Linguistic concepts in L1 grammar education: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

Teaching grammar has always constituted a major part of language education in curricula around the world, although it has also been heavily debated. Most of the debate on grammar teaching focused on the rationales for teaching it, rather than on the linguistic content that should be taught. At the same time, there appears to be a renewed interest in restoring the bond between linguistic theory and grammar education. Previous research has suggested that it would be highly desirable to gain a clearer picture of this content. Which concepts are being discussed in the literature on grammar education, and to what extent are these compatible with modern linguistics, in other words: is the literature on grammar teaching up-to-date? This systematic literature review is the first to dive into these questions. Results indicate: (1) most of the concepts in the literature on grammar teaching are from traditional grammar. To a limited extent, there are also concepts from modern linguistic theory that are being discussed, but mostly implicitly; (2) most concepts are not being motivated because they are meaningful in modern theoretical linguistics, but because they reflect traditional classroom practices and policy. It can consequently be concluded that education on linguistic analysis is not up-to-date, which potentially has severe consequences: implementing insights from modern linguistics is likely to provide students with deeper insights, and teachers with a better equipped pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• Grammar teaching
• linguistic concepts
• educational linguistics
• theoretical linguistics
• syntax
• secondary education
• Systematic Literature Review (SLR)

Acknowledgements

We are most grateful to Brenda van den Broek (University of Antwerp), Xavier Fontich (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Hans Hulshof (Leiden University) for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We also express our thanks to Sebastian Collin (Radboud University Nijmegen) for his help with some of the statistics involved.

Disclosure statement

No benefits or financial interests arise for the authors from the direct application of this research.

Notes

1. There may be even great variation within a country, as in Spain, when it comes to approaches to teaching L1 grammar; this can partly be explained by bilingual contexts in some Spanish regions, but certain linguistic trends with different influences on (teacher) education have also played a role (Fontich and García-Folgado 2018).

2. Van Rijt & Coppen (2017) focused on the syntax-semantics interface, but here, we explicitly added morphology, since some linguistic concepts from syntax do not only overlap with meaning (semantics), but also with morphology (e.g. case).

3. Concepts that were implicitly mentioned have to be distinguished from the exclusion criterion of ‘tacit knowledge’ we used in Table 2. The difference between the two is that the latter is associated with a form of grammar teaching that resists using explicit linguistic knowledge in grammar education altogether, whereas in the former using explicit knowledge is embraced, but simply discusses certain grammatical concepts implicitly. Moreover, tacit knowledge can be seen as knowledge about language that is believed to be internally present or innate (e.g. Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device) without explicit teaching.

4. Some studies do reference studies from other domains than theoretical linguistics, such as psycholinguistics or sociolinguistics, but these too are scarce and generally rather dated.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant number 023.009.034.

Notes on contributors

Jimmy van Rijt

Jimmy van Rijt is a lecturer of Linguistics and a teacher trainer at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences, as well as a PhD candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen, currently conducting research into grammar teaching based on linguistic concepts.

Peter de Swart

Peter de Swart is an assistant professor at the department of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Peter-Arno Coppen

Peter-Arno Coppen is a full professor of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen with a special interest in grammar education and grammar teaching.