Grammar and its environment in English

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the work of grammar in its secondary English
context. In so doing, we review past traditions of grammar and explain the principles of language
underpinning contemporary views.

A brief history of ‘grammar’ teaching

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, English teachers have seen a renewed interest in the
role of language in appreciating, creating and critiquing texts. In this recent ‘linguistic turn’,
grammar is no longer seen as a set of prescriptive rules but rather as a description of how
patterns of language choice construct meanings in different contexts. This contextual view of
grammar links English teachers of the twenty-first century with rhetorical traditions dating back
to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

During the Roman republic and in ancient Athens, oratory was the supreme political skill. The
rhetorical structures of public spoken language were highly organized and rigorously analysed
for how they could be used to convince, to move, to inform or to entertain communities, whether
this be in politics, the temple or the marketplace. In examining how language was organised to
achieve these powerful social purposes, the Greeks and Romans actually catalogued many of the
rhetorical tools of the trade. For example, they identified the ‘rule of three’ (involving repeated
patterns of words, phrases or sentences), much loved by orators such as Cicero and extensively
used by politicians since. One memorable example is Caesar’s ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ See
Higgins (2008) for an overview of other such rhetorical tools.

With the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and the further codifi cation into
writing of the spoken word, this interest in examining the structures and functions of oral rhetoric
was extended to the written mode. Until the nineteenth century in English-speaking cultures (and
still in some parts of the United States), rhetorical studies were a central component of the school
and university curriculum. Students would study models of exemplary spoken and written texts,
learning to
emulate and modify these according to their own purposes.

In the nineteenth century, with the expansion of mass education, attention focused on the
structures of written language rather than on those of the oral mode, resulting in a narrower focus
on children’s acquisition of alphabetic and syntactic knowledge— see Christie (1990) for a very
interesting account. In breaking written language into its various parts, attention to the overall
meaning and organisation of the text was gradually lost. Because they were cheap and easy to
reproduce, prescriptive grammar books proliferated by the early twentieth century (Christie
1990). These were based on the sentence structures (or syntax) of written ancient Greek and
Latin, languages whose structures differed from English in some fundamental ways. For
example, the infinitive form of the verb ‘to go’ is one word in Latin, leading to the rule that
infinitives should not be split in English, and thus rendering Captain Kirk’s rhetorically powerful
line ‘to boldly go’ ungrammatical!

By the mid-twentieth century the separation of grammar and rhetoric was complete. As a result,
grammar became a set of drilled rules about sentence structure that did not contribute
meaningfully to students’ own writing development. In the 1970s and 1980s, three key
movements arose which represented a powerful backlash against this decontextualised and
impoverished model of ‘traditional’ school grammar: ‘whole language’ (Goodman 1967),
‘personal growth’ models of English (Dixon 1975) and ‘process writing’ (Graves 1981). These
all put student learning processes and growth at the centre of their pedagogy, but offered no
model of language to guide the teacher. As a result, many teachers were trained during this era
with no explicit knowledge about language (KAL), leaving them without sufficient resources for
diagnosing or supporting their students’ language development. This was particularly
problematic for teachers working with students from communities with fewer of the ‘valued’
literacy resources to draw on, and those learning English as an additional language.

By the 1980s, a group of educational linguists (Christie 1990; Derewianka 1991; Rothery 1994)
began to explore what kind of KAL would allow teachers to intervene more supportively in their
students’ literacy development. The earlier work of these educational linguists revealed that
teachers’ knowledge about language does contribute to students’ literacy development. The
model of grammar proposed was largely developed by linguists Michael Halliday (1994) and
James Martin (1993). There was a reconnection with rhetoric, in that the model was
comprehensive and fl exible enough to explore the characteristics of spoken and written texts and
how these achieve particular purposes in particular social contexts. This more rhetorically
oriented view of grammar has since informed much of current educational practice across
Australia. It is a grammar which views language as a set of resources for enabling students to
construct and read the varied texts of their contemporary world, while connecting them to the
classic texts of the past. It is a grammar which allows students to appreciate and critique the
powerful texts of their time, including those which galvanised social change by using rhetorical
strategies that reconnected with Roman and Greek traditions of oratory. Two such texts are
former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples of 13
February 2008 (commonly referred to as ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations’ or more simply as
‘Apology speech’) and US President Barack Obama’s election night victory speech of 4
November 2008.

