In the early and mid sixties I taught in the secondary school, first 
exclusively in ninth grade and then in tenth and a little above that. I 
cannot speak to what was going on in college composition courses at the 
time, though my freshman composition courses when I was a college 
student had no grammar in them. We did, of course, have a handbook of 
sorts, but my professors never referred to it. The basis of the courses 
was general semantics, the fourth C in Conference on College 
Composition and Communication. (General semantics was also known as the 
"communication approach.") What I say about my experiences in the 
sixties, then, applies to English teaching in the secondary school.

To my knowledge, there were no research findings that supported the 
idea that the teaching of grammar would improve students' writing, 
although many tried to prove it. If there was ever an "official belief" 
in teaching grammar to teach writing, I am not aware of it. It was just 
taken to be common sense. Many errors could be explained in grammatical 
terms, so it was deemed necessary to teach grammar in order to 
facilitate these explanations. I heard this justification many times, 
though I never saw it written down. Most students never learned enough 
grammar to be able to apply it, and attempting to teach them enough 
grammar consumed a lot of time. The textbook also included many lessons 
on correctness--correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct usage, 
etc.--and these, too consumed much time. Add to that the teaching of 
literature, for most teachers were English majors, which means they 
were literature majors and preferred to teach literature above all. 
That left little time for teaching writing, except that teaching 
grammar and correctness was considered the main part of teaching 
writing, as it still is in many classrooms. I can't say that there was 
no teaching of writing, but there was darned little.

I should say that there was also little or no teaching of writing when 
I was a high school student. There was a little "assigning" of writing, 
but that's not the same as teaching writing. For instance, I never 
heard of a thesis statement until I took a graduate course in teaching 
English.

Personally, I dropped teaching grammar and teaching correctness in 
isolation from writing when I finally began learning how to teach 
writing. That was about 1963 or 64. And I continued in that vein for 
the rest of my career. When I became a college composition teacher, I 
was occasionally required to have the students buy a handbook, but I 
seldom used it. Errors drop away when students do lots of writing, and 
those that don't drop away can be handled on an individual basis. The 
handbook may be necessary to prove that there is indeed a rule against 
certain constructions, despite what the student may say, but most 
errors can be explained without grammatical terminology.

There is a lot more that could be said about the sixties. Serious 
research in other teaching methods besides grammar and correctness 
began in the sixties, for example. But maybe I have said enough. I'll 
just add that I'm not against teaching grammar as a liberal art, but it 
would need to be done differently than we used to do it.

Bill


On Oct 14, 2007, at 1:25 AM, Ronald Sheen wrote:

> The brief summary of the relevant research and conclusion you 
> provided, Bill, is both enlightening and extremely useful.   Thanks.
>
> I wonder if you could add a little on the chronology and the curricula 
> of the period.
>
> When was it the stated official belief that the teaching of grammar 
> would lead to improvement in writing ability and were there any 
> research findings to support the assumption.  I would have thought 
> that it was pretty obvious that one should not expect a direct effect 
> on composition writing ability of teaching a course of grammar.   I 
> would expect the only useful grammar teaching to do would be that 
> based on tackling common errors made in essay writing by the student 
> population involved.
>
> Were there in the 60s compilations of common composition errors and 
> were they part of the composition curriculum?
>
> You say teachers ended up neglecting composition writing because of an 
> over-emphasis on grammar.   Does this mean that there were no actual 
> composition classes?  Or does it mean that there were but that 
> teachers did not follow the curriculum, preferring to teach grammar 
> when they should have been teaching composition?
>
> Ron Sheen
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "William McCleary" 
> <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2007 4:15 PM
> Subject: Re: The lessons of recent pedagogical history was Rules
>
>
>> Herb,
>>
>> I just want to clarify for you what was actually said about the 
>> effect of grammar on the teaching of writing. Here is the much 
>> misinterpreted statement from
>> Research in Writing Composition  by Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer 
>> (NCTE, 1963):
>>
>> In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon 
>> many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in 
>> strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a 
>> negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and 
>> practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the 
>> improvement of writing.
>>
>> Some people seem to read right over the clause after "or." And I can 
>> testify from personal experience that the teacher of grammar did 
>> displace the teaching of composition. (I started teaching English in 
>> 1961) Indeed, at the time we considered the teaching of grammar to be 
>> a significant part of teaching composition. We thought that students 
>> couldn't understand and correct their errors unless they first 
>> learned enough about grammar for us to explain the errors to them. 
>> Unfortunately, a lot of teachers spent so much time on grammar that 
>> they never got around to teaching composition. It is, after all, a 
>> lot easier to correct a grammar quiz than a composition.
>>
>> I am sorry that so many people interpreted this conclusion by 
>> Braddock et al. to mean that grammar shouldn't be taught at all, but 
>> if one has to make a choice between grammar and composition, I'd 
>> rather see composition be the choice. I'd rather see both included, 
>> but that just leads to making of choice of which approach to grammar 
>> would be most teachable and most useful. I'm afraid that what we 
>> taught in the early sixties was neither teachable or useful for the 
>> majority of students. I'm happy to see that you are currently 
>> addressing that issue.
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> On Oct 13, 2007, at 4:15 AM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>>
>>> Ron,
>>>
>>> What you describe in the ESL context in Quebec and Bangalore is the 
>>> heart of what motivated the founders of ATEG, the theoretical claims 
>>> in the fifties and sixties that the teaching of grammar not only did 
>>> not help student writers improve their writing but actually 
>>> detracted from it. Composition writers argued that the teaching of 
>>> grammar was harmful to the teaching of writing.  NCTE adopted this 
>>> finding and the training of teachers in grammar, the place of 
>>> grammar in K12 language arts curricula, and, of course, the place of 
>>> grammar in the writing class all diminished sharply.
>>>
>>> Herb
>>>
>>>
>>> Bruce raises an interesting issue which all teachers have to 
>>> confront from
>>> time to time.   That is the implementation of an innovation which 
>>> they are
>>> not necessarily equipped to handle and which they find implicitly 
>>> entails
>>> their rejecting their own teaching prinicples.  This happened in ESL 
>>> in
>>> Quebec and Bangalore, India in the 80s where teachers were forbidden 
>>> to
>>> teach grammar when an extreme form of communicative language 
>>> teaching was
>>> introduced which, by the way, ultimately failed.
>>>
>>> I wonder whether any members have had experience of this in teaching 
>>> English
>>> as a first language.
>>>
>>> Interestingly, in the cases mentioned in the first pargraph, as 
>>> teachers
>>> increasingly lost faith in the innovation, they returned 
>>> surreptitiously to
>>> their own teaching principles.
>>>
>>> Ron Sheen
>>>
>>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
>>> interface at:
>>>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>>
>>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>>
>>>
>> Bill McCleary
>> Livonia, NY
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
>> interface at:
>>     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
> interface at:
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> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
Bill McCleary
Livonia, NY

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