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Conceptualisations of ‘grammarteaching’: L1 English teachers’ beliefsabout teaching grammar for writingAnnabel Mary Watson aa Graduate School of Education, College of Social Science andInternational Studies , University of Exeter , Exeter , UKPublished online: 20 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Annabel Mary Watson (2013): Conceptualisations of ‘grammar teaching’:L1 English teachers’ beliefs about teaching grammar for writing, Language Awareness, DOI:10.1080/09658416.2013.828736

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Language Awareness, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2013.828736

Conceptualisations of ‘grammar teaching’: L1 English teachers’beliefs about teaching grammar for writing

Annabel Mary Watson∗

Graduate School of Education, College of Social Science and International Studies, University ofExeter, Exeter, UK

(Received 10 February 2013; final version received 22 July 2013)

This paper reports on an investigation of L1 English teachers’ conceptual and eval-uative beliefs about teaching grammar, one strand of a larger Economic and SocialResearch Council (ESRC)-funded investigation into the impact of contextualised gram-mar teaching [RES-062-23-0775]. Thirty-one teachers in English secondary schoolswere interviewed three times each over the course of a year-long project, discussingtheir beliefs about writing in general and grammar in particular. The results indicatethat while teachers’ initial conceptualisations of ‘grammar teaching’ tend to reflect aprescriptive and traditional model of grammar, their beliefs about how it may be of valuetend to evoke a rhetorical model. Their initial prescriptive conceptualisation is also re-lated to negative affective responses to ‘grammar’. This paper suggests that attempts toencourage support or enthusiasm for teaching grammar will therefore need to deal withteachers’ explicit awareness (or lack thereof) of the variety of meanings that ‘grammarteaching’ can have.

Keywords: beliefs; cognition; English; grammar; L1

Introduction

This paper explores the relationship between secondary school L1 English teachers’ con-ceptualisations of ‘grammar teaching’ and their beliefs about how teaching grammar maybenefit their students’ writing development. The fact that teachers’ beliefs influence theirclassroom behaviour and pedagogical practice is well established (Nespor, 1987; Pajares,1992): beliefs help teachers to ‘interpret and simplify’ information (Calderhead, 1996,p. 719), and guide decision-making by acting ‘as a filter through which a host of instruc-tional judgements and decisions are made’ (Fang, 1996, p. 51). For grammar teaching, thestudy of beliefs has particular relevance: Nespor has suggested that beliefs are particu-larly important in helping to deal with ‘ill-defined’ situations where teachers have to dealwith a number of simultaneous and competing interactions, demands, and priorities in theclassroom (1987, p. 324), and Borg and Burns add that ‘in the absence of uncontestedconclusions about what constitutes good practice, teachers base instructional decisions ontheir own practical theories’ (2008, p. 458). Grammar teaching constitutes just such an‘ill-defined’ and ‘contested’ domain, so the beliefs held by teachers are likely to have aparticularly strong influence on their practice.

A study of teachers’ beliefs about grammar is particularly timely, given the movesto reintroduce grammar or cement its position in L1 teaching in Australia, the UK, andthe USA (Locke, 2010). The new Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2009), for

∗Email: a.m.watson@exeter.ac.uk

C© 2013 Taylor & Francis

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example, requires students to demonstrate knowledge about the language, and the draft of thenew UK National Curriculum, due to be implemented from 2014, has grammar now firmlyembedded: at primary level a statutory ‘grammar and punctuation’ appendix outlines spe-cific features which should be taught and a controversial new ‘spelling, punctuation, andgrammar’ test has been introduced at the end of Key Stage 2, while at Key Stage 3 pupils arerequired to ‘make precise and confident use of linguistic [and literary] terminology’ (DfE,2013, p. 52). How teachers respond to a policy is in a large part determined by their ownvalues and beliefs, and particularly the ‘degree of congruence’ which they perceive betweenthe beliefs that underpin the policy and their own ‘belief system’ (Rokeach, 1968, p. 83).Studies of beliefs and practice indicate that changes in teachers’ practice will inevitably ‘bere-grounded in practice with which the teacher already feels an affinity’ (Strong-Wilson,2008, p. 448), and that teachers’ belief systems are equally or more important in shapingtheir practice than their knowledge about teaching (Twiselton, 2002). Clandinin’s warningthat ‘curriculum innovations’ are doomed to fail unless they take account of teachers (1985,p. 364) should be heeded by any seeking to change curricular policy or alter pedagogicalpractice.

