Grammar for Writing: Shaping Policy and Practice

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The Grammar for Writing? study which forms the foundation for the proposed project is located within a contested, politicised history. Grammar teaching was generally abandoned in Anglophone countries in the 60s on the grounds that it made no difference to children's language capacities or writing abilities. Research has tended to focus on whether explicit learning of grammar benefits children's writing and the results appear to be conclusively negative. Indeed, Hillocks and Smith (1991) argue that 'research over a period of nearly 90 years has consistently shown that the teaching of school grammar has little or no effect on students.' Certainly, a string of robust reviews in the past 50 years (eg Braddock et al 1963; Elley et al 1975; Hillocks 1986; Andrews et al 2006) have concluded that teaching grammar is of no benefit in supporting writing development. There is, however, a major difficulty with almost all of the research that these reviews represent. The studies repeatedly investigate whether various forms of isolated grammar teaching, such as learning transformational grammar, or parsing sentences, improves writing. In contrast, our study has eschewed decontextualised teaching of grammar. Instead, the intervention teaching materials draw attention to the grammar of writing in an embedded and purposeful way at relevant points in the learning. In this way, young writers were introduced to what we have called 'a repertoire of infinite possibilities', explicitly showing them how different ways of shaping sentences or texts, and how different choices of words can generate different possibilities for meaning-making. The goal of such an approach is to support writers in taking control and ownership of the texts they compose, making choices which enable them to voice themselves in their writing, and to shape texts to meet the writer's rhetorical goals. We think of this as helping writers to become designers of text, understanding the warp and the weft of text, its textures and nuances, and able to combine both creative and critical thinking in the process of composition. The strongly positive effect of this intervention has enabled the study to offer a new theory of the grammar-writing relationship.The proposed project seeks to build on the success of this approach in three significant ways. Firstly, the project will seek to bridge the research-practice interface by working collaboratively, through Research Action Partnerships, with a small number of English departments to explore the implications of the research in the classroom practice of these departments. The focus of these collaborations will be on trialling the successful intervention pedagogy, on addressing whether the pedagogy can be equally successful for weaker writers, and on raising critical questions about the intervention. This aspect of the project will address the question: What are the main themes, issues and concerns in professionals' discussion of the role that this research suggests grammar can play in a pedagogy of writing? Secondly, the project will seek for broader national impact through the holding of a National Stakeholders Conference, bringing together practitioners, researchers, advisors, teacher educators, inspectors and policy-makers to engage in critical discussion about the policy and practice implications of our research. This will be further informed by a set of four international perspectives on the issue and will lead to negotiated decisions about recommendations for further action. This aspect of the project will address the question: What are the opportunities and barriers to engaging professionals and policymakers in the policy implications of this research?Thirdly, the project team will develop a set of commercial teaching resources, drawing on the successful pedagogy of the intervention, and informed by the outcomes of the Research Action Partnerships, to generate maximum access for English teachers.