GRAMMAR MATTERS:

HOW TEACHERS’ GRAMMATICAL KNOWLEDGE IMPACTS ON THE TEACHING OF WRITING

Debra Myhillab
a
University of Exeter, UK
b
Professorial Fellow, University of Wollongong, Australia.

Susan Jonesc
c
University of Exeter, UK

Annabel Watsond
d
University of Exeter, Uk

Corresponding Author:
Debra Myhill
University of Exeter
Graduate School of Education
Heavitree Road,
Exeter
EX1 2LU
Tel: +44 1392 724767
Email: d.a.myhill@ex.ac.uk

Abstract:
Teaching grammar has been mandated in statutory curriculum documents in England since 1988. Yet
despite this, research evidence continues to suggest that metalinguistic knowledge is an area of challenge
for many teachers. Drawing on data from a larger study, this paper considers the role of teachers’
grammatical knowledge, both content and pedagogical content knowledge, in mediating learning about
writing in the classroom. It also illustrates how students’ learning about writing is influenced by teachers’
metalinguistic knowledge. The study highlights that grammatical pedagogical content knowledge is more
significant than grammatical content knowledge in supporting meaningful teaching and learning about
writing.

Keywords:
Metalinguistic; grammar; writing; content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge

Highlights:
 Teachers’ grammatical knowledge influences what students learn about writing
 Limitations in teachers’ grammatical content knowledge can generate student misconceptions
 Teachers’ ‘applied’ knowledge is more significant than declarative knowledge
1.1 Introduction: Framing the Problem

The importance of subject knowledge in teachers’ professional development has been the focus for a
substantive body of research in teacher education. Shulman’s seminal work (1987) on theorising subject
knowledge is important in its endeavour to categorise the nature of knowledge required in the complex act
of teaching. He distinguishes between subject content knowledge (knowledge of an academic domain),
pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge of how to teach that academic domain) and pedagogical
knowledge (knowledge of how to teach): this signals that ‘knowing how’ is as significant as ‘knowing that’.
In other words, teacher subject knowledge is not simply domain knowledge, but crucially involves knowing
how to transform that knowledge purposefully to enable learners to master it. Stimulated by the work of
Shulman (1988), successive studies have considered teacher subject knowledge in specific domains, such as
Maths (eg Rowland, Huckstep, & Thwaites, 2005) or Science (eg Loughran et al 2008); in terms of how it
relates to beliefs and experiences (eg Brownlee et al 2011; Wilson and Myhill 2012); or through offering
new conceptualisations of subject knowledge (Goulding et al 2002; Park and Oliver 2008; Ball et al 2008).
Core to all of this work is the inter-relationship between content and pedagogy, between academic
knowledge and classroom knowledge, and the need for teachers to be able to transform their content
knowledge into pedagogical content knowledge of learning activities which address learners’ needs. The
concept of pedagogical content knowledge has been substantially researched (see for example, Cochran et
al 1993; Ball 2000; Park and Oliver 2008) and particularly in relation to the teaching of mathematics
(Langrall et al 1996; Kahan et al 2003; An et al 2004; Rowland and Ruthven 2011). In the context of the
language classroom, teachers’ metalinguistic knowledge is significant in shaping their professional capacity
to plan for and respond to learners’ language needs. Taking Shulman’s taxonomy, this metalinguistic
knowledge can be considered in terms of teachers’ metalinguistic content knowledge (the academic
domain of knowledge about language, which includes explicit grammatical knowledge) and metalinguistic
pedagogical content knowledge (their knowledge of how to teach and develop students’ metalinguistic
understanding). However, empirical investigations of first language teaching and understanding of the
subtle inter-relationships between pedagogical content knowledge, classroom practice and student
learning about language are more limited, especially in relation to metalinguistic and grammatical
knowledge.

At the same time, expectations of students’ grammatical knowledge in curricular in different Anglophone
national jurisdictions are becoming increasingly specific. In the United States, the Common Core State
Standards for Language Arts include a set of anchor Language Standards (CCSSI 2010:25) which require
students to be able to use Standard English correctly and to acquire Knowledge about Language (which is
undefined). The detailed year by year standards which follow are heavily focused on grammatical
constructions which students are expected to master. In England, since 1988, there has been a statutory
role for grammar in the National Curriculum for English, although it has been expressed slightly differently
in each of its many versions (DES 1990; DfE 1995; DfEE 1999; DCSF 2007). So, for example, in the 1995
version, very specific aspects of grammar were delineated, including discourse structure, syntactical
structures such as main and subordinate clauses, and a list of word classes which should be taught. In
contrast, the 2007 version adopted more generalised descriptions of a variety of sentence structures and
writing in Standard English. However, it was the non-statutory National Strategies guidance (DfEE 1998;
DfES 2001) which had more impact on teachers’ practices in the teaching of grammar and writing because
of the very detailed setting out of teaching objectives for each year of schooling from Year 1 to Year 9 (ages
5-14). These curricular expectations in the US and England place considerable demands on teachers’
grammatical content knowledge. Similar expectations in other Anglophone countries are posing similar
challenges. Gordon (2005), in New Zealand, describes the problems faced in trying to implement an
innovative syllabus with a strong grammar focus, concluding that major barriers were experienced because
of teachers’ ‘lack of knowledge about language’ (Gordon 2005:63). In Australia at the current time, a new
National Curriculum is being developed which includes a strand on Knowledge about Language which aims
to foster ‘a coherent, dynamic, and evolving body of knowledge about the English language and how it
works’ (ACARA 2009:1). As in England, there is concern in Australia that ‘many subject teachers
(particularly in secondary school settings) have no formal study of language and draw upon partially
remembered folklore about language and grammar’ (Derewianka and Jones 2010:14) and therefore may
feel ill-equipped to cope with these curricular demands.

This phenomenon of less secure, or absent, grammatical content knowledge is an historical phenomenon,
arising principally from two different, though probably related, causes. Firstly, following the Dartmouth
Conference in the USA in 1966, and the widespread view of professionals and educationalists that the
formal teaching of grammar had no beneficial impact on students’ competences as speakers, readers or
writers, grammar teaching was subsequently largely abandoned in Anglophone countries. A consequence
of this is that current cohorts of English teachers were themselves not taught grammar at school, a point
also noted in the US context by Kolln and Hancock (2005:106). Borg (2003:97) reports a study which
showed that native speakers of English performed less well than non-native speakers in a grammatical
content knowledge test, an outcome which he attributes to the different educational backgrounds of native
English and non-native English speakers, with non-native speakers typically receiving higher levels of
grammar teaching. A second reason for the lower levels of grammatical content knowledge in England may
be that at the point of entry to postgraduate teacher education courses, there appears to be a distinct
preference for teachers who have come through the literature degree route, at the same time as there is a
shortage of applicants from a linguistics route (Blake and Shortis 2010).

Curriculum expectations that students will have explicit knowledge of grammar combined with the
tendency towards an absence of grammatical content knowledge in the academic experiences of English
teachers generate very specific challenges for pedagogical practice and student learning. At the same
time, grammatical content knowledge is only one element of the broader set of metalinguistic content
knowledge required to be a language teacher. This paper, therefore, sets out to explore the complex inter-
relationships between teachers’ metalinguistic content knowledge, specifically their grammatical content
knowledge, and their use of that knowledge in the teaching of writing.