Background

The theoretical context: studying beliefs

Despite the proliferation of terminology used in the studies of teacher beliefs or cog-nition (see Borg, 2006; Pajares, 1992), there are some areas of broad agreement. It isgenerally established that beliefs are ‘created through a process of enculturation and so-cial construction’ (Pajares, 1992, p. 316), moulded through experience (Nespor, 1987),and that they form a lens through which teachers view and interpret situations (Calder-head, 1996; Fang, 1996). This study follows Nespor (1987) and Pajares (1992) in sep-arating out conceptual elements of belief – what teachers believe grammar teaching‘is’ – from evaluative elements – if and how teachers believe that teaching grammaris useful. A further facet of belief identified by Nespor, the ‘affective’ element, hasbeen reported on by Watson (2012), drawing on the same data set that informs thispaper.

In operational terms, beliefs can be defined in a number of different ways. Rokeach’sdefinition that a belief is ‘any simple proposition . . . capable of being preceded by thephrase, “I believe that”’(1968, p. 113) has been countered by researchers who have arguedthat beliefs can be tacit, even ‘unconsciously held’ (Kagan, 1990, p. 424), and that ifconscious, they can be difficult or potentially impossible to articulate (Sahin, Bullock, &Stables, 2002). Calderhead has summarised these ideas in his argument that ‘some thinkingmay not be . . . verbalisable’ (1987, p. 185), and that ‘teachers may not have access tomuch of their thinking’ (1996, p. 711). The distinction between ‘espoused theories’ and‘theories in use’ drawn by Argyris and Schon (1974) provides a helpful way to distinguishbetween these different conceptualisations of ‘belief’. Theories of action are the ‘repertoireof concepts, schemas, and strategies’ (Argyris, Putnam, & McLain Smith, 1985, p. 81) uponwhich people draw to guide their responses to different situations. ‘Espoused theories’ arethose which people state when asked about their behaviour, while ‘theories in use’ are thetacit beliefs that actually guide behaviour, and that can be inferred through observation.For the purposes of this study, the beliefs investigated are ‘espoused’ rather than tacit, andoperationalised as propositions or statements.

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The pedagogical context: the place of grammar in writing pedagogies

Whether and how the teaching of grammar might support students’ linguistic and met-alinguistic development has long been a subject of debate across research, policy, andprofessional spheres (Hudson & Walmsley, 2005), particularly in Anglophone countries(Locke, 2010; Myhill, 2005). There remains inadequate understanding of ‘the role lan-guage itself plays in literacy development’ (Schleppegrell, 2007, p. 121), and particularlyof ‘the connection between grammar taught in context and the accuracy and quality ofwriting’ (Andrews, 2010, p. 94). In research and policy, which ‘grammar’ is taught, andwhich approach to grammar teaching is taken are both points of contention. Hartwell (1985)has elaborated some of the different ways in which the term ‘grammar’ is used, discrimi-nating between our innate use of linguistic patterns to create meaning, attempts to describeand analyse such patterns, matters of usage, traditional school grammars, and stylisticgrammars. Lefstein has shown that elements of the traditional approach are still presentin the UK classrooms in what he defines as ‘rule-based’ grammar teaching, a prescriptiveapproach which positions grammatical conventions as ‘rules to be obeyed’, focuses on‘proper English’, and uses decontextualised exercises to help students to learn and applyrules (2009, p. 380). He contrasts this to what he characterises as ‘rhetorical grammar’, thelanguage of which is prevalent in more recent English curriculum documentation such asthe Grammar for Writing handbook (DfEE, 2000). Rhetorical grammar positions conven-tions as ‘resources to be exploited’, focuses on ‘choice’ and effect, and employs a pedagogywhich ‘involves inductive explorations of texts, discussion of rhetorical and grammaticalchoices, and pupil application of grammatical knowledge in written communication tasks’(Lefstein, 2009, p. 380).

The distinctions between different approaches to grammar teaching are not always sowell defined in research literature. The latter half of the twentieth century saw a reactionagainst Hartwell’s rule-based ‘school grammars’ in Anglophone countries (Myhill, 2005),prompted by influential reviews of writing pedagogies by Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, andSchoer (1963) and Hillocks (1984), both of which reported that ‘the teaching of formalgrammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice inactual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing’ (Braddock et al.,1963, p. 38). Recent reviews of both writing pedagogies in general (Graham & Perin, 2007)and sentence-level grammar teaching in particular (Andrews et al., 2006) have similarlyfailed to find convincing evidence that teaching grammar can have a positive effect onstudents’ writing. However, the evidence base for such claims is limited (Graham, 2010),and Andrews et al. in particular has been criticised for failing to clarify the ‘significant dif-ferences’ between ‘the teaching of grammar in different countries, in different decades, andin different contexts’ (Myhill, Jones, Lines, & Watson, 2012, p. 141). A more recent study(Jones, Myhill, & Bailey, 2012) found a positive benefit (e = 0.21) from a contextualisedand rhetorical approach to grammar teaching, with evidence that the intervention had aneffect ‘not simply at the syntactical level of the sentence but . . . on overall effectiveness’of student writing (p. 13). The significance of teachers as mediators was particularly ap-parent, with the intervention having more impact when delivered by teachers with mediumlinguistic subject knowledge than those rated high or low, as well as having more benefitfor more able student writers.

