The impact of embedded grammar teaching on students’ writing & metalinguistic understanding

Myhill, D. A., Jones, S. M., Lines, H., & Watson, A. (2012). Re-thinking grammar: The impact of embedded grammar teaching on students’ writing and students’ metalinguistic understanding. Research Papers in Education, 27(2), 139-166. doi:10.1080/ 02671522.2011.637640

Background

The authors highlighted that, although there had been numerous studies investigating the impact of grammar teaching on writing, there had been little research on grammar taught in the context of writing lessons focussing on developing children’s writing.

Aims

The authors investigated the relationships between pedagogical support for teaching grammar, teacher linguistic subject knowledge (LSK) and improvement in writing.

Sample

The participants comprised 744 students in 31 schools in England. Classes were randomly allocated to either a comparison or intervention group.

Method

The data comprised pre- and post-test writing scores, lesson observations, teacher interviews, writing conversations with students and the students’ writing pieces. The learning focus and objectives, period of study, and the assessed written outcomes were the same for all the participants.

Findings

The results demonstrated that the intervention had a more positive effect on able writers. The able writers in the comparison group made less progress in writing than less able writers, while the able writers in the intervention group made significant progress.

The teachers found the materials and the pedagogical principles underpinning the lesson planning effective in student engagement. The lesson observations revealed how LSK impacted teaching. There were three ways in which a lack of teacher confidence in grammar was realised in the classroom or in reflections on practice:

i. meaningless comments about grammar;

ii. the use of semantic definitions, such as ‘doing’ words, rather than precise linguistic descriptions;

iii. and syntactic confusions

Regarding the students’ metalinguistic understanding, the students in the intervention group stated and elaborated on their views more. The greatest confidence in discussing linguistic choices in writing was at word level as they were cognizant of the impact of word choices. Regarding sentence level metalinguistic understanding, they knew the use of short sentences for particular effects and recognized the value of variety in sentence length within a text. At the text level, there was more evidence of students having awareness of the text as a whole in the narrative and argument units.

Implications

The authors highlighted that as the intervention benefited able writers, it would be useful to investigate whether teaching materials designed around the learning needs of less able writers were effective. The importance of teachers’ LSK in mediating metalinguistic knowledge in the writing classroom indicated that teachers need to possess confidence in declarative knowledge of grammar, particularly syntactic knowledge, if they were to be able to develop students’ metalinguistic understanding effectively.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis.