Research Basis

Research Basis

Current educational research and practice emphasize the importance of providing English learners with explicit instruction in the rules of grammar. This kind of focused instruction is an essential way for students to achieve higher levels of academic language proficiency.¹ However, many teachers today developed their expertise during an era when grammar was not explicitly taught, and many instructional programs do not provide teachers with the information and strategies they need to teach grammar confidently and effectively to their students. Grammar Gallery provides educators with the teaching tools and background information to help students master the key grammatical concepts that are vital in achieving academic language proficiency. This article explains the rationale and research basis that underlies Grammar Gallery.

Grammar—A Definition
If you look up grammar in a dictionary, chances are you will find it described as the study of language as a system of words that demonstrate some apparent regularity of structure (morphology) and arrangement into sentences (syntax). Sometimes, this definition includes the pronunciation of words (phonology), meaning of words (semantics), and history of words (etymology). Some definitions emphasize grammar as a system of rules in a language. In simplest terms, grammar encompasses the rules that govern the way our communication system works. But do you really need to know the rules of grammar in order to communicate? Consider the following sentence:

She want pen blue.

While this sentence contains two grammatical errors—lack of subject-verb agreement (she-want) and incorrect adjective placement (pen-blue)—most of us know or can figure out what it means. In this case, then, incorrect grammar usage does not impede the speaker’s ability to communicate to the listener or reader. However, students who communicate with these types of grammatical errors on a consistent basis will struggle in the classroom and eventually in the workplace. Moreover, as grammatical errors are repeated over time, it becomes ever more likely that they will become fossilized and difficult to change.

“Knowing” and “Knowing About” Grammar
Teaching grammar is a means to teaching communication. A central premise of Grammar Gallery is that it is more important that students understand where to place an adjective in a sentence rather than to be proficient in defining an adjective, adjectival clause, or adjectival noun. If you’ve made it to this point, you’ve demonstrated that you already know about grammar—you have mastered English vocabulary, syntax, voice, mood, tenses, and other dimensions of the English language simply by understanding what you have read so far. Like most educated adults, you know the statement “I are going to the store” is incorrect usage. If you know and can articulate why that construction is incorrect usage – the subject and verb do not agree – you know about grammar. Of course, teachers need to know grammar and know about grammar because they are responsible for helping children learn how to communicate using both social and academic language. Educators who work with English learners, in particular, find that their knowledge of grammar is tested daily—every time students ask for an explanation of a grammatical concept or term they don’t understand, teachers must provide a coherent and comprehensible explanation.

Grammar’s Place in the Curriculum Historically
From almost the earliest days of American education, grammar was at the forefront of the curriculum. Before the American colonies were united into one country, schoolchildren in America had textbooks with names such as A New Guide to the English Tongue (1740) and A Short Introduction to English Grammar (London, 1758). American-produced grammar books entered the market in the late 1700s with titles such as Daniel Webster’s Plain and Comprehensive Grammar (1784) and Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, Adapted to Different Classes of Learners (1795). These grammar books were predominantly prescriptive. They offered seemingly immutable grammatical rules that students were to memorize and practice. Often these rules read like a list of things a parent would tell a child not to do, focusing on what to avoid. Moreover, grammar books tacitly reinforced the idea that only certain styles of English were worthy of study; in other words, some styles of English were inherently better than other styles of English.

There was great emphasis on diagramming sentences and analyzing language using very specialized terms and figures. All of this was aimed ostensibly at teaching students to write and speak more effectively, but too often it resulted in making many students hate and fear English. In a sense, studying grammar became an end in of itself, rather than a means to more effective communication. Still, this instructional approach to grammar was an important aspect of the curriculum through the 1950s. However, by the 1960s, educators had increasingly begun to question the effectiveness of the “drill and kill” approach. Predictably, the pendulum shifted to the other extreme—and the curriculum provided for no explicit grammar instruction. For the next three or four decades, grammar was definitely out of favor. As an English professor observed in the 1980s, “No English teacher would be caught dead diagramming sentences today.”²

