top of page

Word Soup: Why We Need Grammar

Writer's picture: Elizabeth BreauElizabeth Breau

The American educational system has often had a conflicted relationship with English grammar, possibly arising from the conflict between education for the elite, who learned Latin and Greek in school, and education for the masses, which was often limited to basic literacy and numeracy. Studies have suggested that studying grammar does not make people better writers, and many English teachers have been content to leave grammar instruction to high school foreign language teachers who teach the grammar rules of whatever language they teach.


However, this approach does not serve students particularly well. Even high school students who write and speak grammatically most of the time flounder on ACT or SAT questions that test their knowledge of subject-verb agreement or correct comma use. They often haven’t learned any grammar since elementary school and barely remember the definitions of terms like “adjective” or “preposition,” so they become confused when they have to select the correct wording or punctuation. This gap between knowing whether a sentence is correct and being able to explain why it’s correct must be bridged if students are going to be able to answer questions based on knowledge of the rules rather than having to intuit the right answer by how a group of words “feels” or what they think it’s trying to say.


Grammar exists to explain how sentences convey meaning. It codifies how English functions and enables us to understand one another. Not teaching it leaves student writers struggling to make their ideas make sense with wordy constructions, misplaced modifiers, and awkward phrasing. I discovered this when I began teaching college composition classes in graduate school. After wading through papers that can only be described as word soup, I sat down and taught myself the basic terminology I needed to explain to my students why their grades were bad and what they needed to do to improve. However, when I taught high school years later, I was reprimanded for “teaching grammar in isolation” to a class of low-performing students who needed to pass New Jersey’s state test to graduate high school.


What my supervisor failed to see is that a basic knowledge of English grammar--the names for the parts of speech and parts of sentences--is necessary if one wants to talk about why one sentence is correct and another is not. It’s much harder to explain why a group of words is or is not a complete sentence without referring to subjects and verbs, main clauses and dependent clauses. I couldn’t assume that my students knew what these terms meant--given that they had not been able to define a verb--so I was teaching them the vocabulary they needed to understand the lesson I was about to present.


Vocabulary is a big part of why grammar is confusing. English grammar includes two vocabularies: the parts of speech and the parts of a sentence. For example, nouns, words that mean a person, place, thing, or idea, are only sometimes the subjects (or actors) of the sentences they appear in. In many sentences, nouns appear as objects (recipients of the subject’s action). In other words, English grammar consists of two overlapping sets of vocabulary that both label the same thing: words. Students who are confused about the difference between a noun and the subject of a sentence will often be unable to spot errors in subject-verb agreement because they are matching the sentence’s verb to the wrong noun.


English grammar wasn’t taught until the sixteenth century, and many of its rules are taken directly from Latin, even though there are significant differences between the two. In fact, the first English grammar books were written in Latin! Clearly, any grammar that began as the rules from another language and contains two sets of vocabulary that frequently refer to the same thing is going to be confusing. English is a supremely irregular language, filled with exceptions and inconsistencies, and it’s also always evolving. Sometimes, rules are modified or simplified by users--as is currently taking place with the personal pronoun “their,” which has become increasingly acceptable as a singular pronoun despite its official status as plural. Grammar codifies how we use language, but it should not be seen as the final word on how we communicate.





14 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Komentáře


bottom of page