Most recently, there have been renewed calls for the reintroduction of a more sustained approach
to the teaching of rhetoric in the English curriculum—see, for example, Green (2009) and
Sawyer (2009). It is clear that, as English teachers, we are now poised to incorporate the best of
what history has offered us into a system of grammar that is robust and explicit enough to do the
work of the contemporary English curriculum. Such a grammar underpins the new Australian
Curriculum for English, where students are to understand how Standard Australian English, as
dynamic and evolving, works in its spoken and written forms. This grammar provides a
systematic knowledge about the patterns of English usage and grammar at the levels of the word,
the sentence and the extended text, and about the connections between these levels (see Maryin
& Rose 2007). This is a contextual view of grammar, where language functions to enable us to
interact with others, to express and develop ideas, and to comprehend and create coherent texts.
It is this view of grammar as a set of resources that underpins this book.

The grammar introduced in the following chapters makes explicit the grammatical structures and
patterns of key text types in secondary English. An explicit focus on the grammar of these text
types offers enormous support to students who are confused about the basic structures and
language features of English texts. While some students may have been implicitly ‘taught’
versions of these structures and language features in middle-class households, those students
who have not had access to this sort of cultural capital do not learn by osmosis the conventions
which are valued both in the wider culture and in the examination system. The acquisition of
these conventions cannot be left to chance and must be explicitly taught at school, if they are to
be learnt at all by certain groups of our students.

Grammar teaching in the early twenty-first century

Many English teachers we have spoken to are excited by the new Australian Curriculum
and its invitation for them to revitalise their own knowledge about language as they contribute to
a study of English as ‘dynamic and evolving’. Their students will have the opportunity to
develop an explicit understanding and appreciation of the nature of the
English language and how it works to create various kinds of meaning. While supporting them in
developing emerging textual practices, this will also reconnect students with older traditions of
rhetoric as they learn to use language to inform, persuade, entertain and argue. This rhetorically
oriented grammar also provides a means for students to appreciate the capacity of Standard
Australian English to evoke feelings, and to organize and convey information and ideas.
Teachers are particularly excited by the opportunities to explore what kind of language resources
modern orators use to rouse public sentiment. They are looking for a metalanguage that helps
them identify the rhetorical tools used, for example, by Kevin Rudd in his Apology to the Stolen
Generations. One such tool is grammatical parallelism, most evident in Rudd’s choice of
adverbial phrase (underlined) at the beginning of each sentence in the extract below.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for
their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of
families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud
culture, we say sorry.

English teachers also want a grammar that allows them to go beyond identifying discrete
structural features to one which allows them to explore how language choices combine in texts
such as Rudd’s to work their rhetorical magic. For example, along with the repeated choices of
complex adverbial phrases at the beginning of each sentence in the excerpt above, Rudd has used
the rule of three and repetition (we say sorry), which amplifies or ‘turns up the volume’ of the
apology. The choice of the personal, inclusive pronoun ‘we’ is also effective in sharing the
responsibility of the apology with parliament and ‘more broadly’ with the people of Australia.
We will explore these powerful rhetorical strategies later in the book.

Many English teachers are daunted by the significant challenges involved in learning a more
extended system of grammar than they have had access to in the past. For older teachers, the
word ‘grammar’ conjures up memories of stultifying lessons in parsing and analysis, red pen on
a composition and their own keen awareness of the gap between the ideal and the real in actual
communication. For younger teachers, it suggests mysterious, often unfamiliar knowledge about
rules of agreement or structure which they reach for in moments of student difficulty with a
sentence.

Many English teachers have undertaken their own teacher training or high school education in an
era when there was a deliberate avoidance of explicit teaching of grammar. Some of these
teachers may even recall negative experiences in learning traditional grammars at school, in
particular the frustration of learning about parts of speech and sentence-based grammatical rules
which didn’t relate to the literary or everyday texts they studied or taught with. As a result, they
may have avoided teaching and learning with any form of grammar. Some English teachers may
continue to use the simplified forms of these traditional grammars which have featured in various
textbooks, finding that they provide some insights into sentence structure, however fragmented
and shallow. Yet another group may argue that while grammar has always been part of ‘core
business’ in English, it should be taught ‘at the point of need’ rather than systematically built
into their curriculum planning.

Exercise 1.1
At this stage, you might like to take a moment to reflect on, or discuss with a colleague, your
own experiences of learning and teaching grammar. Which of the groups mentioned earlier
would you locate yourself in?
Whatever your prior experiences with learning and teaching grammar, we have designed this
book so that it can meet a range of various teacher needs. In the remainder of this chapter, we
outline the key principles of an expanded system of language, as this reconnects both
retrospectively with older traditions of rhetoric and prospectively as it underpins the Australian
Curriculum for English. We introduce this grammar as a system of choices which arise out of
four key contextual factors:

our purpose for using language (the genre or text type)

what we are talking/writing about (subject matter or field)

with whom we are interacting (audience or tenor)

the role played by language (mode and medium).

