The post is a promotion for my series in the journal English Today.So far, half of the series has been published--an article on the cognitive biases that colo(u)r our view of other Englishes and one on whether it makes sense to speak of 'British' or 'American' English. The series has allowed me to practi{c/s}e expressing ideas for the book I'm writing.
I'm saddened these days by a lot of things going on in the UK, particularly regarding the current government's treatment of education and healthcare. But, you know, I'm not a Conservative or even a conservative, so it's not surprising I'm not too happy with them. What's moving me to write today is the sadness I feel about aspects of the reaction to what's happening in education.
A bit of background: the Tory (BrE) government/(AmE) administration has made and continues to make many changes to schools and education in England. (The other countries of the UK can do their own thing—and as far as I can tell, they're being more sensible.) The changes include a lot more testing of spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPAG) with more specific and more daunting requirements on grammar at earlier ages. To give a comparison, the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2 (ages 4-11) mentions grammar (or grammatical) 35 times in 2015, compared with 6 times in 2010.
SPAG testing is just one aspect of sweeping changes to education in England under Secretaries of State for Education Michael Gove (2010-2014) and Nicky Morgan (2014-present), but it is an aspect that has been the focus of much attention and anger.
But what worries me sometimes in the rhetoric of the anti-testing movement is anti-grammar sentiments—separate from the anti-testing or anti-early-schooling sentiments. I've seen a lot of "down with grammar!" messages, often alongside "learning should be fun!" The implicit—and sometimes made explicit—message is that grammar takes the joy out of language. Fun and joy, as far as I'm concerned, are more about teaching than about subject matter. I want to take a moment to say "up withgrammar!"
To borrow an analogy from a friend, not wanting your child to learn about grammar [by which I mean: describing how sentences and words are structured] is like not wanting your child to learn about molecules and atoms. Yes, you can happily interact with matter without knowing that it is made up of elements, which are made up of atoms, and that those can combine with others to make all sorts of wonderful things. Not being able to explain the chemistry and physics involved will not stop you from making or enjoying a milkshake. But do you really not want to have a clue that there is more to the world than meets the eye? I've found it very useful to know what I learned at school about matter—even though I grew up and had to discover that there might not be any such thing as electrons. All the same, having a basic knowledge of a model of how matter works makes it easier for me to understand the science I hear about in the news. It helps me understand a little bit better when I read about new medical treatments. It also points out to me how little I know, and makes me a bit more curious about the things I don't know. It helped me learn about the scientific method and encouraged me to wonder at the scales of the universe.
Learning about how language works is like that. Learning about it can lead you to appreciate it more and to be less prejudiced about it, and if you go further with it, you might be able do a lot of things with that knowledge. Speech and language therapists can use it. Teachers can use it. Editors can use it. Cognitive psychologists can use it. Computer programmers and software designers can use it. Having a theory of what language is and how it works — what sentence is, what a word is — has lots of applications and can open up all sorts of other areas for investigation.
As Bas Aarts (of University College London's Survey of English Usage) explains in his response to being a scapegoat for anti-grammarism, any grammatical exercise is a test of a particular model of the grammar of the language. At university level, our students compare models. But we don't present more than one at school level, generally—not for language, not for physics, not (generally) for evolution. A problem in grammar teaching/learning sometimes is that several different models are available and no one's pointed that out, and so concepts from one are mixed up with concepts from another and things stop making sense.
Does that need to happen in the early years of school? No. And it doesn't need to be tested in pressure-filled rote ways. But if you are not confident in your (or your school staff's) knowledge of grammar and you don't have the resources (including TIME) to get that knowledge and confidence up, then teaching-to-a-test is what ends up happening.
As I've written about before,
grammar teaching has never been very strong in the UK. I don't want to
repeat everything I wrote at that blog post (relying a lot on Dick
Hudson and John Walmsley's research), so I do recommend clicking on that
link. This has left us with a situation where everyone involved in the
discussion has different half-developed ideas of what grammar means and which models are relevant. And in that situation, it's really easy to see why people are anti-grammar. Grammar
in that case seems like hocus-pocus that's used as a means to keep some
kids back. That may be the meaning of the SATs test, but it's not the
meaning of grammar.
The only grammar/language teaching to trainee teachers at my UK university was for those who were upgrading themselves from classroom assistant to teacher. (And that programme has since been cancel[l]ed.) It was just assumed that people who had studied literature and had university degrees would be able to teach what an adverb is, should the curriculum ask for grammar. And perhaps back in the day when many of our teachers were trained, there was no inkling of an idea that grammar would be taught at primary level. (Foreign language was made compulsory at primary level in 2010. Many current teachers would not have started their careers with that in mind either.)
In the US, the nature of grammar teaching will vary more as there is more state-by-state variation in curricula. (There is now a national 'Common Core' that is like the UK National Curriculum—but it specifies much less than the National Curriciulum does and the statements about grammar are more about "using standard grammar" than analy{s/z}ing sentences [link is PDF].) I've just checked the website of the Texan university where I last taught in the US (in 1999) and Modern English Grammar is still on the requirements for a Bachelor of Science in Education (English) for middle-school (AmE) grades upward—though now they're allowing people to substitute Introduction to Linguistics for it. (I used to teach both of those—and loved them.) In the US university-level grammar (not linguistics, but grammar) textbooks are big business. In the UK, I've not found a real equivalent to the grammar textbooks we taught with in the US. Again, my older post on grammar teaching covers other aspects of this.
My dream would be for kids to be able to learn about language by using observation, experimentation, discovery, categorization. All that good stuff. Learning how to think, not what to think. The ultimate transferable skill. And while many are working hard to make sure schools have access to the training and confidence to incorporate more linguistic discovery into their work, it seems like an impossible ask at a time when teachers are under an incredible amount of pressure from a government that likes to serve its educational reform with budget cuts.
