ABSTRACT
There is little doubt that the Dartmouth Conference in 1966 represents a seminal period in thinking about English teaching, and a turning-point in relation to the teaching of grammar. The conference is properly titled the ‘Anglo-American Conference on the Teaching and Learning of English’ and it was funded by the Carnegie Endowment in response to growing concerns about the teaching of English in classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic. It was jointly organised by the National Conference of Teachers of English and the Modern Language Association and took the form of a three-week seminar, held at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. More than 50 scholars, including leading educationalists such as James Squire, Arthur Jensen, Frank Whitehead, James Britton and John Dixon, came together to discuss ‘what is English?’, but the discussion rapidly moved to focus on the teaching of writing, and with that, the place of grammar. In both England and America, the teaching of writing was typically very product-driven, with an emphasis on accuracy, and including grammar at its core. Grammar teaching was characterised by exercises, drills, labelling and identification. There was an emerging consensus, distilled into a new way of thinking at the Dartmouth Conference, that this product-driven, grammar-heavy approach was not developing confident writers. Instead a process approach, informed by a view of English as personal growth, and energised by the thinking of James Britton and John Dixon, became the dominant theoretical orientation to the teaching of writing. This represented: ‘a shift in attention from learning product to learning process, and other changes based on the British “growth model” for viewing the discipline of English’ (Smagorinsky, 2002, p.23). With this shift came a new orthodoxy, that grammar teaching was ‘a waste of time’ (Muller, 1967, p.68) and across the Anglophone world, many countries moved to reform their English curricula and to remove formal grammar teaching. The effect of this has been powerful and sustained. Indeed, in 2003, Haussamen argued that:
At the start of this new millennium, throughout much of the K-12 English curriculum, grammar is a broken subject. . . Grammar is often ignored, broken off altogether from the teaching of literature, rhetoric, drama, composition, and creative writing. Grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts.
(Haussamen, 2003, p.x)