The professional context: UK teachers and recent policy

Against the background of academic debate is a movement towards a centralised,government-led ‘coercive policy’ (Norman, 2010, p. 40) intended to improve standards

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in literacy, first introduced to the UK primary schools via The National Literacy Strategy(DfEE, 1998), and secondary schools via the Framework for teaching English: Years 7, 8and 9 (DfES, 2001). This development is paralleled by literacy drives in other Anglophonecountries such as the USA (Kolln & Hancock, 2005) and Australia (Masters & Forster,1997). The strategy placed significant demands on teachers’ linguistic subject knowledgeand their ability to make such knowledge ‘intelligible and useful’ to their pupils, particu-larly given that many of these teachers had not been taught grammar themselves (Beard,2000, p. 207). The stipulation that grammar must be taught explicitly was ‘more a matterof fashion than a development driven by academic research’ (Cajkler, 2004, p. 5), madewithout support from a substantial evidence base (Wyse, 2001), without a secure theoreticalbasis (Myhill, 2005), and with accompanying advisory documents that were riddled witherrors (Cajkler, 2004). Teachers participating in this study were working with the revisedEnglish framework (DCSF, 2008), and it is likely that up to 10 years of working and trainingwithin the strategy will have influenced their beliefs.

The reintroduction of grammar to the curriculum has been accompanied by a growingrecognition that teachers are ultimately the arbiters of how curricular policy is enacted inthe classroom (Clark, 2010). There has been a recent interest in teachers’ beliefs aboutEnglish (e.g. Findlay, 2010), and in how beliefs relate to effective pedagogical practice(Poulson, Avramidis, Fox, Medwell, & Wray, 2001) and to student attainment (Wyatt-Smith& Castleton, 2004). However, teachers’ beliefs about grammar remain under-researched,despite concerns regarding teachers’ confidence in teaching writing (Andrews, 2008; Beard,2000). The largest scale study to date was a survey of 137 teachers published before thestrategy by the QCA (1998). The results painted a picture of a profession that was uncom-fortable about grammar, comprised teachers who lacked confidence in their ability to teachit or indeed in the value of teaching it. There was a strong association of explicit grammarteaching with prescriptivism and old-fashioned teaching methods such as decontextualised‘exercises’ and ‘drilling’, along with a general lack of confidence in defining grammar,particularly in understanding ‘the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge oflanguage’ (QCA, 1998, p. 26). This finding was echoed by Cajkler and Hislam, who foundconceptual uncertainty in a study of trainee primary school teachers, with some participantsmentioning phonics or focusing ‘principally on spelling and punctuation’ when asked aboutgrammar teaching (2002, p. 172). The US-based studies have similarly reported that teach-ers struggle to define grammar, noting confusion between grammatical rules and usage orlinguistic etiquette (Petruzella, 1996; Vavra, 1996). In a UK study of English with mediaand modern foreign language teacher trainees, Pomphrey and Moger reported that whileboth sets of students professed ‘preference for descriptive grammar’ the language used inopen comments ‘was the language of prescriptive rather than descriptive grammar’, which‘suggests that they have not always internalised a complete understanding of descriptivegrammar even though it may superficially seem a more palatable alternative to a prescrip-tive view’ (1999, p. 232). These findings suggest that many teachers have an incompleteunderstanding of ‘grammar’ and do not always fully understand or recognise the differentmeanings as identified by Hartwell (1985). They also indicate teachers’ struggle to con-ceptualise grammar pedagogies, reflecting the fact that in L1 teaching there are no cleartraditions akin to the binaries seen in L2 research, such as focus on form/focus on meaning(Ellis, 2001), or inductive and deductive approaches (Andrews, 2003). The limited recentresearch into teachers’ beliefs suggests that grammar, while accepted by teachers, is stillperceived to be a secondary area of English: Findlay’s recent interviews with seven teachersrevealed that grammar is seen as ‘a legitimate aspect of the subject’ but that ‘teachers donot enjoy teaching it and regard it as a chore’ (2010, p. 4). Given that grammar has been

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foregrounded in the new English curriculum (DfE, 2013), it now seems important that theseviews are explored in more depth.

