Grammar teaching in schools: What should teachers be aware of?

Abstract

This paper discusses the advantages of the use of large natural language corpora in promoting grammatical awareness among school teachers and students. The first section addresses the issue of terminology, showing how the study of corpus data can promote the painless acquisition of the terms needed to discuss grammatical categories. It also shows how in some cases the standard terminology is inadequate to the task it has to perform, and that in these cases it makes more sense to concentrate on patterns rather than structures. The second section raises some questions about word‐class and shows how the corpus can be used to relate the patterns a word is found in to the label it is given. It also points out that it is not easy to assign words to classes and that categories tend to be indeterminate. The third section considers prescriptive and descriptive approaches to language and gives corpus evidence that the patterns in common use are very often those that are traditionally identified as ‘incorrect’.