) in a half-full lift.
(10) One of the most misspelt words in English: ‘practice’ v ‘practise’. Most teachers get it wrong, and I suspect even some politicians do. My best advice is to test the spelling by replacing what you’ve written by ‘advice’ or ‘advise’: eg ‘I need some practice (I need some advice) / I need to practise (I need to advise)’. Not everyone gets it, but it’s the best method I’ve got. Americans have it easy as there’s no distinction between the verb and noun.
(11) I usually teach students that a page of A4 (handwritten) will need around three to five paragraphs. Sometimes - as in articles and blogs - short, one-sentence sentences can be emphatic paragraphs on their own. A stand-alone test won’t help anyone to teach this.
(12) Just as I like parenthetical commas, I also like (and probably over-use) parenthetical dashes. I show my students - again, all ages, all abilities - how they give added emphasis to a background or clarifying idea by putting them between a pair of dashes.
(13) Here I’m consciously using semi-solons to separate phrases in a list. If they were single words I’d use commas. Semi-colons give greater clarity. I can’t imagine how a stand-alone test would help anyone to teach this.
(14) I’m breaking another rule here. ‘Which’ is (in this context) a relative pronoun which refers back to the subject of the preceding clause. Once again, for emphasis I’m using it to kick-start a sentence. Go on: sue me.
(15) I could have used a comma rather than a semi-colon here, but - again (sorry if I’m boring anyone) - I thought the semi-colon signalled a more significant change of direction.
(16) I have a feeling that the best writing often mixes formal expression (‘ascertain’) with informal words and phrases (‘nuts and bolts’). Here’s a great example from a writer I admire a lot, Jay Rayner.
(17) Official documents from government agencies use lower case for subjects (just as I have decided to use lower case for ‘government’). I find this misleading. ‘Science’ is different from ‘science’ and, in particular, ‘History’ is different from ‘history’, as in ‘We can learn a lot from history’ versus ‘W can learn a lot from History’. A ‘naming of parts’ test won’t help teachers to teach this.
(18) Actually, I hate the term ‘metalanguage’, but apart from ‘language about language’ or the now discredited ‘knowledge about language’ (KAL) I can’t think of anything better.
(19) It’s that Oxford comma again.
(20) Talk seems to be a key ingredient in developing writing. I suspect that decontextualised grammar tests will make this less likely to be part of primary lessons in Year 6.
(21) I teach students that colons work like car headlamps: they point ahead to something that follows.
(22)‘The use of ‘stalking horses’ isn’t a grammatical point: it’s an example of a metaphor, possibly a dead one, being used to make a point. In teaching students I explore what phrases like this mean. For example, take the concept of ‘targets’. We seem to rejoice when schools and other institutions ‘exceed’ their targets; yet if a target is (in its original sense) something we aim arrows at, then exceeding our target means that we have missed it. I cam’t see how a written, decontextualised text makes it more likely that I will teach this or help students to understand dead metaphors.
(23)I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog entry. I’m worried about it. Please note that I’m definitely not using it to say that I’m a great teacher (I’m not) or that I know a lot about grammar (I don’t). Instead, it was written to show that helping our students to become better readers and writers is about a process, and that this risks being undermined by the shabby test-driven approach currently being proposed. Please - let’s make a fuss about it.
Sunday, 8 July 2012