Method

The study is one strand of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-fundedproject designed to investigate the impact of contextualised grammar teaching on students’writing development (Jones et al., 2012). A randomised control trial was embedded withina contextualising qualitative study which included lesson observations and interviews withstudents and teachers. This investigation into teachers’ beliefs uses data from interviewswith the 31 participant teachers, all of whom were teaching English to Year 8 students(12–13 years old) in secondary schools in the South West and West Midlands of England.Each teacher was interviewed three times over the course of a year, providing a set of 93interviews. The participants range from newly qualified teachers to heads of departmentwith over 30 years in the profession. Nineteen have ‘English’ degrees (sometimes combinedwith other subjects), three have ‘English literature’ degrees, one has an ‘English languageand linguistics’ degree, and eight hold degrees in other subjects.

All the teachers were observed delivering schemes of work focused on narrative fic-tion, argument, and poetry writing: the intervention group using detailed lesson plans andresources provided by the project team, and the comparison group using outline schemeswhich addressed the same objectives, drawn from the revised Framework for TeachingEnglish (DCSF, 2008). To avoid compromising the controlled trial, teachers initially wereunaware that the project was focused on grammar, although they were told that there was a‘hidden’ focus within a wider writing remit. Therefore, it was only in the last of the threeinterviews that teachers were asked explicitly for their views about grammar teaching,although earlier interviews frequently provided opportunities for teachers to express theiropinions and feelings about grammar. The three semi-structured interviews were organisedinto three sections: the first section asking teachers to reflect on the lesson just observed, thesecond asking them to discuss their confidence and beliefs about teaching narrative fiction,argument, or poetry, and the third probing their beliefs about writing more generally. In thefinal interview, teachers were asked what they understand by the term ‘grammar teaching’,along with questions regarding its value or lack of it, whether grammatical terminology isnecessary, and how they approach teaching grammar themselves.

The investigation was structured around core elements of belief as defined by Nespor(1987): conceptual, evaluative, and affective. The interviews were coded inductively underthese major themes using NVIVO. This article focuses chiefly on the conceptual elementsand the relationship between conceptual and evaluative beliefs. After coding, commentswere arranged into ‘belief profiles’ which included bullet-point interpretations of teachers’statements, and these were presented to the participants at a dissemination conference forparticipant validation and further elaboration. The teacher names used here are pseudonyms.Tables of results show bottom-level codes, the number of statements (references) that relateto each code, and the number of teachers who made a comment relating to each code.

The interviews capture teachers’ espoused feelings and so are confined to a conceptual-isation of beliefs which sees them as propositional and conscious, rather than tacit ‘theoriesin use’ (Argyris et al., 1985). However, the use of observations and interviews enablesdiscussion of both generalised feelings and specific events which allow for the ‘context-specific’ nature of beliefs (Pajares, 1992, p. 319), and the use of the three interviews alongwith feedback on the belief profiles also allows for some change over time.

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Table 1. Conceptual beliefs.

Code DefinitionNumber ofReferences Teachers

Defining grammarHard to define Comments where teachers express difficulty in

defining ‘grammar teaching’7 4

‘It’s not’ Comments that define ‘grammar teaching’ interms of what it is ‘not’

7 5

Meaning haschanged

Comments in which teachers suggest that theconcept of ‘grammar teaching’ has changed inmeaning

2 2

Prescriptive modelTerminology Comments that define ‘grammar teaching’ as

being about learning of terminology orlabelling words or parts of sentences

15 14

Rules Comments that define grammar in terms of‘rules’ of language, or that give examples ofrules in the definition

12 9

Formulaic Comments that refer to grammar as ‘mechanical’or ‘formulaic’

15 8

Correctness Comments that link grammar to ideas of accuracyor correctness

9 7

Right or wrong Comments that refer to grammar as an aspect ofEnglish that can be ‘right or wrong’

8 7

Exercises Comments that conceptualise grammar teachingin terms of decontextualised exercises

4 3

Old-fashioned Comments that refer to grammar teaching as‘old-fashioned’

3 3

Rhetorical modelEffects Comments that conceptualise grammar teaching

as concerned with the creation of effects,deliberate design, and manipulation of writing

9 9

Results

Conceptual beliefs: a prescriptive model

Teachers were asked to define ‘grammar teaching’ in their third interview (see Table 1).At this point, the lack of confidence in defining grammar noted in responses to the QCA(1998) survey was evident in some responses.

