ABSTRACT
Grammar has long occupied an uncertain position in, or outside of, the English curriculum. Until the 1960s, grammar was an accepted and unquestioned element in the curriculum, and students learnt how to name and label grammatical terms and structures through a host of activities, such as parsing, diagramming, or six-column analysis. Indeed, in the UK, the ability to correctly identify and name word classes or syntactical structures was included as a tested element in the General Certificate of Education (Ordinary Level) for English right into the 1970s. However, in the 1960s a growing body of educationalists and professionals began to question the value of grammar, alongside questioning narrow closed comprehension tests, and an over-emphasis on writing as a product. The Dartmouth Conference, held in the United States in 1966, was a significant historical moment in re-shaping understanding of a relevant, dynamic and purposeful curriculum for English. As a consequence of this conference, and the changing discourses it generated about subject English, most English-speaking countries abandoned grammar teaching in the years that followed. The key driver behind this was a concern that teaching grammar had no impact upon students' communicative abilities, in speech or in writing. As Dixon subsequently argued, traditional grammar teaching could not “claim to affect language in operation” and he maintained that grammar teachers were “guilty of imposing a body of knowledge which never became a guide to action or a point of reference” (1975: 55). Even worse, some argued that grammar had a negative effect: “The teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing” (Braddock et al., 1963: 37). This argument has had sustained resonance: more than 20 years after it was written, the Kingman Report repeated it almost verbatim in its rejection of traditional grammar teaching: “old-fashioned formal teaching of grammar had a negligible, or, because it replaced some instruction or practice in composition, even a harmful effect on the development of original writing” (DES, 1988: 2.27).
