ABSTRACT
For decades now, school English has had a contentious relationship to grammar and perhaps never more so than in the current era with its constantly morphing digital media and new forms of textuality and a simultaneous pressure to 'deliver' quality outcomes for students in high stakes national and international tests. A pattern of weak linguistic subject knowledge presents an intellectual challenge for a subject dedicated to the study of language and historically resistant to its re-imagining. Re-conceptualizing grammatical instruction in English is problematic for several reasons. This chapter outlines three factors that make this enterprise more challenging: the 'aura of unhappiness' that grammar has accumulated in discourses of deficit (an image problem), a pattern of weak linguistic knowledge across the profession (a knowledge problem) and the controversies that grammar constellates in public media (a distractor problem).