2.1 Literature Review

2.1.1 Theories of metalinguistic knowledge
Defining metalinguistic knowledge is not as straightforward as it might initially appear. The term is used
differently in psychology and linguistics (Gombert 1992: 13 ; Myhill 2011: 249): in general, psychologists are
interested in the thinking processes which accompany text production, whereas linguists are more
concerned with language as an artefact. A further ambivalence concerns the place of metalanguage,
especially grammatical terminology, within metalinguistic knowledge and the tendency in different studies
to use ‘metalinguistic’ either as synonymous with grammatical knowledge, or as an over-arching knowledge
set, of which grammatical knowledge is a subset. Indeed, Andrews prefers to talk of Teacher Language
Awareness because of the ‘potential ambiguity of the phrase ‘metalinguistic awareness’ (awareness that is
metalinguistic, or awareness of metalanguage) (2003: 86). For the purposes of our study, drawing on
Camps and Milian’s definition of metalinguistic knowledge as the ability ‘to take language as the object of
observation and the referent of discourse’ (1999:6), but also mindful of the interdisciplinary framework in
which we were working, we defined metalinguistic knowledge as the ‘explicit bringing into consciousness of
an attention to language as an artefact, and the conscious monitoring and manipulation of language to
create desired meanings grounded in socially-shared understandings’ (Myhill 2011: 250). From the
perspective of teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge in the language classroom,
metalinguistic content knowledge might include the teacher’s knowledge of how emotive language can be
a persuasive technique in an argument, how newspaper editors use straplines to signpost key information
for readers, or how expanded noun phrases can convey effective character descriptions. We see
grammatical content knowledge as just one part of this metalinguistic content knowledge: it is that part
which draws specifically on explicit knowledge of grammar in terms of morphology and syntax, rather than
on broader knowledge about language and how texts work as socially-constructed artefacts. So in the
classroom examples given above, the knowledge of how noun phrases convey character description is
grammatical content knowledge. It is teachers’ grammatical content and pedagogical content knowledge
which is the particular focus of this article.

Theoretical thinking about grammatical content knowledge has tended to address three themes: what
teachers need to know about grammar; explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge; and addressing
learners’ language needs. Both Perera (1987:3) and Leech (1994) agree that teachers’ grammatical
knowledge needs to be richer and more substantive than the grammar they may need to teach to students,
requiring ‘a higher degree of grammar consciousness than most direct learners are likely to need or want’
(Leech 1994:18). Indeed, Kamler maintains that students do not need to learn the metalanguage of
grammar, whereas teachers need this knowledge in order to make appropriate pedagogical decisions in the
language classroom (1995:4). At the heart of this is explicit, conscious grammatical knowledge in which
teachers are ‘conscious analysts of linguistic processes’ (Brumfit 1997:163) and possess ‘conscious
awareness’ (Armstrong 2004:223) of how texts are structured. Andrews (2005:75) argues that a teacher
with ‘a rich knowledge of grammatical constructions’ is more likely to be able to intervene to support
developing writers, whilst Gordon (2005), drawing on an empirical study working with teachers in New
Zealand, concluded that teachers with poor grammatical knowledge were ‘unable to see language
development in the writing and speaking of their own pupils’ (2005:61). Not only does limited grammatical
knowledge prevent teachers from appropriate identification of language development, it may also hamper
the teaching of writing because even if teachers are ‘able to internalise the features of the text to the extent
that they can imitate its style’ and thus must have implicit knowledge, if they do not have explicit
knowledge ‘they cannot make the analysis explicit’ (Hudson 2004:113).

There is, thus, a connection maintained between teachers’ grammatical content knowledge and their ability
to address learners’ language needs in the classroom. On one hand, a lack of teacher confidence with
grammatical content knowledge can lead to learners’ developing misconceptions, such as the students in
Paraskevas’ study (2004) whose meaning-based descriptions of verbs as ‘doing’ words do not correspond
with linguistic definitions. On the other hand, robust grammatical content knowledge confidently
communicated by the teacher offers the potential of ‘increasing students’ language repertoires and thus
expanding their meaning making resources’ (Coffin 2010:4).

2.1.2 International concerns about grammatical content knowledge

However, such robust grammatical content knowledge appears to be a scarce phenomenon: repeated
studies or national reports have signalled weaknesses in teachers’ grammatical content knowledge. In the
US, Vavra (1996:36) critiqued the expectation that students should analyse the structure of sentences,
when English teachers could not do this themselves and in England, a survey by the Qualifications and
Curriculum Authority (QCA) also concluded that teachers’ lacked confidence with syntactical knowledge.
Gordon (2005:50) noted that because linguistics was not widely taught in New Zealand university courses,
and because English teachers entered the profession through a literature degree route, teachers avoided
the need for grammatical content knowledge by approaching language teaching from a predominantly
sociological, rather than linguistic perspective.

There is also a substantial body of research investigating grammatical content knowledge at university
level, particularly in pre-service education. Bloor (1986), Alderson (1997) and Alderson and Horak (2011)
have conducted studies with undergraduate English or language students and consistently found that
grammatical knowledge, particularly of grammatical terminology, is limited and that even when students
possess the metalanguage, ‘they are not necessarily able to use the terms they acquire accurately’
(Alderson and Horak 2011:37). Kolln and Hancock (2005:6) complain that in the US most pre-service
programs for English teachers do not address grammatical content knowledge, but in England, the
expectation that Initial Teacher Education courses will audit subject knowledge on entry has led both to
more direct attention to grammar in these courses and to more research exploring the challenges pre-
service teachers face in commanding grammatical content knowledge. Weaknesses in grammatical content
knowledge are reported by Andrews (1994; 1999); Chandler (1988), Wray (1993), Williamson and Hardman
(1995) and Hislam and Cajkler (2006); similarly, Burgess et al (2000) found that their pre-service teachers
were more confident with language at text level and least confident with sentence grammar. In Australia,
Louden et al (2005) conducted a survey which indicated that teachers do not feel confident about teaching
grammar when they complete their training and Harper and Rennie’s pre-service teachers (2009) ‘showed
limited understandings in their ability to analyse the parts and structure of sentences, and their knowledge
of metalinguistic terms did not seem to extend past the basic concepts of ‘noun, ‘verb’ and adjective’
(2009:27).

In general, this body of research constructs a deficit discourse around teachers’ grammatical content
knowledge, positioning them as ill-equipped to undertake language teaching effectively. However, a more
nuanced understanding of grammatical content knowledge is offered by Cajkler and Hislam (2002) – their
pre-service teachers had reasonable knowledge of grammar but experienced high levels of anxiety,
believing their subject knowledge to be poor. The authors attribute this anxiety to unrealistic expectations
at public and policy level of what can be achieved in a pre-service programme. In Australia, a growing
cluster of research is also providing a richer understanding of teachers’ grammatical content knowledge.
Jones and Chen (2012) have demonstrated how through participatory collaboration with their research
team, teachers were evolving new understandings of both grammatical content knowledge and
pedagogical practice. A survey of primary teachers by Hammond and Macken-Horarik (2001) found
evidence that teachers were teaching many aspects of knowledge about language and were confident in
their knowledge of genres and text types. Like Cajkler and Hislam’s pre-service teachers, they expressed a
lack of confidence in their own content knowledge, yet this was restricted to ‘rules of traditional grammar’
(Hammond and Macken-Horarik 2001:125). It is also evident that teachers conceptualise grammar content
knowledge in very prescriptive ways (Kamler 1995), with an emphasis on ‘the need for grammar to be
‘correct’ and for ‘proper’ English to be spoken’ (Harper and Rennie 2009:32).
2.1.3 From declarative to procedural: the importance of grammatical pedagogical content knowledge
Teachers’ own perspectives, as reflected in these studies, appear to focus substantially upon their own
declarative knowledge of grammatical terminology or of prescriptive rules of usage. Likewise, many of the
research studies investigate teachers’ grammatical content knowledge through tests which ask teachers to
name and label grammar items and to correct grammatical errors (eg Alderson 1997; 2011). These studies
address content or domain knowledge rather than grammatical pedagogical content knowledge: they
examine teachers’ declarative knowledge of grammar, rather than their procedural knowledge of how to
use that knowledge in talk or writing. Equally, many of these studies do not consider how this knowledge
translates into classroom practice, and is noticeable how few studies examine actual classroom practice,
relying instead on survey and self-report.

Yet in second language research there is good evidence that strong declarative grammatical content
knowledge is not linked with effective teaching of language (Andrews 2001; Borg 1999). Training students
in systemic functional grammar did not improve their effectiveness in teaching (Burns and Knox 2005), and
Andrews and Bunton (2006) found that a Linguistics degree was not a good predictor of teacher
effectiveness in preparing language materials. Borg (2003) argues that ‘increasing language teachers’
explicit knowledge about grammar through teacher education will not automatically lead to more effective
instruction. Teachers also need the pedagogical skills to use this knowledge to enhance learning’
(2003:100). Bartels (2005) also argues that language teaching requires an integration of pedagogy and
declarative grammatical content knowledge. In other words, it is grammatical pedagogical content
knowledge which may be most salient.