A number of teachers reflected on or demonstrated the difficulty of defining ‘grammarteaching’. Four teachers suggested that grammar teaching is hard to define, struggling toarticulate the ‘airy concept’ (Laura). Five other teachers approached the definition by out-lining what grammar teaching is not, attempting to establish when teaching about languageor sentences becomes ‘grammar teaching’. These responses again reflected difficulty indefining grammar, particularly in separating it out from other areas of language study.

That’s not so much grammar as, just sentence structure . . . I mean I know that they’re notseparate things but maybe it just doesn’t involve the same level of terminology as grammardoes. (Heather)

When teachers did define ‘grammar teaching’, their responses predominantly framedgrammar within a traditional or prescriptive model. The most common response identifiedthe teaching of metalinguistic terminology as its defining feature. Fourteen of the teachers

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described teaching grammar to be ‘putting labels on things’ (Pamela) or teaching ‘a verytechnical vocabulary’ (Sylvia) in their definitions, a view summed up by John’s commentthat ‘my initial thought is that it’s the explicit teaching of specific terms’.

Alongside terminology, other common definitions of ‘grammar teaching’ conceptu-alised grammar as rule-bound, relying on notions of writing ‘correctly’ or ‘accurately’,of being ‘right or wrong’, and of learning ‘rules’ or formulaic patterns. Nine teachersresponded that grammar teaching involves addressing a collection of ‘rules’, which are tobe learned and applied: ‘Grammar teaching is teaching the practical application of rules’(Tim). A further prescriptive understanding of grammar teaching focused on ‘correct’ useof English in the explanations of seven teachers. These included statements that concep-tualised grammar teaching in terms of using language ‘properly’ (Celia; Gina), ‘correctly’(Arthur; Catherine; Gina; Jane; Pamela), or ‘accurately’ (Sally). Such definitions oftendiscussed grammar in terms of usage, ‘teaching students to write sort of in a conventionalformal way’ (Jane), emphasising the importance of how people are judged by their writing:‘if they can use it correctly and people see them using it correctly then they will take it moreseriously’ (Gina). The focus on accuracy was also echoed in the responses which concep-tualised grammar as an aspect of English that is ‘right or wrong’ (a phrase used exactly byLaura, Rose, and Tim). This ‘objective’ understanding of grammar was contrasted to theidea that English is generally considered to be ‘subjective’, as in Rose’s comment:

I’m always saying to them in English that there’s no wrong answer, . . . saying that let’s forgetgrammar, because there is a right or wrong answer there, isn’t there?

In total, 13 teachers described grammar in terms of ‘correctness’, ‘accuracy’, or ‘beingright or wrong’ when they were asked to define it.

Seven teachers described grammar teaching as a formulaic or mechanical approach tolanguage study. There was a degree of ambiguity in these statements: while the metaphorof ‘mechanics’ may suggest a rule-bound perception of grammar, teachers also used it torefer to ideas that foregrounded stylistic elements. However, these responses consistentlyconceptualised grammar teaching as the study of prescribed formulaic patterns of language.Gina, for example, discussed using ‘recipe’ approaches to sentence structure in preparationfor exams, both to support weaker students and to help others to attain the highest levels.Here, a conflict in her feelings was evident as she positioned this approach as ‘shameful’when defining grammar, but in an earlier interview had suggested that it was effective, per-haps indicating a tension between the urge to provide a quick-fix approach for examinationsand the desire to facilitate deeper learning:

At A∗ we just fit them into almost like a formula, and that I thought was quite fascinatingbecause I used to say you couldn’t make A∗s but you can. (Interview 1)

I’ve also shamefully given it almost like a recipe to kids at GCSE, just saying right when yougo in there you are going to use a simple sentence next to a long compound sentence for effect.(Interview 3)

Less common definitions that also relate to the prescriptive model included those whichfocused on a traditional idea of grammar pedagogy, echoing the QCA (1998) findingsthat teachers associated grammar with exercises and drills, and recalling Hartwell’s (1985)fourth category of ‘school grammar’. These included Sylvia’s comment that ‘it means,you know from my experience, a lot of working from books and copying out phrases andchanging them and things that can be beautifully marked and easily ticked like a mathslesson’, and those which described grammar teaching as innately ‘old-fashioned’ (Leanne,Rachel, Tim).

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Table 2. Evaluative beliefs.

