Subject: disc : grammar in uk schools

forwarded message - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - i have recently received , by a rather roundabout route , just a few of the contributions to this discussion . i do n't , therefore , know everything that has been said . i teach advanced level english language ( as well as a separate course in english literature ) at a sixth form college - i . e . to students aged 16 + . they come to us from 80 + different schools , so have a wide range of previous educational experience . far from arriving having been taught to avoid splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions , most arrive having never been taught what infinitives and prepositions are . they lack the ` reasonably precise vocabulary for analysis ' referred to by larry rosenwald in his contribution of 5 june . i can teach them the terminology from scratch , but find that it does not ` bed down ' as it would have done if they had been familiar with basic grammatical concepts from a much earlier age . a few days ago , i spent a whole lesson teaching my students to distinguish between active and passive verbs ( something which i myself could have done easily at the age of 12 , thanks to the ` old-fashioned ' grammar teaching which i received ) because i wanted them to try an old exam question where the knowledge would have helped them to see which of two texts would have been harder for young children to read . i ended up nursing them through the . exercise , doing much of the work for them . in the next lesson , i gave them another old exam question with extracts from ` animal farm ' to analyse in the light of orwell 's own suggestion ( amongst others ) that one should prefer the active to the passive . many of the students took so long to decide which verbs were active and which passive that they had no time to write an analysis . a recurring problem on the course is that students struggle with higher-order analysis because they lack lower-order skills . teachers in the past at least had the grace to teach children how to recognise infinitives and prepositions : they described before they prescribed or proscribed . now , however , most teachers seem so anxious to avoid prescription and proscription that they avoid even description . like larry rosenwald , i think that the prescriptivist / descriptivist dichotomy has been taken too far . jennifer chew - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - end of forwarded message - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
