The piece of official writing that I'm referring to in this post, is at the bottom of the post. It comes from the Bew Report (2011) and is available online. I haven't made it up!
The people who decided that children in Year 6 in schools in England would 'do' grammar, did not decide to do so for reasons to do with 'grammar' nor to do with children. It was not a decision made because teachers, or advisers, or researchers sat in a room and thought it would be a good idea to do grammar for reasons to do with language, writing, linguistics, children's development. The reasons were entirely to do with a government trying to work out how to assess teachers and teaching. They wanted a tool to do it with.
If you think I'm being too political or too conspiracy-theorist about this, then please let me draw your attention to one part of one paragraph in the Bew Report of 2011 (see below). It's available on the gov.uk website. In this piece of the report you can see clearly that this huge change in the Year 6 curriculum was made purely and only in order to assess teachers - yes - but in itself, it was based on a total fallacy: that 'grammar' has right and wrong answers.
Digression: there are various ways of describing language (ie how we speak, write - and to a certain extent - think.) There are several, if not many, grammars. There is also the fact that we do grammar without anyone describing it anyway, just as the landscape does landscape without geographers describing it.
Some grammars are flexible, tentative, open to possibilities and which accept that human language is part of human behaviour and so frequently defies being tied down to simple categories.
So the 'grammar' that the government chose to implement is one specific form of grammar. It is rigid. Some of it is based on out-dated terminology. Some of it isn't even grammar (eg 'synonyms). Some of it is disputed (which in itself is no bad thing, precisely because some language production (ie how we use language) can't be tied down. )
As I've mentioned before, one example of all this is 'tense'. As a word, it is used to refer to the idea that a specific 'verb form' like 'I am going' is attached to and expresses a particular time frame. In this case, the 'present'. You know that, without me telling you that! You say every day things like 'I'm going to the shops' and so 'am going' helps you say that you're doing something now. So grammarians (who noticed that Latin does the same sort of thing) called it the present tense (though in this particular example they distinguished between 'I go' and 'I am going' and called the first the 'present tense' and the second 'present continuous'. People who have to teach Year 6's now, will notice that they have to call it the 'present progressive'. That's because grammarians form into terminology camps. Spend a few minutes online and you can find that terms used for parts of speech vary all over the English-speaking world. So the claim that 'grammar' produces right and wrong answers is false even on those grounds alone. The universal ways or terms for describing language have long lost their universality, or were never there in the first place. Spend some time looking at how to describe 'my' in 'my Mum', for example!
Back with 'tense': you'll know that you can say and probably do say, 'I'm going out tomorrow'. 'Present progressive', surely. But 'tomorrow' indicates that this about the 'future'. In other words, the sentence as a whole indicates 'future'. And yet it uses a present tense. How come? Because grammar doesn't have right and wrong answers. And because the terminology needs to be more flexible. Perhaps it would be more useful to ask, 'how do we express time through language? Sometimes we can do it through verb forms. Sometimes we do it through combinations of words as with this example - using 'tomorrow'. In other words, we need a description that is fit for purpose and not a rigid one that doesn't allow for what we really say, write and think.
People who've had to 'do' this grammar and the absurd test in May of Year 6 also notice that there are questions in the exam that express certainties about language which aren't there. In the first year that they implemented the exam, there was a question to do with putting an 'adverb' (a term that is long past its usefulness anyway) in the clause 'The sun shone [....]' There was a choice of words, I think. The 'right' answer was 'brightly'. The wrong answer was 'bright'. Just say to yourself, these two alternatives. You may remember the song about the moon shining bright on Charlie Chaplin. Anyway, the linguist David Crystal wrote to the examiners and told them that 'bright' was a valid answer. Of course, they ignored him.
Yesterday, I posted here, a discovery I made that on the government's own website where it is trying to say, in effect, 'this is how you write well, using the grammar that we tell you to teach', they can't get it 'right' according to their own rules.
So, the apparatus is at fault. It's been brought in on the premise (the sole premise) of assessing teachers. It's not been brought in because it's valid in itself. Here's the part of the para from the Bew Report (2011). Please distribute it as widely as you can. There is a new government in power. It might just be faintly possible that someone 'up there' will listen to this argument.
