The Grammar of Memory

Abstract

This essay focuses on two sites of memory in my professional life. One is from my very early years of teaching, the second from about 10 years later. Each is centred on a moment of controversy in English curriculum in New South Wales, Australia, and each is to do with the teaching of writing and the supposed neglect of language study, including grammar. In each case, the ‘Growth’ model or its manifestation in a particular Syllabus developed and implemented in New South Wales came under attack. I ask in hindsight whether these attacks stand up to the scrutiny of a reading of that Syllabus and argue that there was no conflict between, at least, this particular version of the ‘Growth’ model and the close study of language.

Keywords:

• English curriculum and pedagogy
• ‘Growth’ model
• curriculum history
• language study

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Brenton Doecke for comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Notes

1. National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy: Australia’s standardised testing regime for ‘literacy’.

2. I am not going to attempt here an analysis of the differences between various genre-based approaches and their various labelling of aspects of language. I am mainly referring here to what has become known as the ‘Sydney School’, that includes Frances Christie and Jim Martin, in particular (Richardson 2010). The key issue here is that the history of writing in schools since the mid-1980s in Australia and elsewhere has been influenced – and is now dominated by – a focus on generic structures with the grammar that accompanies these, and that the grammar most favoured by the ‘Sydney School’ is Hallidayan functional-systemics. The need for a conscious, analytical knowledge by students of the details of the accompanying grammar is fundamental to the pedagogy.

3. I should point out that despite the structure of its title, McGraw’s article is arguing that NAPLAN is not a high-stakes test.

4. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority – the body which oversees both the NAPLAN testing and the My School website.

5. This document goes on to say that ‘That’s a small investment, considering the information can be used to track a child’s progress in the important areas of literacy and numeracy and to see how they fare against other students around the country’.

6. NSW English Teachers Association.

7. These latter two articles have no byline.

8. ACES Review was an organ of the self-styled Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES). It comprised business figures, conservative politicians and culturally conservative academics. The members of this group were relentless throughout the 1970s in their attack on educational standards and on levels of literacy through their journal. Davis and Watson, in fact, place primary responsibility on to the ‘back to basics’ movement, as led by ACES, for the merely partial implementation of the spirit of the ‘new English’ Syllabuses in Australia in the period (Davis and Watson 1990, 162).

9. Today, Years 7–10.

10. See, for example, the highly nuanced treatment of language in the chapter ‘A Question of Knowledge’ in Growth Through English (Dixon 1975).

11. The other key studies are Hillocks (1986) and Andrews et al. (2004).

12. Interestingly, another meta-analysis of the relationship between grammatical knowledge and writing development was published at about this time. Like Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer (1963), Hillocks’ (1986) paper also dealt with studies of writing in general, beginning with 2000 items. Of those concerned with the role of grammar, Hillocks concluded that ‘none of the studies reviewed for the present report provides any support for teaching grammar as a means of improving composition skills’ (138).

13. This argument is elaborated in Doecke, Parr, and Sawyer (2014).

14. Genre theorists are not alone in the linking of Arnoldian and Leavisite traditions with ‘Growth’. See also Medway (1990), Patterson (1992, 1993) and Moon (2012).

15. Punctuation and layout here is as per the original.

16. I have also argued (Sawyer 2008) that the Syllabus was not ‘rhetorical’ in the more specialised sense that this term was later to take on in English studies, and which reflects what we eventually came to call ‘critical literacy’ and ‘cultural studies’ (Eagleton 1983, 205–6; Green 1988, 2006, 2007); however, I argue that it was certainly ‘rhetorical’ in the sense put forward by Christie and which focuses on the relationship between audience, purpose and meaning.

17. A lot of this is attributable to the explicit influence of James Moffett on the syllabus (Sawyer 2010a), with Moffett’s work explicitly seeking to move ‘English’ from ‘grammar’ towards ‘rhetoric’ (‘Only in the largest context – the whole composition – can meaning, style, logic, or rhetoric be usefully contemplated’; Moffett 1968, 5).