The Art of Not Teaching Grammar

Think about how you learned grammar. Was it by doing worksheets in eighth grade? Was it through a series of well-paced quizzes in high school? Was it from a sequence of online grammar modules in college?

Not likely.

You probably learned grammar, like most people, by being a mindful reader and a mindful writer. You paid attention while reading Harry Potter and wondered why Ms. Rowling would plop a semicolon here but place a dash there. You noticed, perhaps subconsciously, that when someone started a sentence with words like despite, even though, and if, that a comma would soon follow. In short, you developed your sense of grammar by consuming it. You digested it. It became a part of you at the instinctual level. It probably wasn’t until much later that you began retroactively attaching rules and terminology to the things you already understood. I’m sure at some point in graduate school or your early days of teaching you had a moment when you were forced to Google subordinating conjunction or split infinitive, and then said, “Ah…so that’s what that means.” It wasn’t the concept you were finally understanding but the mere nomenclature for it.

This is the natural way that humans learn grammar. It starts from the moment we point at a bottle and babble. Our brain is making all sorts of connections, and through years of trial and error, we refine our sense of grammar (if you really want to get into neurolinguistics and the neurology of grammar, I recommend reading any of Steven Pinker's books, especially The Sense of Style and The Language Instinct).

Yet, for some bizarre reason, this isn’t how we teach grammar. We do quite the opposite. We take students, especially those with low test scores, and expect them to memorize all the rules of grammar with a whole host of useless words like conjunctive adverb, gerund, participle, and superlative.

Why?

What are we really preparing them for? Is the ability to circle a possessive pronoun in a sentence about John riding his bike really going to prepare them to write that Intro to Psych term paper on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

It’s no wonder so many students either drop out or fail these grammar-heavy first-year writing classes. I probably would have failed too. Fortunately, I never had a college instructor who put much stock in the teaching of grammar. When I took English 101, our instructor—a bubbly teaching assistant who was younger than most of the class—loved to read to us. Almost every class period she would stand at the front of the room with the textbook in hand and read entire essays out loud. Her cheeks would blush when she had to utter a swearword. When she wasn’t reading to us, she expected us to read, and there were moments I griped that this was supposed to be a writing class, not a reading class. But then she heaped on the writing assignments: four essays that we workshopped over and over and over again. In the end, I got an A, and I moved on to the next writing class, where we read more essays and wrote even longer papers. And the papers got longer and longer until ten years later I finished my three-hundred-page dissertation and received my Ph.D. in English. As I ventured into the job market, I had already published several essays and short stories, I had edited a few anthologies, and I had taught dozens of writing classes. Through all of this, though, I had never received a single lesson in grammar: not a one.

After finishing my Ph.D., I was assigned to teach a developmental-writing course, and as I perused the “common” curriculum used by all of the instructors, I was shocked to see how much time and attention was given to grammar instruction. We had a pre-test, a post-test, ten quizzes, a final exam, and an expensive series of online modules all focused on grammar. Additionally, we had a textbook that cost over a hundred bucks that was little more than a giant grammar how-to manual. We also had a customized course packet that—you can probably guess—was full of grammar tutorials and worksheets and practice quizzes. To be fair, we taught actual writing assignments in the course, broken up into drafts and workshops, and we emphasized the writing process, but all of that seemed secondary to the teaching and testing of grammar.

As I prepared for the course, I actually lost sleep over my anxiety of not knowing the terms and rules of grammar. I knew the rules at the instinctual level—well enough to publish my writing and to help others edit and publish their writing too—but I had never learned how to articulate those rules. So as I taught my students, I was never more than a couple lessons ahead of them. I created PowerPoints and quizzes and activities and worksheets, and I would act like the expert as I explained rules, tips, and tricks to my students. And then I was shocked at the end of the semester when, after all my hard work, the majority of my students failed the final grammar exam. Fortunately, I had only made it worth 5 percent of their final grade, so it really didn’t hurt anyone. When I went to my colleague’s office to find out what I had done wrong, she commiserated and said that was the status quo. Most students in most sections did just as poorly on the grammar exam. That’s the way it had always been, and that’s the way it would always be.

The next semester I doubled my efforts. I memorized every grammar rule I could. I read half a dozen books on grammar and the teaching of grammar. I participated in the online grammar modules and took all of the quizzes. I revised my PowerPoints and lesson plans. I adopted excellent active-learning activities. By the end of the semester, I was ready to pick up my professor-of-the-year award—until, that is, I ran the stack of Scantrons through the machine and looked at the results. My students had done exactly as badly as my students from the previous semester. There was absolutely no improvement.

I slumped into the office of my colleague and asked her why in the world we continue to do this. “Why,” I said, “Do I expect our developmental-writing students to master the rules of grammar when I didn’t even learn them until just a few months ago?” How was it that I could earn a Ph.D. in composition studies before memorizing the rules of grammar, yet I expected my eighteen and nineteen-year-old students, who were not even English majors, to memorize all of these terms and rules?