Such pedagogical content knowledge is dependent upon teachers (and policy-makers) having a clear
understanding of what grammatical content knowledge is for, its purpose in the classroom. The pre-service
teachers in Cajkler and Hislam’s study (2002) understood grammatical content knowledge as essentially
about the naming of grammatical constructions but did not understand that pedagogically ‘grammatical
awareness is about making available a range of choices for writers to use for particular purposes in
particular contexts’ (2002:176). Harper and Rennie frame this as ‘being able to think metalinguistically’
(2009:30), which would allow teachers ‘to make informed decisions about how and when it might be
appropriate to teach metalinguistic concepts explicitly in a decontextualised fashion, or alternatively, how
and when they might usefully contextualise explicit metalinguistic teaching’ (2009:29). Without a clear
sense of pedagogical purpose and applied understanding of grammatical content knowledge, teachers may
generate mismatches between teachers’ use of grammatical metalanguage and students’ understanding
(Berry 1997) or unwittingly convey inappropriate messages to learners. Lefstein (2009) illustrates how
teachers using policy materials underpinned by a principally rhetorical notion of grammar can use them in
rule-bound prescriptive ways, or in ways which have no real meaning. He gives the example of a lesson on
powerful verbs where children were asked to find more ‘powerful’ synonyms for the verb ‘eat’ in the
sentence ‘Please may I eat ice cream?’: the children eventually offer ‘gobble’ and ‘demolish’, which are
accepted as valid alternatives without any discussion of the contexts in which these might be appropriate
substitutes. This underlines the importance of pedagogical understanding which links declarative
knowledge to contextually valid purposes: as Derewianka and Jones (2010:14) warn ‘if teachers do not
understand the orientation of the model toward whole texts in their contexts of use then the pedagogy is at
risk of becoming restricted to teaching normative structures and grammatical labels in isolation from
meaning.’
Emerging understanding of how grammatical pedagogical content knowledge is realised in practice is more
evident in second language research than in L1 (for example, Andrews 2001; Borg 2001). Wright argues
that ‘a linguistically aware teacher not only understands how language works, but understands the
student’s struggle with language and is sensitive to errors and other interlanguage features’ (2002: 115).
This draws attention to the inter-relationship between the declarative grammatical content knowledge of
the teacher and his/her analysis of learners’ needs. Synthesising studies on this topic, Svalberg (2007:296)
concludes that description, exploration, languaging, engagement and reflection are the salient features of
metalinguistically-aware teaching. It is also evident, however, as noted earlier, that research in this area
uses conceptual terms such as metalinguistic knowledge or grammatical knowledge in ambiguous or
arbitrary ways, sometimes using the terms ‘metalinguistic’ and ‘grammatical’ interchangeably, whilst at
other times using them as distinct concepts. Likewise, there is no clear theoretical understanding or
definition of metalinguistic or grammatical pedagogical content knowledge. Thus, in the interests of clarity,
we offer a table of working definitions below which inform the conceptual thinking underpinning this
article, and which clearly frames grammatical knowledge as a specific subset of metalinguistic knowledge.

METALINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE
‘explicit bringing into consciousness of an attention to language as an artefact, and the conscious monitoring and
manipulation of language to create desired meanings grounded in socially-shared understandings’
(Myhill 2011: 249).
Term Definition Practical Examples
Metalinguistic content Teachers’ knowledge about language Knowing that emotive vocabulary used in
knowledge a conservation campaign leaflet is used
to persuade the reader to empathise
with the issue
Grammatical content Teachers’ explicit knowledge of grammar in Knowing what is the subject in a
knowledge terms of morphology and syntax. It is sentence;
declarative knowledge, which is conscious Knowing that word classes in English are
and can be articulated, and uses the mobile and need to be looked at in the
metalanguage of grammatical terminology. context of their function in a sentence
Metalinguistic Teachers’ knowledge about how to teach Being able to select appropriate texts to
pedagogical content language in order to address learners needs. exemplify metalinguistic features of
knowledge texts;
Knowing how to model the metalinguistic
features of texts in the classroom
Grammatical Teachers’ knowledge about how and when to Knowing that children are often confused
pedagogical content teach grammar in order to address learners’ by word class mobility;
knowledge language needs. This includes procedural Knowing that post-modified noun
knowledge of the inter-relationship between phrases can be valuable in creating
grammatical constructions and how texts effective descriptions of characters
work to shape meaning.
Table 1: Working Definitions underpinning the Conceptual Framework
From a second language perspective, Borg (2003) has argued that ‘our understandings of the relationships
between declarative subject matter knowledge and practice in language teaching are still undeveloped’
(2003: 106) and such research is notably scarce in an L1 context (though see Smagorinsky et al’s (2007) case
study of one teacher’s experiences). This article sets out to redress this gap by illustrating how teachers’
grammatical content knowledge influences their classroom practice and shapes the nature of learning
experience by students .

3.1 Methodology
3.1.1 The larger study
The data for this article draws on a subset of data from a larger Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC) funded study, involving a research team of two investigators, one research fellow, and one doctoral
studentship linked to the study. The study is reported in full in Myhill, Jones, Lines and Watson (2012) and
the statistical results are reported more fully in Jones, Myhill and Bailey (2012: however, it is necessary to
provide an overview here, as it frames the findings in this paper. The research investigated whether
embedding the teaching of grammar within teaching units for writing would improve students’ attainment
in writing. The grammar selected for the teaching units was consistently linked to the genre of writing
being taught, with the intention of helping students develop a repertoire of possibilities for authorial
decision-making in writing. Three genres of writing were taught over a period of a year (narrative fiction;
argument; and poetry). The study involved 32 teachers in 32 schools in a randomised controlled trial with a
complementary qualitative data set of lesson observations and teacher and student interviews. The
schools were mixed comprehensive schools drawn from the Midlands and South-West of England. They
were selected using local authority school lists, which were numbered as listed, and then a random number
generator was used to determine a rank order. Each school was then directly approached in rank order and
invited to join the study and this process continued until the target sample of 32 was reached. One class of
12-13 year old students from each school was involved in the study (n = 855 initially, n= 744 with attrition).
Using a pre and post-test design, measures of writing attainment were taken before and after the
intervention, using a writing test designed by Cambridge Assessment (an independent assessment
organisation used to set and mark national writing tests at age 14). Cambridge Assessment also blind
marked and moderated the writing tests, mirroring the standards and expectations of national testing in
England, with a 30 point mark scheme, calibrated to reflect National Curriculum levels. The research team
was not involved in any way in judging writing attainment, creating greater robustness in the design. The
study found a strongly significant impact (p<0.001) of the intervention on writing attainment with a modest
effect size of 0.21 (see table 2 below).

Pre-test Post-test Gain Effect size

Group Mean SD Mean SD Mean

experimental 14.2 (5.7) 17.6 (5.7) 3.4 0.21

control 15.2 (6.2) 17.4 (6.0) 2.2

Table 2: The Statistical Results of the Study

Note: Writing attainment measured on a 30 point scale

Subsequent stepwise regression modelling revealed that teachers’ subject knowledge of grammar was a
mediating factor (p<0.050) in the success of the intervention, and equally, the analysis of the lesson
observations and teacher interviews signalled the saliency of grammatical subject knowledge.

3.1.2 Grammar knowledge test

As one of the subsidiary research questions for the larger study was to investigate the impact of teachers ’
grammatical content knowledge on the teaching of grammar and writing, teachers’ declarative knowledge
of grammar was tested prior to randomisation in order to establish levels of knowledge. Teachers were
then ranked in pairs according to their results and then individuals in each pair were randomly allocated to
intervention or comparison groups. Because participating teachers did not know the research focus was
grammar in order to avoid bias in the results the test was masked as a broader teacher profile, eliciting
their academic record, their personal experiences as a writer, their views on the teaching of writing and
their literary knowledge, as well as their knowledge of grammar. The grammar test used an extract from
Pride and Prejudice as the basis for straightforward questions of grammar at word and sentence level (See
Figure 1).

YOUR SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LANGUAGE.

