ABSTRACT
I have left to the last the most difficult of all issues in the English curriculum-what, if anything, pupils should be taught about language, at what age and how. As with other issues dealt with in this book, the Newbolt report laid the basis of what seems to me the position with the most to recommend it. Noting that hostility to ‘traditional grammar’ (especially to the imposition ‘upon English of the forms of Latin’ and the unwarranted prescriptions and proscriptions arising therefrom) had led ‘many teachers to throw grammar entirely overboard’, it insisted that it was ‘highly desirable’ for children to ‘obtain some kind of general introduction to linguistic study’ and that ‘grammar of some kind’ had to form ‘the essential groundwork’ of such study. This grammar, it argued, should be ‘pure’ (i.e. universal and therefore applicable across the range of languages taught at school) and ‘functional’ (i.e. related to pupils’ own speech and language use). The report was aware that there were unresolved problems over precisely what to teach, when to start and whether there should be set lessons or a more
indirect approach, but suggested that the higher elementary (i.e. upper junior and lower secondary) classes might be the best time to begin and that phonetics, the parts of speech and sentence analysis might constitute the basic content.
