"Not sure you'll get all this — you need to read the pompous piece it's responding to but I thought it was such a hilarious pricking of a balloon that I thought you should point to it in your blog."
Done!
Done!
Friday 24 May 2013
Monday 13 May 2013
Testing, testing
I see the grammar debate is back in the news. Rather tediously, and like so many of these issues, the argument often collapses into two unappealing opposites, when a perfectly sensible and uncontroversial middle ground needn't be beyond our wit.
On the one hand, there is the view that there is no such thing as standard grammar (as argued, rather eliptically, by Michael Rosen) and that, as Charlie Higson puts it, "You can't teach English without teaching grammar, it's inherent." On the other, there is the view that grammar does have fixed rules and that these need to be not just taught but regularly tested.
I argue that one need not be a linguistic prescriptivist with a sort of Euclidean belief in a set of immutable laws — arbitrary archaisms governing when to use 'shall' and when to use 'will', how to not split infinitives, and so on — to recognise the value of having a decent grasp of the forms of sentence structure and orthography commonly used in British English to facilitate clarity in written and spoken communication. The sad reality is that many children will not be exposed to this outside the classroom and will not have them on hand when they first go for an interview. The controversy seems to be about whether teaching critical analysis of Shakespeare, Burns, Orwell and the rest of them will automatically embed a working grasp of these useful conventions, or whether this needs to be done separately and explicitly.
Here comes the smug middle-ground bit, and the plug for my employers. In Scotland, I think we've got the balance about right now. At SQA we've recognised that this osmotic assumption is a bit out of date. That's why we've taken advantage of a new, modular setup to include distinct units in Literacy that will be incorporated into English (and Gàidhlig) courses. In much the same way, we've acknowledged that teaching the -ometries in Maths doesn't necessarily produce numerically competent and confident school-leavers, so we've done the same with Numeracy units. We've also opted to combine continuous coursework with final exams, which again seems to me preferable to a system of assessment based entirely on one or the other.
(Perhaps this is all unnecessary though; the best argument we could present to teenage boys is that a good grasp of grammar will help you get not just jobs but girls.)
It's depressing that this gets hijacked into another interminable left/right argument. By now, we really should be able to agree that if grammatical rules aid clarity and comprehension we should keep them, encourage them, and teach them to children; if not, we shouldn't bother with them. Why we can't just accept this principle then work out the details, rather than turn it into a partisan political debate, is completely beyond me. How many other countries do this?
Perhaps the reason is that, as Chris Cook puts it, "90% of education 'commentary' reflects the writer's own school neuroses." I couldn't possibly comment...
On the one hand, there is the view that there is no such thing as standard grammar (as argued, rather eliptically, by Michael Rosen) and that, as Charlie Higson puts it, "You can't teach English without teaching grammar, it's inherent." On the other, there is the view that grammar does have fixed rules and that these need to be not just taught but regularly tested.
I argue that one need not be a linguistic prescriptivist with a sort of Euclidean belief in a set of immutable laws — arbitrary archaisms governing when to use 'shall' and when to use 'will', how to not split infinitives, and so on — to recognise the value of having a decent grasp of the forms of sentence structure and orthography commonly used in British English to facilitate clarity in written and spoken communication. The sad reality is that many children will not be exposed to this outside the classroom and will not have them on hand when they first go for an interview. The controversy seems to be about whether teaching critical analysis of Shakespeare, Burns, Orwell and the rest of them will automatically embed a working grasp of these useful conventions, or whether this needs to be done separately and explicitly.
Here comes the smug middle-ground bit, and the plug for my employers. In Scotland, I think we've got the balance about right now. At SQA we've recognised that this osmotic assumption is a bit out of date. That's why we've taken advantage of a new, modular setup to include distinct units in Literacy that will be incorporated into English (and Gàidhlig) courses. In much the same way, we've acknowledged that teaching the -ometries in Maths doesn't necessarily produce numerically competent and confident school-leavers, so we've done the same with Numeracy units. We've also opted to combine continuous coursework with final exams, which again seems to me preferable to a system of assessment based entirely on one or the other.
(Perhaps this is all unnecessary though; the best argument we could present to teenage boys is that a good grasp of grammar will help you get not just jobs but girls.)
It's depressing that this gets hijacked into another interminable left/right argument. By now, we really should be able to agree that if grammatical rules aid clarity and comprehension we should keep them, encourage them, and teach them to children; if not, we shouldn't bother with them. Why we can't just accept this principle then work out the details, rather than turn it into a partisan political debate, is completely beyond me. How many other countries do this?
Perhaps the reason is that, as Chris Cook puts it, "90% of education 'commentary' reflects the writer's own school neuroses." I couldn't possibly comment...
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