Research reports on grammar for writing
The following is a very incomplete collection of more or less recent reports on the effects of grammar-teaching on children’s writing.
- 2017. Wyse, Dominic & Carole Torgerson. Experimental trials and ‘what works?’ in education: The case of grammar for writing. British Educational Research Journal. doi:10.1002/berj.3315.
- Teaching grammar does not improve children’s writing ability, research finds (TES article based on Wyse and Torgerson 2017)
- Can grammar teaching improve pupils’ writing? (A blog replying to this by David Didau.)
- We need a mature, informed debate about grammar in the classroom – we need to listen to the teachers (a reply by Debra Myhill)
- Grammar teaching in the national curriculum: has it failed the test? (a reply to Myhill by Wyse and Torgerson)
- A critical commentary by Dick Hudson on Wyse and Torgerson 2017.
- 2014. David Torgerson, Carole Torgerson, Natasha Mitchell, Hannah Buckley, Hannah Ainsworth, Clare Heaps, Laura Jefferson: Grammar for Writing. Evaluation Report and Executive Summary. (Education Endowment Foundation)
- Grammar teaching had little or no effect on Year 6.
- 2013. Jones, S.M. Myhill, D.A. and Bailey, T.C. Grammar for Writing? An investigation into the effect of Contextualised Grammar Teaching on Student Writing. Reading and Writing 26 (8) 1241-1263
- Contextualized grammar teaching does improve writing.
- A follow-up study with weak writers in Year 8, which showed that just four weeks of clearly-focused grammar teaching improved their writing.
- 2012. Myhill, D.A. Jones, S.M., Lines, H. and Watson A. Re-thinking grammar: the impact of embedded grammar teaching on students’ writing and students’ metalinguistic understanding Research Papers in Education 27 (2) 139-166
- Contextualized grammar teaching, with ‘playful experimentation’, does improve writing, but its effect depends both on the pupils’ ability (with stronger learners benefitting more) and on the teachers’ ‘linguistic subject knowledge’.
- 2011. Debra Mayhill, Helen Lines, Annabel Watson: Making meaning with grammar: a repertoire of possibilities. ( Metaphor,4)
- Carefully planned grammar teaching had a strong positive effect on writing quality in Year 9.
- 2007. Fearn, Leif & Nancy Farnan. 2007. When is a verb? Using functional grammar to teach writing. Journal of Basic Writing 26. 63–87.
- Tenth-graders taught grammar for just five weeks in relation to ‘writing purposes’ learned as much grammar as a comparable class taught without this focus, but improved their writing significantly more.
- 2005. Richard Andrews: Knowledge about the teaching of [sentence] grammar: The state of play. (English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 4: 69-76.
- Previous research (in English) showed no positive effect at all of sentence grammar.
- 2005 Richard Andrews and others. The effect of grammar teaching (sentence combining) in English on 5 to 16 year olds’ accuracy and quality in written composition. (University of York research paper)
- Sentence combining does have a positive effect on writing.