Read the extract from Pride and Prejudice below and then answer the questions which follow:
Mr Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance and easy,
unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women, with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-
law, Mr Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend, Mr Darcy, soon drew the attention
of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in
general circulation within five minutes of his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.
What word class is decided in ‘air of decided fashion’ ?
What word class is merely in ‘merely looked the gentleman’?
What word class is attention in ‘the attention of the room’?
What word class is of in ‘of his entrance’?
What word class is he in ‘he had a pleasant countenance’?
Which of the following are noun phrases?
‘having ten thousand a year’ YES/NO
‘a pleasant countenance’ YES/NO
‘the report which was in general circulation within five minutes YES/NO
of his entrance of his having ten thousand a year’
‘His brother-in-law, Mr Hurst’ YES/NO
merely looked the gentleman’ YES/NO
His sisters were fine women, with an air of decided fashion Simple/compound/complex
sentence
Circle a co-ordinating conjunction in the extract – if you think there is one present
Underline a relative clause in the extract – if you think there is one present
Put a dotted line under a non-finite clause in the extract – if you think there is one present
Cross out a subordinating conjunction – if you think there is one present
Figure 1: the test of grammatical content knowledge

Each answer was scored as either right or wrong and one point was given for a right answer, with a
maximum available score of 15. Analysis of the tests showed that the teachers had very differing baseline
levels of grammatical content knowledge, with a mean result of 8.7 points and a Standard Deviation of 2.1
points. The scores spread fairly evenly across a range from 5 points to 13 points. In other words, the test
indicates that across the sample, teachers’ grammatical content knowledge ranged from very low to very
high, but with the majority of teachers achieving just over half marks.

3.1.3 Ethics
The study was given institutional ethical approval, and was informed by the ethical guidelines of the BERA
Revised Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (2004) and the ESRC Research Ethics Framework
(2005). Anonymity, confidentiality and informed voluntary consent were not problematic with this
research design; however, the need to conceal the precise research focus from the teachers in order to
maintain the blind randomisation required particularly careful ethical consideration. At the outset, all
participating teachers were told that the study was researching the teaching of writing but that, in order to
prevent any bias, no further details would be provided until the end of the study. On the final plenary
conference for the project, teachers were then fully informed about the research questions for the study
and how the schemes they had taught realised this research goal. For a fuller discussion of the ethics, see
Myhill et al 2012.

3.1.4 Lesson observations

During the teaching of each of the three genres of writing, for each teacher involved one lesson was
observed. With thirty two teachers involved, this resulted in three observations per teacher, and thus a
total data set of 96 observations. The observation data was captured on an observation schedule which
noted what the learning focus was for the observed lesson, what grammatical terminology was used during
the lesson, and a record of the lesson under four column headings: Activity; Teacher Interaction; Student
Response; and Comments. Under Activity, the observer noted what the teacher or learners were doing,
such as ‘teacher explanation of a noun phrase’ or ‘paired work highlighting modal verbs’. The Teacher
Interaction column invited the observer to note what the teacher said and did; to provide examples; and to
capture the nature of questioning and explanation offered. In the Student Responses column, the observer
noted both student responses and non-responses; evidence of understanding, misunderstanding or
confusion, and evidence of learning. The Comment column was used to record additional details to help
contextualise the observation in later analysis.

3.1.5 Teacher interviews

After each lesson observation, the teacher was interviewed: the aspects of the interview relevant to this
article are a) the discussion of the lesson observed and b) the discussion of their grammatical knowledge.
The interviewer invited teachers to reflect on the lesson observed, the teaching strategies used, and the
learning achieved in the lesson; drawing on the lesson observation notes. The teachers were also invited to
consider how confident they felt with the grammatical content knowledge needed to teach the three
writing genres through being asked what were the key features of narrative, argument or poetry that they
wanted writers to understand. This question was asked separately to address word, sentence and text
level understanding. In this way, the interview probed pedagogical content knowledge by trying to elicit
the links teachers made between their declarative content knowledge, and the learning about writing they
wished students to accomplish.

3.1.6 Student interviews

After each lesson observation, one focus student in each class was also interviewed: the teachers selected
one boy and one girl from each class on the basis that they would not find the interviewing intimidating,
and the research team used this to select a gender-balanced data sample of 32 students (96 interviews).
Students were first asked what they thought the teacher had been teaching them about writing in the
lesson, what they felt they had learned, and what they found helpful in supporting their learning. The
interview then focused upon the students’ own writing, produced in the lesson observed, or in previous
lessons, and they were asked how they felt the writing was progressing and what they were most pleased
with. They were also invited to comment on genre-specific features they had used, the effectiveness of
their sentence structures or patterning, and vocabulary choices, and what they were least happy with or
might want to change or improve. The final section of the interview used another piece of writing as a
prompt for metalinguistic conversation: the prompt questions for the narrative unit are outlined in Table 4
below, and those for argument and poetry followed a similar design.

This is the start of a story, written by someone of your age. We want to know what you think
about it. Read it and then think about your answers to the following questions. We would like you
to be as specific as possible in explaining and justifying your answers.

 How well do you think this opening is written?

 What makes it successful or unsuccessful as an opening for you?
 How can you tell this the opening of a story?
 What about the sentences? Can you comment on how effective the sentence structures or
shaping is?
 What about the word choices? Can you comment on the effectiveness of the vocabulary?
 How could the story opening be improved?
Figure 2: the prompt questions for the narrative unit

3.1.7 Qualitative Data analysis

Although reliability and validity were important concepts to address in the statistical analysis of the
randomised controlled trial, these concepts are ‘premised on the assumption that methods of data
generation can be conceptualized as tools, and can be standardized, neutral and non-biased’ (Mason
1996:145) and are thus less appropriate in the context of the qualitative data analysis. Instead the
qualitative analysis was mindful of Guba and Lincoln’s (1985) concepts of transferability, dependability,
confirmability and credibility. Figure 3 below indicates the methods used to ensure trustworthiness in the
findings.

The teacher and student interviews were analysed inductively making use of the data analysis software,
NViVo. Broadly adopting Wellington’s (2000:134) recommendation of four stages of analysis, ‘immersion’,
‘reflecting’, ‘taking apart’, and ‘recombining and synthesising’, the first stage of the coding process involved
all members of the research team reading the transcripts of the interviews to fully familiarise themselves
and immerse themselves in the data. Each member of the research team then coded an initial interview
collectively to develop a shared understanding of possible themes emerging through analysis and to
actively consider alternative interpretations of the data. Following this, team members coded the
remaining interviews individually.
 CONCEPT
Transferability:
The extent to which the findings can
be generalised to other contexts with
different participants and situations
Dependability:
The extent to which similar findings
would be obtained if the study were
repeated
Confirmability:
The extent to which the findings are
neutral and free from researcher bias
Credibility:
The extent to which the findings seem
believable
Figure 3: Overview of Methods used to ensure Trustworthiness
METHODS USED TO SECURE TRUSTWORTHINESS
 The collection of 3 interviews/observations per participant to achieve
greater richness and descriptive depth
 Sampling strategy which includes randomisation and which maximises
number of different context represented (32 schools with one class
per school in different geographical locations).
 Constant comparison across cases during data analysis
 Triangulation of data through teacher and student interview, lesson
observation and statistical data
 Maintenance of a research log of coding decisions and project log of
methodological decisions
 Systematic coding consistency checks for inter-coder agreement
 More than one team member involved with all aspects of data analysis
 Alternative interpretations of data sought through team meetings
 Open coding sought to code as much of the data as possible
 Research team reviewing of coding processes and code labelling
 Cross-checking results with statistical results, where applicable
 The use of multiple sources of data
 The discussion of results with teacher participants at a plenary
conference
 The avoidance of over-generalisation or over-claiming in all reporting
of data

The first stage of coding involved open coding, the process of identifying, labelling and classifying the data,
seeking to represent codes which reflected what each phrase or statement was expressing. At this stage,
Wellington’s ‘taking apart’ stage, coders sought to assign meaning to as much of the interview transcript as
possible to avoid the potential researcher bias of ‘cherry-picking’ findings from the data. The technique of
constant comparison (Glaser and Strauss 1967) was used, whereby each individual coder iteratively
compared current codes and new information with previously coded data, and reframed, revised or refined
coding labels accordingly. The team met when this stage was complete to compare coding and to cross-
check for consistency in both the coding itself and the naming of codes. These consistency checks were
systematic and thorough, with two coders reviewing all the data allocated to each code and checking that it
reflected the code label accurately, using the affordances of NVivo to cross-refer back to the full interview
transcript for confirmation, if necessary. At the same time, the team checked the code labels and their
definitions for appropriacy. With 96 interviews in both the teacher and student dataset, this was a
substantial body of analysis and the initial open coding of the teacher interviews resulted in the generation
of over 200 codes, and the student interviews generated over 320 initial codes.

