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Grammar In Secondary English
Grammar teaching in secondary English is one of the most contested areas of English pedagogy. Some argue it's the foundation of clear writing; others that it has almost no measurable effect on pupil writing quality. The evidence, carefully read, is more nuanced than either camp allows — and points toward specific ways of teaching grammar that do help.
About this video
The most-cited research is the Hillocks meta-analysis (1986) and the Andrews et al. review (2004), both of which found that traditional grammar teaching — teaching parts of speech and syntax as isolated knowledge — had little to no effect on pupils' writing quality. That finding has been taken by some as license to drop grammar teaching altogether. It isn't quite what the research says.
What the research does support is contextualised grammar teaching: teaching specific grammatical structures at the point where pupils are learning to use them in their own writing. Teaching subordinate clauses when pupils are learning to write complex sentences. Teaching passive voice when they're learning to write scientific reports. Teaching noun phrases when they're learning to make description more precise. This works because it links grammatical knowledge to a purpose the pupil can see.
The Debra Myhill research programme at Exeter, which developed the "Grammar as Choice" approach, is now the most influential UK evidence base for contextualised grammar teaching. Its central claim is that pupils improve as writers when they see grammar as a set of choices a writer makes — noun phrase or clause, active or passive, simple or compound — rather than as a body of rules to obey. Teaching becomes about opening up the toolkit, not enforcing the norms.
A working approach to grammar teaching
- Teach grammar in service of writing. Introduce a structure when pupils are working on writing that will benefit from it, not as a standalone unit.
- Show, don't just name. "Look what a semicolon does here — it links two related ideas without a full stop" beats "a semicolon separates independent clauses".
- Practise with pupils' own writing. Pupils rewrite their own sentences with a specific grammatical choice. Compare the versions. Discuss which works and why.
- Model the choices in action. Under a visualiser, write a sentence, then rewrite it three ways using different grammatical structures. Show pupils the effect each has.
- Read like a writer. When you're studying literature, notice grammatical choices explicitly. What did this author do here that we could steal?
Discussion prompts
- What proportion of your grammar teaching is contextualised in pupils' own writing, and what proportion is standalone?
- When pupils improve as writers in your class, what specifically is changing — vocabulary, syntax, structure, voice, something else?
- How do you handle the tension between the exam demands (which often specify particular grammatical features) and the more organic development of a writer's toolkit?
Try this in your classroom
- Next time you teach a specific grammatical structure, do it under a visualiser using a real pupil sentence (with permission) and rewrite it three ways.
- For one writing task this term, have pupils highlight three grammatical choices they made and explain why. Mark the reasoning as well as the writing.
- Read one short paragraph by an author you admire with your class. Identify one grammatical move they make. Have pupils try that move in their own writing.