Code DefinitionNumber ofReferences Teachers

Rhetorical modelEffects Comments focusing on the creation of

‘effects’ as the most important value ofteaching grammar

11 10

Craft Comments suggesting that learning aboutgrammar helps students to consciouslycraft their writing

11 8

Choices Comments suggesting that learning aboutgrammar makes students more aware ofthe choices they make in their writing

12 6

Toolkit Comments suggesting that learning aboutgrammar gives students ‘tools’ or a‘toolkit’ for thinking about, talkingabout, and manipulating language

8 6

Awareness of process Comments suggesting that learning aboutgrammar helps students to understandwriting as a process

4 3

Prescriptive modelRules Comments that learning grammar helps

students to ‘learn the rules’13 8

Accuracy Comments that imply or state thatlearning grammar improves theaccuracy of students’ writing

5 4

Far fewer teachers – just over a quarter – emphasised a rhetorical or stylistic understand-ing of grammar in their definitions. These teachers defined grammar teaching as concernedwith the manipulation of language for effect. Lydia’s definition summed up this understand-ing by explaining that grammar teaching is not just about ‘the naming of parts’ but ratherabout promoting metalinguistic understanding:

Giving the children the vocabulary and the knowledge that they need so that they are creatingeffects on purpose, and if they have done something well, making sure that it hasn’t happenedby mistake . . . that they know what it is, they know how they’ve done it, so that they canreplicate that success again.

Evaluative beliefs: a rhetorical model

When teachers were asked to discuss the benefits of teaching grammar, the relative weight-ing of the prescriptive and rhetorical models outlined above was reversed (see Table 2).When expressing evaluative beliefs, teachers tended to position grammar within a rhetor-ical model, focusing on ‘choice’ rather than ‘rules’, ‘effects’ rather than ‘accuracy’, andcontextualised rather than decontextualised pedagogy.

The most widely held perception of how grammar can support students’ writing develop-ment was one that related it to children’s ability to craft or design their writing, manipulatinglanguage purposefully. Eighteen of the participants made at least one comment relating tothis theme.

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Ten teachers commented that the study of grammar can help students to understandhow to create different ‘effects’ in their writing, linking the improvement of students’metalinguistic understanding to improvement in writing ability:

You can create effects through it, your writing will improve by having this knowledge of howit works. (Janine)

Even teachers who elsewhere stated that they ‘don’t do’ grammar, like Olivia, indicatedthat they believe in the value of discussing the effects of different linguistic structures withtheir students:

We would spot how those sentences, variation of sentences work, and how they would have animpact on the reader.

Closely linked to this focus on effect were comments that discussed the importance ofgrammar in helping students to ‘craft’ their writing. Teachers in this code valued students’ability to consciously shape their work, ‘designing the sentences’ (Grace). They believedthat attention to grammar helps students to understand that ‘a writer doesn’t just put a greatstory down by accident . . . it’s a craft’ (Janine). Some were able to clarify this idea byreferring to examples, such as using grammar to ‘mimic speech and mimic tones of voiceand types of voices and characters’ (Tim), or studying syntax to reveal how ‘where the wordis in the sentence stresses [those] points’ (Joanne). Six teachers discussed the potential ofgrammar to alert children to the choices they have when they write, enabling them ‘to makeinformed decisions’ (Josie). These teachers emphasised the value of grammar teaching inpromoting metalinguistic awareness, giving students a way to think about, talk about, andexperiment with their writing:

By talking about it they’re more able to make decisions because they can actually ask and theycan discuss their own writing. (Laura)

In contrast, only eight teachers referred to the learning of ‘rules’ as a valuable benefitof being taught grammar. These teachers commonly described learning about the ‘rules’of language as ‘liberating’ (Laura), focusing on the fact that students ‘can choose to breakthem’ (Tim). However, improving students’ ability to accurately conform to rules was verylow on the list of perceived benefits. Only four teachers implied that teaching grammar helpsstudents to improve the accuracy of their writing, suggesting that it can help paragraphing,sentence construction, and punctuation. Of these four, only Arthur claimed outright thatteaching grammar ‘does help’ students to write ‘more accurately’.

A case study

Different conceptualisations of grammar were also seen to underpin what superficiallycould appear to be inconsistencies in some teachers’ opinions. Across all three interviews,for example, Grace made several blunt, affective comments which indicated her dislikeof grammar. She admitted to being ‘consistently bored by grammar’, finding it ‘a boringthing to have to explore’ and professed to ‘hate’ grammatical terminology. This attitudewas clearly linked to her perception of herself as a literature specialist, ‘more literaturethan language’. She also objected that teaching grammar ‘takes away the fun . . . andcreativity’ of writing, stated that her students ‘don’t need to know the terms because there’snot a grammar test’ and claimed that she doesn’t teach grammar. She also stated that ‘themechanics of language and how it’s shaped is irrelevant.’