The next stage involved recombining and synthesising the coding (Wellington 2000), using the process of
axial coding described by Corbin and Strauss (2007). In this stage, coders examined the open codes, looking
for inter-relationships and links between the codes. This led to the clustering of the data under broader
conceptual themes, and to the combining of some of the open codes into newly-labelled codes which
appropriately synthesised relevant codes together. So, for example, the over 200 codes generated in the
teacher interviews were clustered into three over-arching themes: Writing Pedagogy; Grammatical Subject
Knowledge; and Schemes of Work, each with associated sub-themes. Figure 4 below provides a full
overview of the codes and sub-codes under the theme of Grammatical Subject Knowledge, which informs
this article. The lesson observations were analysed manually following a similar process, but also looking to
match codes in the interview data with the observations. For example, relevant to this article, one sub-
code which arose from the teacher interviews were comments on the problems teachers had with
grammatical explanations, and the observations were analysed to look for classroom examples where
explanation proved problematic or otherwise.

CODES AND SUB-CODES FOR THE THEME:

GRAMMATICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE
Fear, Anxiety or Inadequacy
Grammar as Technical Skill
Grammatical Confidence
Grammatical Knowledge Problems
Making Connections between Grammar and Writing
 Adding to Improve
 Lexical Choices
 Syntactical Choices
 Making Informed Choices
 Linking Grammar and Writing
Pedagogical problems with Grammar
 Problems with Grammatical Explanations
 Problems explaining Sentences and Syntax
 Problems handling students’ grammar questions
 Unanticipated classroom problems
Perceptions of Students' Grammatical Knowledge
 Forgetting Previous Grammar learning
 Student confidence
 Student Difficulty
 Grammatical Terminology
Figure 4: Grammatical Content Knowledge: Codes and Sub-Codes

4.1 Findings of the Study

The data reported in this article draws principally on the teacher interview and lesson observation data,
though it is complemented, where appropriate, with student interview data. The interview coding process,
described above, elicited a coding theme of Grammatical Content Knowledge . Within this theme, one set
of codes related to teachers’ beliefs about their declarative knowledge of grammar (Fear, Anxiety or
Inadequacy; Grammar as Technical Skill; Grammatical Confidence; and Grammatical Knowledge Problems)
and have been reported by Watson (2012). A further set, Perceptions of Students’ Grammatical
Knowledge, related to teachers’ reflections on student issues with developing grammatical understanding.
This article draws on the two codes which relate to pedagogical knowledge: Pedagogical Problems with
Grammar and Making Connections between Grammar and Writing. The definitions for each of these codes
and sub-codes is outlined in Figure 5.
 CODES AND SUB-CODES
Pedagogical problems with
Grammar
 Problems with Grammatical
Explanations
 Problems explaining
Sentences and Syntax
 Problems handling students’
grammar questions
 Unanticipated classroom
problems
Making Connections between
Grammar and Writing
 Adding to Improve
 Lexical Choices
 Linking Grammar and Writing Comments about making connections relating to sentences or
 Making Informed Choices
 Syntactical Choices
 Discussion
Figure 5: Definitions of Codes and Sub-codes
DEFINITIONS
Comments which express a classroom problem or challenge
related to the teaching of grammar
Comments which refer to the challenge of providing clear
explanations or definitions of grammatical points
Comments which refer to problems in defining or explaining
aspects of syntax
Comments which note difficulties in responding to students’
questions about grammar
Examples of general situations where teaching grammar creates
a problem or difficulty
Comments which link a grammar structure to a teaching
purpose in writing
Comments which refer to the principle that adding more of
something eg adjectives, will improve the writing
Comments about making connections between lexical choices
and effect
syntax.
Comments which refer to how knowing grammar can allow
choice or control/ownership
Comments which refer to general links between grammar and
writing
Comments which refer to the value of discussion in developing
student understanding

Figure 8 provides an overview of the number of responses in the interviews which were coded to each
category. It should be noted that the very high number of responses to the code Syntactical Choices is
because one of the interview questions related directly to sentence-level understanding.

Codes and Sub-Codes Number of Responses

coded to this category
Making Connections between Grammar and Writing
Adding to Improve 14
Lexical Choices 18
Linking Grammar and Writing 31
Making Informed Choices 24
Syntactical Choices 107
Discussion 41

Pedagogical problems with Grammar

Problems with Grammatical Explanations 22
Problems explaining Sentences and Syntax 15
Problems handling Students’ Grammar Questions 7
Unanticipated Classroom Problems 13
Figure 6: Number of Responses coded to each category
Synthesising the data from the interviews and the observations, we have structured the presentation of the
findings under four sub-headings:
 The problem of grammatical definitions and explanations
 Syntactical challenges
 Making meaningful connections between grammar and writing
 Conceptualising lexical development in terms of addition
 Fostering grammatical discussion

4.1.1 The problem of grammatical definitions and explanations

One immediate challenge in teaching grammar is knowing how best to define and explain grammatical
metalanguage, and this challenge is substantially increased for teachers whose own grammatical content
knowledge is limited. The interview codes, Problems with Grammatical Explanations and Problems handling
Students’ Grammar Questions indicated some teachers’ concerns with this issue, and the observations
revealed many examples where teachers struggled with grammatical explanations. A strong tendency
throughout the sample was to attempt to explain word classes using semantic rather than functional
definitions. Of these, calling a noun a ‘naming’ word or something you can touch, a verb a ‘doing’ word and
an adjective a ‘describing’ word were the most common, mirroring what is often standard practice more
widely in both primary and secondary schools in England. Some teachers coined their own unique
definitions: one teacher defined an adverb as an ‘action plus word’ and another defined an adverbial as
‘size words’. One reason for this seems to be a view that these semantic definitions make it easier for
learners to understand, but it may also linked to a sense that more functional definitions are too difficult,
and that it may create antipathy. In one interview, the teacher explains why she avoids even using the
appropriate metalanguage for fear of ‘putting off’ learners:

Teacher: I ask them to start with a preposition. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a

preposition, I’d call it like a position word or something like that and, and so
we do…
Interviewer: Why would you use position word rather than preposition?
Teacher: Because they know the word position because it’s in everyday life, but
preposition isn’t.
Interviewer: So you don’t think you should ever teach them new words in English?
Teacher: Well, no, because as you can see by word of the week, that is how we teach
new words in English.
Interviewer: So why do grammar words differ from other new words?
Teacher: Oh probably because I hate them … I do teach them but I think probably
because it put me off so much I’m afraid of putting them off.
Figure 7: Interview Extract

The difficulty with everyday or semantic definitions is that whilst they are easy to understand at a
superficial level, they are rarely robust enough to stand up to the test of authentic language in use and thus
ultimately generate confusion rather than understanding. Because of the mobility of word class in English
and the fact that you cannot identify a word class from its morphology, identifying what class a word is can
only be achieved when it is in the context of a sentence. In a sentence, such as ‘Dancing is my passion’,
many students will identify ‘dancing’ as a verb because it is the ‘doing’ word in the sentence. Such
confusions were frequently evident in the lesson observations. In one lesson, a student reasons that ‘you
play hockey so it must be a doing word’. In another school, the ‘test’ of a noun being something you can
touch caused confusion:

Student 1: Is floor an object?

Student 2: Well it’s a noun.
Student 3: It’s a noun but you can’t really get hold of it can you?
Figure 8: Observation Extract

In the same class, there was discussion about whether ‘homework’ was an object and students were
prompted by the teacher, ‘Can you touch it?’ which seemed to convince the majority that it was, although
some remained confused as to whether an object needed to be a ‘single thing’ or an ‘abstract’, suggesting a
further confusion between an abstract noun and a collective noun.

