Russell Daylight’s university students express themselves clearly when they speak. “Their sentences start in the right place, they speak coherently,” he says. But when they sit down at a keyboard to put those thoughts on a page, they produce a confusing jumble of jargon, colloquialisms and random punctuation.
Writing is difficult; it requires the brain to use several different skills at once. The words must be handwritten or typed. They must be ordered into sentences, spelt according to convention, and dressed with punctuation. And then there is the higher-order skill of drawing on our stores of knowledge to decide what we want to say, and which words will say it best.
Grammar fell out of fashion then too, and was put in the category of “drill and kill” . In 1974, the NSW Department of Education published a syllabus document that said: “training in formal grammar does not improve pupils' written expression. In fact, it could even hinder it”. There was also no teaching of factual writing, says Knapp. “It was all based around narrative. Rather than describe an earthworm scientifically, they'd write a story about being an earthworm.
When genres were introduced in the early 1990s, there was a big push to train teachers. There hasn't been much training since. “What we are left with is not taught consistently, not taught evenly, taught superficially,” says Tom Alegounarias, the former chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority . “Primary teachers have a pretty good grasp of it, but not necessarily the grammar underpinning it.
Eva Gold, the head of the English Teachers Association, says time is essential. “The best way to improve writing is to write, write and write some more,” she says. “I do not think it is a literacy problem. It’s lack of practice.” Russell Daylight teaches his students about grammar. It does not kill their motivation. “Their heads are in their notebooks writing as fast as they can,” he says. “They suspect it's important and they are starved of information.” For him, teaching students to write without the language of grammar would be like teaching mechanics to fix cars without the terms “engine” or “chassis”.
JordsBaker I am a primary teacher and all I want is to teach students how to write a sentence but the syllabus requires them to learn too many text types - imaginative, informative and persuasive. The English syllabus needs to ask less of students so they learn well and deeply. NewsAtNESA