Grammar’s Place in the Curriculum Today
Over the past decade, educators, particularly English language development (ELD) educators, have come to appreciate that grammar instruction has a definite role to play in helping students speak and write English more effectively, i.e., with greater clarity and less ambiguity. The approach most modern grammarians take is descriptive. Descriptive grammar looks at ways a language is actually spoken or written rather than ranking one style of English as better than another. According to Teschner and Evans, “an utterance is grammatical if a language’s native speakers routinely say it and other native speakers of that language are able to understand it.”³ A survey of ESL/ELD teachers commissioned by The Teacher Writing Center in 2008 ("ESL/ELD Teacher Attitudes toward and Perceptions of Grammar Instruction: A Preliminary View") revealed that most respondents believe that English learners should receive direct instruction in the rules of grammar and writing conventions and that they (i.e., the survey respondents) were well-prepared to provide such instruction. However, slightly more than half said they do not believe that most ESL/ELD teachers have the grammatical knowledge and writing skills to do so.

Because grammar is the fundamental organizing system of language, educators today emphasize that teachers of English language learners (ELs) must have a strong grasp of grammatical concepts and terminology as a means to teach English. Dutro and Moran describe a systematic approach to ELD instruction in which grammatical forms are taught in order to show students how they can perform specific language functions: “Grammar is taught through the lens of meaning and use. For example, we teach past tense verbs so students can retell, comparative adjectives so they can compare, and the conditional tense so they can hypothesize. Thus, functions connect thinking and language use and provide the context for language instruction.”4

Language Functions and Forms English Learners Need to Know
Increasingly, ELD educators understand the importance of balancing authentic communication with direct instruction in English grammar. While ELD educators have not yet reached consensus as to the most appropriate scope and sequence for grammar instruction, they have coalesced around the following concepts:

1. It is important to delineate and describe a sequence of language functions (i.e., the purposes for which language is used) and language forms (i.e., the grammatical structures of language) that English learners should be taught as part of their ELD program of study.

2. The general framework of language functions and forms begins with a focus on concrete nouns, simple tenses, and sentence structures that allow students to communicate basic needs and then continues in an upward spiral to progressively more abstract vocabulary, sophisticated tenses, and complex sentence structures that facilitate highly refined student expression.

Grammar Gallery – An Innovative Toolbox for Teachers Today
By tapping into this current research, Grammar Gallery provides an effective and efficient way to help teachers relay key grammatical concepts that are critical to students’ achieving academic language proficiency. Grammar Gallery is organized by language level, topic, language function, and grammatical form. Teachers may use resources from lower language levels to review or reinforce forms with students at higher language levels. Each resource includes a lesson plan, overview charts, sentence frames, student worksheet, and background information for the teacher:

LESSON PLAN: A four-step, 20-minute lesson plan
OVERVIEW CHARTS: Pictures and text the teacher uses to present the target topic, function, and form
SENTENCE FRAMES: Large sentence frames for whole-class oral practice
NOW YOU TRY! Student worksheets for collaborative oral and writing practice
TEACHER TALK: An explanation of the target grammatical form, including what it is, how it's used, examples, how to help students practice it, and special notes

By simply clicking on the desired resources, teachers can use Grammar Gallery:

• To introduce language functions and corresponding grammatical forms.
• To reinforce language functions and corresponding grammatical forms.
• To review language functions and corresponding grammatical forms.

These materials may be printed, copied onto a transparency, or projected on a wall or screen using an LCD or interactive white board. Click here to read more about the research basis of Grammar Gallery.

1 See, for example, Anderson (2007), Fillmore & Snow (2000), PreK-12 English language
proficiency standards. (2006), August & Shanahan (2006), and Hiebert & Kamil (2005).
2 Personal communication with Dr. Margaret Doane, 1982.
3 Teschner and Evans (2007).
4 Dutro and Moran (2003).

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