There was a clear link between teachers’ confidence with a grammatical point and the clarity and the
economy with which they were able to explain it to students. In one lesson, the teacher used examples of
kennings to explain the pattern of compound nouns: ‘Compound means put together, like in a compound
sentence where you put two clauses together, here it’s two nouns together’. This definition was used to
test students’ own examples of kennings and by the time they came to write independently, all but one
were confidently using the pattern of compound nouns. In another lesson, there was no firm evidence that
the teacher had seen the pattern herself. The initial explanation of a kenning as an ‘idea of collective things
being put together to describe an object’ was not made any more specific in terms of word class so that
although models of kennings were provided and some students imitated them independently, many were
not aware of the compound noun pattern when describing their chosen animal, leading to kennings such as
‘a soft-fur’ which did not really make sense.

4.1.2 Syntactical challenges

Linked to the broader problem of providing appropriate grammatical definitions and explanations was a
specific problem with syntactical explanations. The interview codes, Syntactical Choices and Problems
explaining Sentences and Syntax illustrated some teachers’ awareness of the difficulties they faced, and the
lesson observations highlighted how differing levels of grammatical content knowledge shaped the clarity
of syntactical explanations. When teaching about sentences and syntax, the combination of weaker
grammatical content knowledge and the difficulty in providing clear explanations provided some real
challenges. Explanations of sentence types were often reduced to issues of length, and as with word
classes, non-grammatical explanations were used. A clause was explained as ‘part of a sentence’ and ‘the
bits between the punctuation’ whilst sentence types developed unique non-grammatical variations: ‘more
simple’; ‘ very complex’; ‘a normal sentence’;’ a more than average sentence’. With simple sentences, the
concept of grammatical simplicity was frequently confused with semantic simplicity and teachers regularly
communicated that more sophisticated writing needed more complex sentences. However, in a class where
the teacher’s grammatical content knowledge was strong, her clarifying question, ‘What’s a simple
sentence?’ allowed students to put each other right:
 Student 1: When it has no interesting words in it?
Student 2: When it has a subject and a verb.
Figure 9: Observation Extract

Definitions of the main clause as ‘the main information’ and subordinate clauses as something that ‘gives
secondary or additional information’ gave rise to generalised and somewhat misleading explanations of
clause grammar. This was compounded by discussions of conjunctions which equated grammatical
independence and dependence with equality and lesser importance. In one lesson, where students were
sorting conjunctions into two groups, subordinating and co-ordinating, the teacher prompted ‘Is it equal?
Or is it less important? Does it give equal power or does it suggest possibilities?’ and followed this with ‘So
what’s a subordinate clause? It has lower status because it can’t make sense on its own. Sub-clauses are
less important.’ Another teacher tried to explain subordinating conjunctions as those that ‘can be moved
around in the sentence’ and went on to ‘test’ with students whether different examples of subordinating
conjunctions (e.g. while, despite, although) could go ‘at the start of a sentence’ or ‘in the middle’. One
student suggested but as an example of a conjunction that could ‘only go in the middle’. Presumably to
avoid cluttering this stage of the lesson with consideration of co-ordinating conjunctions, the teacher
responded: ‘Yes, because it’s a slightly different sort of conjunction, but we’ll come to that later,’ before
concluding, ‘What you should have picked up on is that a conjunction can be moved around some of the
time, but not always’. In the subsequent writing activity, students expressed confusion about which
conjunctions to use at the start of sentences and which to use to start paragraphs, while some completed
the writing task without using conjunctions at all. In contrast, one teacher made a more helpful distinction
between a subordinating conjunction which ‘may go at the beginning of a sentence or within a sentence to
join a subordinate clause to a main clause’ and a co-ordinating connective which ‘must go in the middle of a
sentence to join the two main clauses’.

4.1.3 Making meaningful connections between grammar and writing

The focus of the research was to investigate the impact of supporting developing writers in making
meaningful connections between grammatical constructions and different rhetorical possibilities in writing
so it is unsurprising that this has emerged as significant in the teacher interviews and observations. The
interview codes, Linking Grammar and Writing and Making Informed Choices, illustrated teachers’
pedagogical reflections on their efforts to support students’ metalinguistic understanding and the lesson
observations provided evidence of the these pedagogical issues in practice. Without well-developed
grammatical pedagogical content knowledge which could link grammar to purpose, teachers tended to
communicate highly generalised principles for writing which were difficult for learners to operationalise
meaningfully. Students were repeatedly exhorted to vary their sentences: ‘make sure you have sentence
variety’; ‘sentence variety is key’; variety is important’. But there were few attempts to develop
understanding of why variety might improve writing and how that variety might be enacted. Several
teachers explained that sentence variety ‘makes it more interesting’, something repeated back by students
in interview with no corresponding understanding: ‘I need to vary my sentence variety: she’s said that quite
a lot on the marking, she does.’ In one lesson in the Argument unit, one teacher more successfully gave
students a clearer example of how sentence variety might be used to support the persuasive articulation of
the argument: ‘in a long sentence you can detail the cruelty and a short sentence you can refer to sudden
death for impact’. In another lesson, a teacher responded to a student’s draft with explicit linking of
syntactical choice with its potential impact upon the reader: ‘Look what’s happened by changing the word
order. As a writer you can withhold information and build a sense of expectation.
In the teacher interviews, it was noticeable how often teachers used the phrase ‘for effect’ in relation to
particular grammatical constructions, but not necessarily with any meaningful suggestion of what that
effect might be. There were some examples from lesson observations of this blanket use of ‘for effect’ and
of ‘effectiveness’ which was offered as generic advice for improving writing but was rarely linked to, or
triggered by, specific examples. Students were advised to ‘vary vocabulary for effect’ and to ‘remember
that some words are more effective than others and you need to find the right ones…just think about what
effect it has as well’. These generalised comments were commonly given just before, or during, individual
writing tasks and for feedback, as in the plenary instruction to pick out examples of a ‘short sentence used
for effect’. On one level, the desire to link grammar to effects is positive as it shows these teachers
attempting to make meaningful connections, but they lack the precise and specific grammatical knowledge
to develop the idea of effect in particular writing contexts and purposes. The lesson observations
highlighted the problems these generalisations promoted. Students struggled both with the concept of
effectiveness and in finding words with which to explain effects, irrespective of how fluently they used
terminology. In a starter activity, for example, where students were asked to choose and share ‘an
interesting and effective sentence’ from their fiction books, many clearly did not understand what was
implied, and comments on effectiveness were limited to plot rather than rhetorical effect. One student in
interview, talking about the prompt piece of writing, said ‘It’s kind of like for effect…I can’t explain what
type of effect it is…I don’t have a clue.’ Both the interviews and the observations suggest that teachers do
have a real commitment to making purposeful links for learners and in some cases, it was evident that
teachers were trying to push students’ thinking in a constructive way: ‘In terms of your writing, it’s not just
a case of keep changing. You need to be thinking about why these changes are taking place. What effects
does it create? Why has Peter Benchley made these switches? So you know when to change for effect, not
just because you’ve seen a published writer do it’.

