The history of English teaching in England

 

Introduction

This site is intended to bring together a rather haphazard collection of documents to do with the history of the subject called ‘English’ in our education system. If you can suggest or offer other documents, please contact me. Another page brings together various systems that have been used for ‘diagramming’ sentence structure in different countries.

Historical surveys

The dominant figure in England at the turn of the twentieth century had been Henry Sweet (1845-1912). Sweet was essentially a philologist, concerned with the understanding of texts (hermeneutics) and textual criticism. He offered striking and original insights into the structure of English, as well as helping to lay the foundations for the scientific study of language in general, and phonetics in particular. Unlike some of his contemporaries (and cf. Daunt, below) he believed that the study of language should begin with one’s own native speech. In the teaching world, Sonnenschein probably occupied at least as prominent a place in the academic consciousness as Sweet did, especially as far as the teaching of grammar in schools was concerned. Sonnenschein had founded the Birmingham Grammatical Society in 1885 with the purpose of promoting simplicity and uniformity of terminology in the teaching of the ‘school’ languages, and of encouraging grammatical research among teachers. This work was to develop in two major directions. The first issued in a series of books covering the most important languages taught in schools, which were uniform in  classification and terminology, scope, size and type. This series – the ‘Parallel Grammar Series’ (PGS) – covered eight
languages, each with its own printed grammar, and some with supplementary readers as well.

The second area into which Sonnenschein channelled his energies was the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology (JCGT), – the political arm, it might be said, of the practical work being done through the PGS. The committee published its recommendations in 1911 (Anon 1911). There was little danger of them being overlooked: with seemingly tireless energy Sonnenschein forged links not only with eight different associations in Britain, who were persuaded to nominate members for the Committee, but also with like-minded colleagues in the United States, Germany, Austria and France. However, for all this activity Sonnenschein’s campaign came to little. This was in part because of the opposition of no less a figure than Otto Jespersen, who took a different view on both theory and  terminology (Walmsley 1989).

For more discussion of the pursuit of a unified grammatical terminology, and the conflict between Sonnenschein and Jespersen and its consequences, see this page:

The early roots of English teaching

  • Derek Gillard’s Education in England: a brief history gives an excellent overview of how our education system evolved since the Romans, including interesting explanations of the changing role of ‘grammar’ and ‘grammar schools’. I have extracted particularly relevant paragraphs here.
  • See Foster Watson’s “The English Grammar Schools to 1660” – published in 1908, but full of useful data based on textbooks and syllabuses from the period. Here’s a juicy extract from p. 247, where he’s discussing the Latin grammar that Henry VIII (yes!) authorized in 1540, a few years before he also authorized the Book of Common Prayer (with similar intent, according to Watson: simply to impose his own authority). This grammar book was called Lily’s Grammar, but it was written by a combination of people, including Erasmus (yes!). You’ll see that the pedagogical strategy in teaching translation into Latin was to start with a grammatical analysis of the English sentence. Here’s how to recognise a verb:

 

 

Textbooks

  • A scanned online copy of Grammar-land (1878, by M.L.Nesbitt), an entertaining story for children about how Mr Noun, Dr Verb and others divide the words of English among themselves in a courtroom, with some intelligent and very undogmatic arguments, and nothing about ‘errors’.
  • A scanned online copy of Sonnenschein’s New English Grammar (1916) in which you’ll find:
    • ‘phrases’ used much as in modern phrase-structure grammar, including noun-phrases and adjective-phrases (but no PPs or VPs).
    • the classification of whole sentences as simple, complex or ‘double/multiple’ (corresponding to the more recent ‘compound’).
    • a system of sentence-analysis using columns (as in Nesfield 1891 ) for subject, verb, indirect object, etc.
    • the five cases of English nouns: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative (but no ablative!).
  • A classic English grammar for schools: Nesfield’s “Manual of English Grammar and Composition” (1916 edition).

Reports

  • Extracts from the Lockwood Report (1964): intro 0 – 1 – 2 – 3; p. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5
    • including Randolph Quirk’s proposed A-level in English Language: p. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6

Exam papers

 

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