ABSTRACT
The contested place of grammar in a literacy curriculum is a peculiarly anglophone phenomenon: throughout most countries in Europe, for example, it is accepted as wholly natural that students should learn the grammar of their own language. But as a phenomenon, the debate about the role of grammar in English rehearsed in England is also common to the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In all five countries, the teaching of formal grammar was abandoned in the second half of the twentieth century, largely rejected by English teachers and educationalists as serving no educational value. English grammar, as taught prior to the 1960s, was largely a matter of syntactical analysis and identification of ‘parts of speech’, and the implication was that such grammatical knowledge would lead to students who wrote and spoke Standard English correctly. Thus grammar teaching was predominantly conceptualised as obedience to rules and the avoidance of error. However, a swelling tide of disenchantment with grammar arose in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1962, Gurrey attributed the decline in grammar teaching to ‘the lack of agreement on all salient points [which] has unsettled the belief of many older teachers that it is of value, and has led many of the younger ones to deny its usefulness’ (1962: 7). English teachers, supported by research evidence which suggested there was no beneficial impact of grammar teaching on students' language use, believed their role was to enable and empower communication and self-expression, not to act as gatekeepers to language standards. Indeed, Randy Bomer, a former president of the US professional association for English teaching, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), argued as recently as 2006 that ‘most English teachers do not see themselves as grammar police, on the lookout for mistakes and intolerant of diverse ways of speaking’ (NCTE 2006).