4.1.4 Conceptualising Lexical Development in terms of Addition

In general, the teachers in this study were more assured in their declarative knowledge of word classes
than in their syntactical knowledge. But the way this declarative knowledge was realised in pedagogical
practice illustrates the significance of grammatical pedagogical content knowledge to make learning
meaningful for students. Whilst adjectives and adverbs do, of course, develop descriptiveness in writing,
well-chosen nouns and verbs can often remove the need for additional description, and provide
opportunities for effective editing. However, a strong theme in the teacher interviews, reflected in the
interview codes, Adding to Improve and Lexical Choices, and in the classroom observations, was the
principle that writing. particularly vocabulary usage, could be improved by adding more of something,
often adjectives or adverbs. In the interviews, teachers reflected that:

 We’ve looked at like adding adjectives and adding adverbs and stuff in fiction so I really want
them to focus on making, thinking about ok what’s the most powerful word I can use here and
like avoiding all ‘goods’ and ‘nice’ and things.
 I can see how adding an adverb to a verb can help the imagery.
 I will start off with a dull sentence: we will add adjectives to it, we will add non-finite phrases
 I was looking for more adjectives, more adverbs, more verbs.
Figure 10: interview extracts

This additive principle was mirrored in the observations; for example, one teacher advised her class to ‘add
in adjectives and like nouns and adverbs and verbs, because ... if you do that then it makes it more
interesting because ... it’s like describing the words, the sentence better’. This ‘learning’ was directly
mirrored in the student interviews: responses to how their own writing or the prompt writing could be
improved often involved addition of ‘more sentences’, ‘bigger paragraphs’, or ‘more of the modal verbs’.
Nonetheless, it was adjectives or adverbs which were most frequently described and in some cases
revealed young writers developing misconceptions about improvement. One boy explained that ‘instead of
just plain words like, ‘I was kicking my legs back and forth’, you can say, ‘I was hastily moving my legs back
and forth’, suggesting that adding an adverb and weakening the verb is a good strategy for improving
writing. In contrast was the young writer who initially explained in interview that she would add adjectives
to improve her writing but then, almost guiltily, argued that ‘I think sometimes not having adjectives really
works, and not having adverbs… just sometimes, sometimes it can make things sound so much better, but
sometimes …it makes it sound a bit kind of, like you’ve tried too hard almost, a bit complicated’

There were teachers, however, who recognised this tendency: in interview, for example, one teacher
reflected that her students were ‘overdoing the adjectives and the description’ and she wanted to move
them beyond this; and another teacher observed that some of her students had ‘three adjectives and one
would do - because they know that adjectives are good, they over play them’. In one observed lesson, the
teacher explained to the class that ‘a lot of you are adding adjectives when you could change the noun for a
better effect’. There was also evidence that the experience of being in the intervention group and using the
materials had changed practice in this respect, as one teacher noted she had been ‘trying to use just nouns
and verbs whereas usually you bang on about add in adjectives, add in more detail though like literary
devices and things like that, and it was interesting to think they could actually write successfully without
using all of that stuff that you usually say they need to include’.

4.1.5 Fostering grammatical discussion

One of the pedagogic principles underpinning the intervention teaching materials was creating plentiful
opportunities in lessons for students to talk about their writing and to discuss language choices and
possibilities. This emphasis is reflected in the teacher interviews represented by the sub-code Discussion,
and the lesson observations provided evidence of teachers struggling to manage grammatical discussion,
and other teachers demonstrating considerable confidence in this. Inviting students to talk about language
frequently generated questions or comments about grammatical metalanguage which caused considerable
challenges for teachers whose grammatical content knowledge was less strong. This was a risky activity for
teachers: they had to deal with misunderstandings or unexpected answers ‘on the hoof’, and this
sometimes led to protracted conversations which challenged their subject knowledge. The following
exchange illustrates this. The teacher started the lesson with a question intended to trigger a quick recap of
learning in the previous lesson but which instead initiated a ten-minute heated whole-class discussion, with
the result that the planned content of the lesson was not completed. In addition, through this unplanned
exchange, the students revealed an unexpected layer of misunderstanding that the teacher then had to
decide how best to confront:

Teacher: Can you remind us of what a subordinating connective is?

Student 1: You have two things together and it makes one more important than another,
maybe one is stronger.
Student 2: Co-ordinating connectives like but, or mean the same thing. Although means
it could possibly be.
 Student 3: I don’t really get that – why would you need to do that – what difference
does it make?
Teacher: Let’s look, like Beth said, as some connectives being about possibilities.
Which would those be?
Student 4: But sounds rubbish compared with although.
Student 5: But sounds really bum.
Student 4: While, despite, although – I’ve got it; they’re like what posh people might use
in a posh sentence.
Figure 11: Observation Extract

This led to general, animated discussion about which connectives sound ‘better’ than others, with some
frustration voiced: “Ah, this makes no sense”; “Oh, I don’t know”, until the teacher intervened to move to
the next activity, unable to develop the discussion. Similar episodes were frequent, often revolving around
correct classification of word classes, and the confusion initiated by the semantic definitions discussed
earlier. Where teachers lacked confident grammatical content knowledge, one consequence was that such
discussions, potentially fertile contexts for learning and clarification, were quickly closed down to avoid the
problems they created.

However, in the interviews, some intervention teachers commented on the way the teaching materials had
‘opened up wonderful discussions’. The lesson observations revealed there were teachers who
demonstrated greater confidence in managing grammatical discussion and used careful questioning to
support student learning, as the extract below indicates.

Teacher Interaction Student Response

“Are there any examples of short powerful Picked out rhetorical question.
sentences?”
“How did we get a sense of what Ed’s character
was like – what his voice was like?” “He used the first person well.”
“It sounded like a real American.”
“So, writing in a deliberately non-grammatical way
in order to get the voice of his character.”
“Politicians and speech makers use different verbs Students find examples of modal verbs in text
depending on whether they want to suggest what examples and comment on effect e.g.
is possible, or if they want to be motivating, or “The modal verbs are all similar – all saying they
positive – they are important in speeches.” definitely will do it. All positive.”
Figure 12: extract from lesson observation record illustrating grammatical
discussion.

5.1 Discussion:
Before the broader theoretical and pedagogical implications of this data are considered, and given the
predilection towards deficit discourses around teachers’ grammatical content knowledge (QCA 1998;
Alderson and Horak 2011), it is important to reiterate that the teachers in the study presented a full range
of confidence in grammatical content knowledge, including those with very limited knowledge through to
those with a high degree of confidence. Moreover, it is important to note that teachers with limited
grammatical content knowledge were frequently highly capable and professional teachers of English, with a
particular limitation in this particular area. By focussing our attention upon this aspect of teacher subject
knowledge, it is not our intention to suggest there is a crisis of competence within the profession: rather,
we wish to draw attention to the continuing professional development needs which are a consequence of
changing policy mandates in the language curriculum. These issues have salience, not only in England, but
also in all Anglophone countries where new curriculum mandates are re-emphasising grammar, as outlined
earlier.

One significant outcome of this study is that it traces, in the context of authentic pedagogical practice in the
teaching of writing, how grammatical knowledge mediates interactions with students and influences what
students learn. The data presented here suggest that there are two important facets of teachers’
knowledge which merit further consideration. Firstly, the relationship between grammatical content
knowledge and classroom practice; secondly, the greater significance of grammatical pedagogical content
knowledge in promoting student learning. Linked to both of these is the need to generate greater
consensus about the role of grammatical metalanguage in supporting students’ metalinguistic
understanding of written text.

Where teachers’ declarative content knowledge of grammatical metalanguage is not secure, this does
generate consequent difficulties in managing student learning effectively. As with Harper and Rennie’s
pre-service teachers (2009:28), the teachers in our study were more confident with word classes than with
syntax, but were frequently challenged by the particular linguistic flexibility caused by word class mobility
in English. Moreover, although the reliance on semantic explanations of grammar, rather than functional
explanations, makes lower demands on teachers’ grammatical understanding, it generates confusions and
misconceptions in students’ learning, as Paraskevas (2004) noted with her own students. As a
consequence, students ‘mislearn’ grammatical relationships, such as the issues noted earlier around
subordinate clauses being presented as ‘lower status’, and struggle, like their teachers, with word class
mobility. At the same time, low levels of grammar knowledge create problems for teachers in handling
grammatical discussion, particularly students’ questions, and opportunities to clarify misconceptions are
not realised. Paraskevas argues that students need ‘clear, linguistically accurate information about the
structure of their language’ (Paraskevas 2004:97). Providing such information, however, requires a greater
emphasis on developing both a consensus around terminology and definitions and more understanding
than exists at present about how best to teach them.