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However, when pressed to go into more detail about her views in the third interview,Grace recognised that the anti-grammar identity she had constructed was causing her tomake potentially misleading comments. She admitted ‘I’m being facetious. Yes, I do teachthem grammar and yes they do know the words.’ She also qualified her dislike by explainingthat she thinks that it can be useful to explore ‘the mechanics of a sentence and of languageand of why it’s shaped that way’, and that it is important that students ‘know how’ to shapelanguage ‘and why they’re doing it’. Grace also partially contradicted her comment thatgrammar is boring when she explained that she enjoys the exploratory elements of teachinggrammar, saying that ‘I particularly enjoy asking them [students] to compare the effect ofone effect over the other or one technique over the other or one structure over another.’

Close inspection reveals that these seeming inconsistencies are probably caused bycontext, and particularly by the fact that it seems likely that Grace is talking about differenttypes of grammar. Her comment that she doesn’t teach it may refer to Hartwell’s (1985)fourth category: she doesn’t teach the sort of grammar that she remembers from her ownschooling, ‘by rote, by tests and reciting it’, but rather tries to teach it in a more activeway, referring to ‘punctuation rap and human sentences’ as two activities she has tried. Itmay also be this prescriptive and decontextualised form of grammar that she finds ‘boring’,disassociating it from her enjoyment of the exploratory, rhetorical, and subjective activityof discussing the effects of different patterns of language, a version of grammar closer toHartwell’s fifth, stylistic category.

Discussion

Given the range of meanings and associations possible with the notion of ‘grammar’ it isperhaps unsurprising that teachers were found to be conceptualising the term in varied ways,and this finding replicates that of numerous studies conducted in the UK and the USA (e.g.Cajkler & Hislam, 2002; Petruzella, 1996; QCA, 1998). However, this research indicatesinteresting trends in teachers’ use of the word when relating it to teaching contexts. There isa similar discrepancy in the way teachers talked about grammar teaching to that discussedby Pomphrey and Moger (1999): here teachers’ initial conceptualisations tended to evokea prescriptive model, while discussion about what they valued about teaching grammartended to prompt a rhetorical one.

It was notable that no teachers referred explicitly to particular models of grammarteaching when defining it. Teachers did not show any familiarity with pedagogical modelsthat have taken root in the USA, such as Weaver’s (1996) Contextualised Grammar orKolln and Gray’s (2010) Rhetorical Grammar. Only one teacher explicitly identified amodel of grammar when he referred to systemic functional linguistics, and this was notlinked to any pedagogical knowledge as he described it as being entirely unrelated tohis teaching. Although teachers used some of the language of rhetorical grammar, asdiscussed above, they did not name the approach or indicate that they recognise it as beinga particular pedagogical model. The fact that teachers demonstrate neither a consistentconceptualisation of grammar, nor a clear understanding of pedagogical approaches toteaching it, means that the problems identified by the QCA survey have persisted despitethe introduction of the literacy strategy and English framework: teachers still lack confidencein defining grammar and in situating it within the wider study of language, and still tend toassociate it with prescriptivism and old-fashioned teaching methods (1998, p. 26).

The tendency to immediately call to mind a prescriptive conceptualisation may relate tothe way in which grammar is discussed in public discourse, with an emphasis on rules anderror correction linked to notions of standards of both language use and, more broadly, social

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behaviour (Keen, 1997; Rimmer, 2008). The element of media discourse that positionsgrammar as reactionary (e.g. Pullman, 2005) is particularly echoed by the few teacherswho characterised grammar teaching as innately ‘old-fashioned’, suggesting the influenceof social context on some teachers’ beliefs. In fact, six teachers openly discussed thenegative associations of the term ‘grammar’, the ‘bad word’ with a ‘stigma’ (see Watson,2012). The prevailing initial conceptualisations of grammar teaching – concerned withlabels, rules, accuracy, and traditional teaching methods such as drilling or learning byrote – were also those evoked when teachers expressed dislike of grammar. The focuson terminology, in particular, is linked to the fears and anxieties experienced by teacherswho find ‘all the terminology . . . really scary’. Similarly, teachers who described grammaras ‘boring’ mentioned decontextualised exercises, referred to grammar as ‘mechanics’ ordescribed the tedium of addressing ‘rules’ or ‘terminology’ (Watson, 2012, p. 31).

