Grammar and the English National Curriculum

Abstract

In 1998 the regulatory body for the National Curriculum, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, acknowledged that there was ‘widespread uncertainty’ over the grammar requirements of the English Curriculum. In this paper I argue that the QCA still has not addressed this uncertainty. I analyse the 1999 and 2011 Primary English Curricula, alongside the 2008 Secondary English Curriculum and show that the QCA grammar guidelines lack specificity, with no clear definitions for key terms such as ‘standard English’ or ‘morphology’, further compounding the perceived uncertainty. I argue that this directly contradicts the QCA's acknowledgement that younger teachers may not have been taught a standardised framework for grammar in their own schooling, making the absence of technical definitions and clear guidelines highly significant. Although the QCA may be aware of uncertainties surrounding grammar teaching, their guidelines in the English National Curriculum do not provide a clear account of what pupils must learn about grammar.

Keywords:

• National Curriculum
• English grammar
• teaching
• metalinguistic knowledge

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Chris Christie and Arianna Maiorani at Loughborough University, the anonymous reviewers of this paper and Katy Lever.

Notes

1. Here I use the term ‘metalinguistic knowledge’ to refer to a teacher's awareness of grammar as a discrete subject and their ability to use grammatical terminology such as ‘word class’, ‘syntax’ and ‘morphology’ confidently, correctly and effectively.

2. Such rules included not ending a sentence with a preposition and not beginning one with a conjunction (Cox 1995a, 8).

3. See also Carter (1990, 107–8) for a discussion of the Cox Report and Knowledge about Language (KAL) in the Curriculum.

4. There is some evidence in the literature to support this claim, as Pauwels and Winter (2006) showed that Australian teachers’ knowledge of prescriptive grammatical rules on the ‘correct’ pronoun to use with indefinite referents was influenced by their age. However there are not necessarily any direct parallels between the grammatical knowledge possessed by Australian and UK teachers.

5. According to Wales (2009, 3), this lack of selection of a particular grammatical model is also apparent in the LINC materials, where both Halliday's systemic functional grammar (1985) and Quirk et al.'s (1985) grammar are explicitly referenced, although she is not criticising this approach, instead noting the significance that those working on the LINC materials did actually reference specific grammatical models.

6. In an attempt to clarify their position, the QCA published a set of grammar Assessment Focuses in 2004. These additional guidelines required all pupils to ‘write with technical accuracy of syntax and punctuation in phrases, clauses and sentences’ (QCA 2004, 1). At first, this appears to be a rather technical statement, but on closer analysis, it can be easily paraphrased as ‘pupils must write in (correct) sentences’. This does not indicate what the QCA expects teachers to teach and does not stipulate whether pupils must gain any metalinguistic knowledge.