A teacher running an interactive grammar exercise (still from Englicious in the Classroom video)
A recent study, asyoumayormaynothaveheard, has found that teaching grammar to Year 2 children (age 6-7) does not improve their writing. But that’s not what it found.
The study, by researchers at UCL and the University of York, did not compare grammar teaching with no grammar teaching. It compared one particular programme of grammar teaching, called Englicious, with the grammar teaching that schools were doing already, and it found that Englicious produced results that were essentially no better than the other grammar teaching.
The research paper makes this very clear, although the conclusions section seems to stray a little into over-generalisation. And the news articles published by the two universities both lead with the generalised claim:
The teaching of grammar in primary schools in England (a key feature of…
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