Conversely, elsewhere in the interviews, teachers expressed very different understand-ings of ‘grammar’ and ‘grammar teaching’. When asked what they value, the majorityclearly espoused some of the principles of a rhetorical model. An additional 10 teachers(on top of the eight who initially described grammar teaching in rhetorical terms) valuedthe potential grammar teaching has to explore the ‘effects’ of different linguistic structures,the ‘impact’ texts can have on a ‘reader’, and the ‘crafting’ of writing, with a focus on‘choices’ and ‘decisions’ as opposed to ‘rules’ and ‘correctness’. These evaluative beliefsecho Kolln’s description of rhetorical grammar as ‘grammar knowledge as a tool that en-ables the writer to make effective choices’ (1996, p. 29). This is also, however, the languageused in The National Literacy Strategy and its accompanying documents, which assert theintention to focus on ‘exploring the decisions that writers make’ (DfEE, 2000, p. 12). Inthis respect, therefore, the recent policy seems to have exerted a degree of influence onteachers’ beliefs, although this was often not the model of grammar teaching that cameimmediately to mind when teachers were asked to define it.

This research therefore indicates a clear pattern in teachers’ responses to the concept of‘grammar teaching’. Initial responses predominantly identify grammar with terminology,prescriptivism, a deficit approach and traditional teaching methods, while discussion ofthe potential grammar has to benefit students’ writing predominantly evokes conceptuali-sations much more closely aligned to Lefstein’s (2009) description of rhetorical grammarin teachers’ focus on choices, to Sharples’ (1999) model of writing as design in teachers’focus on crafting, or to Hartwell’s (1985) stylistic grammar in teachers’ focus on effects .Given the persistence of the ‘grammar debate’ across Anglophone countries (Locke, 2010),it is important that researchers, policy-makers, and teacher educators take account of thisdisjunction in teacher beliefs when seeking to encourage teachers of English to tacklegrammar in their classrooms.

Conclusions

Within the sample of this study, there is little evidence that policy documents, including thegrammar strand of the Framework for teaching English (DfES, 2001), have provided teach-ers with a coherent and consistent concept of ‘grammar teaching’. Indeed, it is remarkablehow little has changed when the findings of the QCA (1998) survey are considered. Themajority of participant teachers did not demonstrate a confident explicit understanding ofdifferent models of ‘grammar teaching’, despite demonstrating different conceptualisationsof it at different points during the interviews. There is, therefore, a pressing need for moreprecision and consistency in professional, policy, and research documents in the use ofthe term ‘grammar’ as it relates to the teaching of English. More nuance and clarity in

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how the phrase ‘grammar teaching’ is used, along with more consistency in the modelof grammar advanced in curricular documents may help teachers to develop a more se-cure, multi-dimensional understanding of what ‘grammar teaching’ can mean, and this mayassuage negative feelings or resistance to the inclusion of grammar in the curriculum.

This study suggests that it would be helpful to draw clear distinctions, for example,between the conventions of linguistic etiquette and the genuine patterns that underlielanguage, between descriptive and prescriptive grammars, between grammar taught tobroaden the range of stylistic choices open to writers and grammar taught to improveaccuracy in the use of standard written English. Discriminating clearly between such usesof the term ‘grammar’ may even allow teachers to set aside some of the negative attitudesthey have towards the word, as they would be better able to see how some conceptualisationsor pedagogical focuses may align with their own values and priorities. In this respect, wemay go even further than Myhill’s call for a ‘reconceptualisation of grammar at bothpolicy and professional level’, (2010, p. 178) and aim instead for recognition at policyand professional level of multiple ‘grammars’ or ‘grammar pedagogies’ which relate to theteaching of English. This also requires clear theorisation of different approaches to grammarteaching from the research community: further conceptual clarification of the meanings ofand relationships between, for example, ‘rhetorical grammar teaching’ and ‘contextualisedgrammar teaching’, would assist policy-makers in ensuring that their policies and guidanceare consistent. In addition, teacher training and development must recognise the conceptualconfusion surrounding the concept of ‘grammar’ in order to provide teachers with a clearerunderstanding of the different meanings of ‘grammar teaching’.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant numberRES-062-23-0775]. The author would also like to thank Debra Myhill and an anonymousreviewer for helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes on contributorAnnabel Watson is a lecturer in language education at the University of Exeter, UK. She teaches on theSecondary English PGCE programme, and her research has been in the area of writing development,with a particular focus on grammar and teachers’ beliefs.

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