Another good way to learn about grammar is by learning a language other than your own. Our experience teaching linguistics at university level is the exchange students can out-grammar all our UK-educated home students, because they've had to do metalinguistic thinking—thinking about languages—before. You don't need to learn the language by learning grammar—but being faced with the fact that your language does things differently from others gives insight into what grammar is.
In the meantime, here's a video of the strike rally that we attended today, from the Channel 4 news. The reporter is trying to be clever (I eventually figured out) by naming grammatical constructions he's about to say. It's fair to say, he didn't study much grammar either. (Best bit: when causal connective turns into casual connective. I'm thinking like could be added to the grammar tests as a casual connective.)
But even though I'm slightly taking the mickey out of that reporter, I do think it's not really fair when people pick on grown-ups' inability to answer the test questions. If schools only taught facts and theories that you'd remember as an adult, schooling would be very short indeed. What's important is not whether decades-later-me can explain what an electron is or what the French and Indian War was about or how to tell a preposition from a subordinating construction (ok, maybe I need that one for my job). What's important is
the thinking skills I honed when learning those things
the communication skills I developed in tasks related to those things
the knowledge that any part of the world can be analy{s/z}ed in interesting ways
the echo of those things in my mind, reminding me that things do have names and explanations and I could go look them up if I wanted to
P.S. Lots of other linguists and educationists and other interested people have written a lot of other things about this, but I couldn't take the time to link to them all. Feel free to suggest further reading in the comments!
* The SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) in the US is for (AmE) college/(BrE) university admissions. Lazily quoting Wikipedia, no one really knows what it stands for in England, as it's variously referred to as: "Statutory Assessment Tests, Standard Attainment Tests,Standardised Achievement Tests and Standard Assessment Tests".
The linguistic note here is that in the UK, it's pronounced as a word: Sats. In the US, the SAT is always S-A-T.
I'm often told (by Brits) that Americans are prudes when it comes to language. And I can often demonstrate the error or hypocrisy in their claim. Tidbit/titbitis one I've covered here so far. Another one is levee, which an Englishman informed me is used because Americans don’t want to say (AmE) dike/(BrE) dyke for a built-up bank to prevent the overflow of water.
So let me count out my objections to his claim:
1. Leveehas been used in North America since the 18th century. (Orig. AmE)dyke has only been (slang (or a hyponym) for 'lesbian' since the 20th century. So, Americans definitely didn't start saying levee to avoid association with lesbians.
2. If you're an American like me, you primarily know levee from Don McLean's song American Pie, where it is a convenient rhyme for Chevy. (This is at the top of the 'Lynne's most hated songs' list. I hope I haven't earwormed you with it. My day is ruined.) I think of it as a Louisiana thing (it is used all the way upthe Mississippi River), and that's where it came into English, from French. (That part of the continent came into the US with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.) It may be more common now that people have heard it more in the news because of extreme weather in the Gulf States, but I still think of it as a vaguely regional term, rather than pan-American.
3. I only really knew the word dike from the story of the Little Dutch Boy. Where/when I grew up, I'd've called it a little dam (because we weren't put off by the homophony with damn either!) But note the spelling. The main American spelling of this thing is dike, whereas the 'lesbian' sense is usually spelled/spelt dyke, which which Merriam-Webster lists as 'chiefly British variant of dike'. So, in printed form, at least, the 'taboo' sense and the 'built up bank by the river' geographic (or is it architectural?) sense are a bit more linked. Living in the 'gay capital of Britain' near a place called Devil's Dyke, I can tell you that the British are aware and amused by the punning potential. In that sense, though, it tends to be for a natural feature, not an artificially built-up place by a river.
4. It’s not like the British are freely going about saying dikefor the meaning 'levee'. They tend to prefer the word embankment for such things. Who are the prudes now?
(The green (more BrE) bits above were added after first posting.)
It's been too long since I've posted here. And it will be a bit longer still. I'm currently in the US doing a tour of dictionary archives as part of my research for some on-going projects. Since I have limited time here, I'm working in the evenings to prep for the days in the archives.
But I did want to let you know about some podcasts that I don't think I've mentioned here on the blog. Helen Zaltzman, for her Allusionist podcast, interviewed Rachele de Felice and me about our research on please and we had such a good time talking that we just kept on doing it. So, on her following podcast, she included some of our discussion about thank you.
I complained about this on Facebook last night with the status "Hay fever? Already?" and this led a former (British) student, now working in New York to ask:
They don't really say that here do they? More just 'allergies' in general.
I grew up with hay fever in Upstate New York, and much of my family suffers, so I'm used to hearing the phrase in American English. But, of course, I had to look it up.
I found on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English more mentions of hay fever in Britain than America and more of allergies in North America than in Britain. But allergies wins overall in both countries. Of course, allergies can refer to more than just pollen allergies, so that's not totally surprising.
(The darker the blue in these tables the more a phrase is associated with a particular country in this corpus. The raw numbers can't be directly compared because the sizes of the sub-corpora for each country differ, but the US and GB sets are roughly the same size.)
But looking at Google Books gives a different story:
This shows hay fever as peaking earlier in the US (around the 1940s) and later in the UK (1970s), but not more common in BrE than in AmE. It also shows the rise of allergies--earlier in the US than in the UK. I feel like I use allergies a lot these days because I'm never really sure what I'm sneezing out. But I do seem to be sneezing for most of the year.
So, it looks like the US is leading a change to allergies over hay fever, but this little exercise does demonstrate that a lot depends on the make-up of the data you're using.
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