2013 was a year of grammar books: notably by N. M. Gwynne, Harry Ritchie
and David Marsh. A stack of unwanted
gifts easily offloaded at the charity shop?
Hardly. Especially when Mr Gove
has made the teaching of grammar statutory from this coming September. Unfortunately, his intervention has muddied the
water. Being in favour of the explicit
teaching of grammar in primary school has already been portrayed as a neglect
of creative writing and a move away from ‘child-centredness’ and the territory
of the grammar nazi.
Fortunately, grammar isn’t Gove’s or any minister’s to give or withhold. And creativity cannot, by its nature, be
repressed. If you are a teacher, however,
the question remains: what do I teach?
Grammar and creativity: why can’t we have both? I’d go further. We must have both. We just have to recognise the role that they
both play in the teaching and learning of English.
Learning grammar is a closed activity like learning the alphabet and should
be accepted as such, rather than denigrated as a waste of time, and something
imposed by an elitist bunch of jackbooted, old-fashioned grammarians. Creative writing is an open-ended, albeit
directed, activity and mustn’t be skipped or dismissed as a frivolous add-on. The one provides structure and clarity of
meaning; the other promises delightful adventures in writing. They can be separated analytically, but not
in practice. Analogies might include technology
and design, skeleton and skin, the pentatonic scales and Jimi Hendrix.
It is true, as Ritchie and many others point out, that we pick up the rules
and structures of English by early everyday experience, intuition and trial and
error, but that doesn’t mean that to continue in that vein is the only, best or
fairest way to proceed. For example,
finding out very early in life that a toy thrown from the pram falls downwards
might be all you need to get by in life, to stay away from cliff edges and
place your glass of wine on a horizontal surface. But we might want to talk about the concept of
gravity at some stage.