More significantly, however, this study underlines the critical importance of pedagogical content
knowledge over content knowledge. Whilst it is axiomatic that declarative knowledge of grammar, or
grammatical content knowledge, is a prerequisite for the effective teaching of grammar within a writing
context, it is not sufficient on its own to support student learning about writing. Just as the L2 research
suggests no direct correlation between declarative knowledge and effective language teaching, (Borg 2003;
Bartels 2005), this study also highlights that effective teaching of writing goes beyond naming and labelling
grammatical items. Teachers need not simply the declarative knowledge of grammar, but also the
grammatical pedagogical content knowledge of how grammatical constructions shape and shade meaning
in writing, in order to draw learners’ attention to this in relevant ways. Without this knowledge, teachers
tend towards the teaching of the ‘normative structures and grammatical labels in isolation from meaning’
prefigured by Derewianka and Jones (2010:14). Indeed, some teachers in our study adopted very formulaic
approaches to addressing grammar in writing, fostering a recipe-approach to grammatical content, rather
than developing metalinguistic understanding: ‘I tell them very systematically to you know start with an
adverbial, start with an adverb, start with an -ing verb, to start with an adjective, you know, just give them
those three things that you’ve got to do that so I think we have a habit of doing it quite mechanically like
that actually rather than for them thinking about for themselves, what effect am I going to have?’ In
England, this formulaic approach is compounded by the heavily-assessment driven English curriculum,
where there is a strong emphasis on grades and results. This creates a learning context for writing which
often prioritises quick-fix solutions and writing ‘recipes’ over deep learning about writing and the author’s
craft.

In contrast, those teachers whose grammatical pedagogical content knowledge was more secure fostered
greater learning about writing and the repertoire of possibilities open to writers. These teachers were
‘linguistically aware’ and understood ‘the student’s struggle with language’ (Wright 2002). Not only were
they confident handling grammatical discussion, but they frequently generated it, responding to the
thinking emerging within the classroom. Typically, these teachers were effective in three ways. Firstly,
they always linked the linguistic feature being studied to a specific context-relevant effect or purpose in
writing, thus making meaningful connections for learners between the grammar under focus and the
writing. Secondly, they were able to respond to students’ own writing sensitively, asking questions which
invited students to consider the writing choices they were making, or by drawing out explicitly effective
choices in the writing: for example, the teacher who commented on one child’s narrative that there was ‘a
real sense of the environment with adverbials in there’. Thirdly, these teachers had sufficient grammatical
pedagogical content knowledge to notice relevant aspects of reading texts to draw to learners’ attention.

Such grammatical pedagogical content knowledge allows teachers to induct students into metalinguistic
discourses and foster their ability to discuss and talk about language with precision. Identifying the
presence of an adjective or the use of complex sentence is of relatively little use to a language learner
unless that knowledge can be transformed into meaningful understandings about texts and the choices
they have as writers in shaping their own writing. Harper and Rennie (2009:30) argued for the importance
of ‘thinking metalinguistically’. This has much in common with Halliday’s notion of grammatics, (Halliday
2002) where he distinguishes between grammar as a phenomenon in language, and grammatics as the
study of that phenomenon in use. In particular, he argues that grammatics is ‘a way of using grammar to
think with’ (Halliday 2002:416). In Australia, the influence of the Sydney School, led by Halliday, on
theoretical thinking about grammar is significant, although it has as yet had relatively little impact on
teachers’ practices (Macken-Horarik 2012). Thinking metalinguistically is about exploring the symbiotic
relationship between language and meaning, and teachers with secure grammatical pedagogical content
knowledge are more likely ‘to recognize playful developments in students’ texts and also to foster their
control of literate discourse’ (Macken-Horarik 2012:179) Indeed, the analysis of student interviews
indicated that the intervention developed students’ metalinguistic understanding, and over the year period
of the study the intervention students engaged in longer and more meaningful grammatical discussions
than the comparison group (Myhill 2011). However, the analysis also indicates the strong link between
teaching and learning: students’ metalinguistic conversations often echoed what teachers had said in
lessons, with less successful learning consequences for those students whose teachers’ grammatical
pedagogical content knowledge was less secure.

Underpinning teachers’ grammatical pedagogical content knowledge are deeply-held beliefs about the
value of grammar and different pedagogical understandings of the role of metalanguage within the
teaching of writing. These issues are not within the scope of this article and are considered in more depth
elsewhere (Wilson and Myhill 2012; Watson 2012). Nonetheless, it is important to consider the
pedagogical purpose of developing learners’ metalinguistic understanding of writing and the place of
grammar in this. Derewianka and Jones argue that it is ‘a means of making language explicit to learners in
the form of an accessible and flexible metalanguage’ (2010:6), and like Coffin (2010) and Kolln and Hancock
(2005) we have argued that such grammatical understanding develops students’ writing repertoires and
understanding of the meaning-making resources available to them. Teachers with confidence in their own
grammatical content knowledge are more likely to share this understanding and thus to foster classroom
climates which nurture effective grammatical conversations building upon relevant, explicit teaching.
Paradoxically, teachers who feel anxious or insecure about their own grammatical content knowledge are
more likely to hold prescriptivist, rule-bound views of grammar (Kamler 1995; Macken-Horarik 2001;
Harper and Rennie 2009). This may account for some of the formulaic, rather prescriptivist teaching
sometimes evident in our study.

Finally, in attempting to frame the subject and pedagogical content knowledge needed to address policy
mandates across the Anglophone world which re-emphasise grammar, this study underlines the socially-
situated nature of professional knowledge. Greeno, Collins and Resnick (1996) describe the situatedness of
teachers’ professional knowledge, which is ‘distributed among people and their environments, including the
objects, artifacts, tools, books, and the communities of which they are a part’ (Greeno, et al: 17). More
recently, Opfer and Pedder (2011) have argued, drawing on complexity theory, that teachers’ professional
learning is shaped by complex interactions between the teacher, the school and the learning activity. For
the teachers in the intervention group in our study, the learning activities were provided for them in the
teaching materials and using them often created different contexts for learning and less familiar discourses
around texts which foregrounded both their grammatical content knowledge and their pedagogical content
knowledge. For some, the materials acted as effective scaffolds for engaging in metalinguistic talk in the
classroom; whilst for others the materials posed a very real challenge. This was influenced by the teachers’
beliefs about grammar and their own sense of self-efficacy in terms of grammatical content knowledge
(Watson 2012; Brownlee et al 2011). At the same time, differing school contexts, influenced by the
national high-stakes assessment context, led teachers to orient their language teaching differently, from
those who opened up discussion and developed authorial choice in linguistic decision-making to those who
narrowed their teaching to formulaic linguistic prescriptions for test success. This underlines that bridging
teachers’ grammatical content knowledge into effective grammatical pedagogical content knowledge,
realised in classroom practice, is not a simple linear process but one shaped by personal dispositions and
social contexts.

6.1 Conclusion
To date, this study is the first to investigate how teachers’ grammatical content knowledge influences their
classroom practice and shapes the nature of learning experience by students. Although drawing on a
substantial sample, it is limited by its reliance on just three classroom observations per teacher, spread
over three terms. Given the intensity of the debate in Anglophone countries about whether there is a role
for grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum (Locke 2009; Myhill and Jones 2011), it is surprising
that there has been so little empirical investigation of teaching and learning with grammar, and of the
development of grammatical understanding in L1 learners. Likewise, whilst there have been numerous
reports of ‘deficits’ in teacher content knowledge of grammar, as noted earlier, there has been limited
exploration of how this plays out in pedagogical practice. There is a need for further studies which trace
forensically the situated practice of teachers addressing grammar in the context of writing, drawing on a
dataset which includes substantial and sequential lesson observation.

In this article, we have attempted to illustrate the inter-play between teachers’ grammatical content
knowledge, and how this knowledge is reframed in the writing classroom as grammatical pedagogical
content knowledge. We have shown that declarative grammatical content knowledge alone is not
sufficient to establish powerful contexts for learning about writing; it is the pedagogical content knowledge
which is more significant in making meaningful connections, and where developing writers are supported in
seeing ‘language as a resource, a meaning-making system through which we interactively shape and
interpret our world and ourselves’ (Derewianka and Jones 2010:9). Shulman wrote of the importance of
the teacher’s capacity to ‘transform the content knowledge he or she possesses into forms that are
pedagogically powerful and yet adaptive to the variations in ability and background presented by the
students’ (1987: 15). The article points to the importance of addressing not simply declarative grammatical
knowledge in pre-service and in-service teacher education, but also how that knowledge is transformed to
pedagogical grammatical content knowledge, realised in effective classroom practice which develops
students’ grammatical understanding of the written text and their compositional decisions. It also signals
the situatedness of professional learning and the complex inter-relationship between knowledge, beliefs,
practice and context. If grammar matters, then policy-makers and professionals need to take account of
this interplay between content and pedagogy to generate practices in the teaching of writing which are
genuinely pedagogically powerful.
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