We illustrate how working with this view of grammar can help English teachers support their
students not only to understand the structure of English as a language, but to develop their
students’ literacy (in terms of comprehending, evaluating and creating written and multimodal
texts) and engage in a more informed appreciation of literature. We introduce three key text
types of English as important contexts for further exploring grammar, outlining the typical
structure of some key story genres, argument genres and text response genres. We hope that the
texts and exercises we offer for your professional development will provide models that you can
adapt for your classroom use.

Principles of language underpinning this book

The view of language that underpins this book is concerned with how we use language to make
meaning. This is a social view of language, based largely on contributions from systemic
functional linguistics (Halliday 1994; Halliday & Hasan 1976; Martin 1993). These principles
about language, text and context, as outlined below, allow teachers to fully engage with the
language strand of the Australian Curriculum for English.

Language is influenced by the context of use

The texts we use and the meanings we make with language are influenced by a number of factors
outside language—those associated with the context in which language is being used. Features of
the context which may influence and shape our language use include:

the cultural context—This refers to the broad cultural practices associated with different
countries or ethnic groups but also to the institutionalized practices within groups such as
schools, sporting associations or internet chat groups. Western and Asian ways of telling a story,
for example, may vary, but so too might stories told in a blog, compared with those told in a
public book reading.

the sociocultural context—Language also varies according to the different orientations or

backgrounds of groups within cultures. Sociologists and linguists have noted, for example, that
factors such as socioeconomic status, gender, age and ethnic background have a great influence
on language choices. A letter to the editor by a teenage boy in the western suburbs of Melbourne
about the need for more skate parks may use very different language choices to a letter on the
same topic written by a middle-aged, middle-class woman.

the specific context—Aspects of the specific or local context, such as the activity we are
engaged in, the nature of the interaction and the channel of communication, also have a great
influence on language. A person might review a film using one set of language choices when
speaking with a friend, and a very different set of language choices when writing a review for the
school magazine.
Language is functional
Language enables us to get things done. We use spoken and written texts to achieve different
goals or social purposes. For example, we use stories to entertain, arguments to persuade and text
responses to analyze a literary artefact. Texts that share the same social purpose and have many
of the same features are called text types or genres.

This notion of function relates not only to whole texts, but to language itself. The language we
use in different text types serves a number of functions simultaneously. Halliday (1994)
describes these functions as:

the experiential function—the way we use language to represent our experiences of the world

the interpersonal function—the way we use language to interact with others

the textual function—the way we use language to create well-organized and cohesive texts,
both written and spoken.

The words we choose and the way we organize them within texts reflect these functions and help
the text achieve its purpose.

Language is a system of register choices

The language system is a network of grammatical and lexical (word) choices which can be seen
as a tool kit with which we can make particular meanings in particular contexts. We draw on
different areas of the language system (or different tools) depending on whether we are
representing:

the field—what’s going on, who’s involved and the surrounding circumstances. This set of
choices is related to the experiential function.

the tenor—the roles, relationships and feelings involved in interacting with others. This set of
choices is related to the interpersonal function.

the mode—the different modes or channels of communication, whether these be written, spoken
or multimodal. This set of choices is related to the textual function.

These three factors of field, tenor and mode combine to shape the register of a spoken or written
text in its specific context. The term ‘register’ has long been used by English teachers to refer to
different ways of speaking or writing, determined by such things as class, gender or age. For
example, in the film Educating Rita, Rita initially uses only a colloquial and everyday register of
English but develops in addition a more specialized and formal register through the interactions,
topics and modes of her study at university. Throughout this book, we use the concept of register
to refer to the combination of grammatical resources which create the fi eld (the what), the tenor
(the who) and the mode (the how) of a text as it achieves its particular purpose (or genre). The
relationship between these aspects of context (fi eld, tenor and mode) and the grammatical
systems drawn on (the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual) is represented in figure 1.1.

Implications of a social view of language for teaching and learning

The social view of language described earlier has three important implications for teaching and
learning about language in the secondary English curriculum:

1 The development of students’ spoken and written language does not take place naturally, but is
supported by key experts in their educational communities. Teachers who are aware of how
language is structured to achieve distinctive purposes can better support students in appreciating
and creating the increasingly complex range of texts they encounter in secondary English.

2 Access to a metalanguage—a language for talking about language—allows teachers to be

explicit about how language functions when modelling or jointly constructing texts with
students. This metalanguage is a particularly important tool kit for describing and critiquing the
language resources used by speakers and writers to construct different versions of reality in the
texts they produce. 3 The model of language and context applies to multimodal texts as well as
those based on words alone. We live in exciting multimodal times, where technology offers us
the opportunity to represent meanings not just through spoken and written words, but also
through intriguing combinations of words, images, animations, hyperlinks and sound, to name
but a few modes. The written or spoken word is central to meaning-making in all the modes
studied in English, and this is the system we have focused on in this book. However, the model
outlined above provides essential tools which can also be applied to multimodal texts—see, for
example, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006).