Teaching Grammar for Writing and Reading in the 21st Century

Why teach grammar? Writers need grammar in order to know how to write. Good writers are needed throughout most dimensions of workplace activity as well as in schools, colleges and universities. The widespread use of laptops and tablets for workplace report writing has brought about the need for most professional, clerical and management personnel to be writers. But there is a problem posed by the “correct” yet soulless sludge produced under the narrow tutelage of ChatGPT, Grammarly and Word grammarcheck.

Sound teaching practices require scaffolding of concepts, effective modelling of the processes for their use, and clear instruction in content and application. The twin keys to improving student writing are:

• The quality and amount of the teachers’ knowledge of English, and
• The teachers’ self-belief that they are writers who can teach writing.

The issue for education systems is how to teach all students to become proficient and confident writers. Over the last 32 years, my work in schools in Australia, Asia and the USA has been directed towards developing strategies and applications for improving knowledge of English, the teaching of writing and assessing the quality of student writing.

And there are multiple other benefits. Knowledge of English assists reading and especially assists inferential comprehension. Within learning how English works, students are pitchforked into the study of vocabulary. English language knowledge is about grammar, vocabulary, cohesion, sentence construction, punctuation and style.

How to teach grammar? The major change in writing since Gutenberg and Caxton has been the development of modern technology, and in recent years the application of AI, but writers who rely upon Grammarly and grammarcheck programs are left to the limitations of those programs. Late in 2022, ChatGPT has delivered the apparently perfect tool for non-writers. So why teach grammar? Almost 400 years ago, Francis Bacon wrote that:

• 'Reading maketh a full person; conference a ready person; and writing an exact person.'' (Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625). Reading, conferencing and writing are the central pillars of the English program. I have two other mantras to keep my thinking and teaching in focus.
• You write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head.' (Mike Rich, Finding Forrester, 2000).
• The classical curriculum trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic.

The need to be able to write with your head requires writers, teachers and students to know about English grammar, spelling, punctuation, conventions, style and many other items of knowledge about English. And the classical trivium for developing thinking and learning requires knowledge of grammar for sentence construction and cohesion, rhetoric for organisation of the content, and the logic required for presentation of content, argument or narrative.

Teachers and students of English need to realise that they are undertaking two related functions as they study and use language:

• How English works and functions (English as an object of study);
• How English is used as an instrument for composing texts, and for comprehending and analysing them (English as an instrument of study).

Teaching has always been about developing student thinking and learning, and sole reliance upon any modern AI program for teaching writing is a dereliction of professional responsibility. Of course, students must be introduced to the use of these programs but only as part of the wider curriculum of IT, subjected to analytical scrutiny and clarity of expression. To go to ChatGPT and to rely, uncritically and without analysis, upon any text developed by a programmed AI robot is to invite limited knowledge and worldview at risk of manipulation and dumbing.

English grammar and all its elements must be taught, learned, practised and applied in reading and writing whole and purposeful texts. Sound teaching practice also allows students to use their own language experience, knowledge and creativity to undertake the heavily scaffolded strategies that teachers model for and with them.

The best approach for teaching and learning the grammar of sentence construction and cohesion is to focus upon the syntactic patterns and organisation of English. The teaching strategies for writing and grammar provided in my work are not designed as ends in themselves but as means for application to writing, and as a base for discussing and conferencing student text and other texts.

Check out Rod's new book Grammar in Its Place