ABSTRACT
For me as editor, this book has had a multiplicity of prompts. Some of these stem from dilemmas I faced as a classroom teacher and Head of English in a number of New Zealand secondary schools; others stem from conversations subsequent to my involvement as an educational researcher in perhaps the biggest ever review of the impact of two kinds of formal grammar teaching (syntax and sentence-combining) on the quality of student writing (see Andrews et al., 2004a, 2004b). In this introduction, I will be aware of donning a variety of hats at different times: former classroom teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher. This is appropriate, I think, since my co-contributors and I would see ourselves as addressing a broad audience: English/literacy/L1 teachers, preservice teachers, teacher educators and members of the academic community with an interest in this topic. The over-riding question driving this book is: What explicit/implicit knowledge about language in teachers and/or students appears to enhance literacy development in some way? It is a question which takes many forms depending on context. It is also the question that has arguably generated more acrimonious debate than any other among English/literacy teachers, linguists and educationalists in the last five decades (see Locke, 2009). The acrimony is reflected in the kinds of metaphors used to draw attention to the various ways this question has been framed, and the attack and defense mode of much of the argumentation. Urszula Clark (2001) played on this when she entitled her account of language, history and the disciplining of English, War Words. In a Bernsteinian analysis of the “Grammar Wars” in England, Clark (2005 and in this book) views the conflict in terms of Conservative government attempts starting in 1984 to reverse a curriculum trend that “had become increasingly decentralized, relocated from the government to the teaching profession, with both content and assessment becoming increasingly deregularized” and
to pull control over education back towards the centre even more. The curriculum envisaged by this reversal amounted to a restoration of a grammar school curriculum, with the privileged text in English returning to the teaching of Standard English, its grammar and its literature. (2005, p. 37)
In the United States, a major focus of conflict has been the position and positioning of grammar within American classrooms. As Kolln and Hancock argue in their chapter in this book, a range of forces (again, the military metaphor) in the United States signaled the demise of a systematic focus on grammar in US classrooms and a shut-down to dialogue between linguists and educationalists in respect of ways in which grammar could be used in the service of literacy acquisition. For these authors, these forces include NCTE policy, “minimalist” grammar and its anti-knowledge stance, whole-language approaches to language acquisition, the ascendancy of process approaches within composition and the primacy of literature within English curriculums at all levels. Interestingly, Kolln and Hancock view Constance Weaver, who also contributes to this book, as associated with the first two items on this list. In the New Zealand context, as Elizabeth Gordon has described, while there have been pressures to accord traditional grammar knowledge the same kind of status in the educational system as that advocated by conservatives in England, a different kind of “grammar war” was fought in the early 1990s, when it was suggested that the indigenous language, Maaori (an official language), be used as a comparison language for enhancing students’ understandings of the workings of English (see Gordon, 2005). What makes the “grammar wars” in the Australian context interesting, as Frances Christie explains in her chapter, is that it involved the kind of debate that Kolln and Hancock lament the lack of in the United States. In Australia, the debate was between two versions of subject English, both of which offered a social, “progressive” view of English but which viewed the place of explicit grammatical knowledge and what constituted such knowledge (i.e. whose knowledge) very differently. The central issue, to use Christie’s words, was “What knowledge about language should be taught in the name of subject English?”