It seemed backwards—hypocritical even. So I gave up. The next semester, I didn’t teach a lick of grammar. I never even mentioned it. Instead, we spent the entire semester reading and writing. We wrote draft after draft after draft. We read essays and articles and movie reviews and letters to the editor. We watched Ted Talks and YouTube videos about literacy and education and Pop Culture. We wrote product reviews and arguments and analyses, and at the end of the semester, my students seemed happy and motivated and ready to move on to their next writing course. Even though I didn’t teach them grammar, I still made them take the final grammar exam—the same one used in every section of the course—and you know what happened? They did terribly, but no worse than my previous students or the students from other sections.

A few years have passed since then, and I have softened my no-grammar stance. Once every week or two I like to do a “context editing” activity in which students volunteer to let me proofread their paper while it is projected on the big screen. I read each sentence aloud and then ask the class if it looks okay. They’re surprisingly good at noticing when a piece of punctuation should be added, removed, or changed. They recognize when a word is used incorrectly. They notice redundancies. They recommend that a couple of sentences be combined or that a confusing long sentence be broken up. They have the grammar instinct, even if they can’t quite articulate the particular rule or invoke the correct term. Sometimes, I’ll say things liked, “This is what we call a split infinitive,” or, “In case you were wondering, this is a complex sentence,” but I don’t expect them to write down those terms. There are no quizzes or exams. What is important to me is that they can learn to recognize these mistakes so they can fix them in their own writing. A decently-edited final draft is all the proof I need that they’re getting it (and on that note, a poorly-edited final draft can still receive a decent grade and high praise from me for the ideas that it contains).

Beyond that, I don’t teach grammar, and I never will. Each semester, I can confidently say my students finish the class prepared to take on whatever writing challenge is next.

There’s only so much we can teach our students in one short semester or quarter. We have to prioritize, and I have found no compelling evidence—anecdotal or otherwise—to suggest that direct grammar instruction is more beneficial to our students’ development as writers than having them read, write, and engage in other critical and creative-thinking activities.

If grammar is so remarkably unhelpful, then why is it so pervasive in the teaching of writing? There are many reasons, and the teaching of grammar has a long, boring history, but it really comes down to three things:

1. The standardized-testing culture we live in (it is much faster, simpler, and cheaper to test students on grammar proficiency than on writing ability).

2. The need for content in writing classes (grammar is easy to teach and grade, especially for less-experienced instructors).

3. The myth of necessity created by the textbook industry (writing instructors can’t possibly do their job without the content provided by expensive textbooks and online programs—and grammar is an easy commodity to package and sell).

I’m not such a curmudgeon when it comes to grammar that I don’t see the value of grammar-based placement exams. At the university where I teach, we rely on exams like the ACT, SAT, and ACCUPLACER to figure out which writing course to put students into. As I have taught different courses that were based on ACT ranges, I have seen a clear correlation between ACT scores and writing ability. When I teach a regular section of first-year writing, where students must have an ACT of 19 or higher, I tend to see higher-quality essays, especially in the early drafts, than similar co-requisite sections where students’ ACT scores range from 15-18. It would be great if we didn’t have to rely on multiple-choice tests to determine writing ability, but with our limited funds and time, these grammar-heavy placement tests actually do a pretty good job of placing students into the most appropriate course.

There is a prevalent misconception in academia, however, that if a student gets a low score on a grammar-heavy placement test, then that means he or she needs to be taught more grammar. What these instructors and administrators are failing to consider is that those students who get the higher placement scores do so because they have a more refined sense of grammar: they have that grammar instinct—an instinct not born of grammar quizzes and worksheets, but one born of mindful reading and writing. So our goal with lower-scoring students, then, should be to help them likewise acquire that sense of grammar, to continue growing that grammar instinct, through similar mindful reading and writing experiences.

The testing culture that we live in—or, to be more specific, the standardized-testing culture—is partly to blame for this mindset. Grammar factors into many standardized tests because it is such an easy thing to assess. All you need is a Scantron and some multiple-choice questions. As much as we tell ourselves and others not to teach to the test, that’s what we do. High-school administrators want to make sure their students get a good ACT or SAT score, so they often build their curriculum around those standardized exams. And then when some of these students don’t do so well but still want to go to college, we again look at the tests to figure out where our students are “deficient” and then teach them accordingly, which usually means grammar.

Let’s stop the cycle. No matter what level of course you are teaching, just celebrate the fact that your students got their diploma or GED and have now safely landed in college. Forget the standardized tests they took. They’re over; students don’t ever need to take them again, so stop building your curriculum around them. Focus, instead, on what has been proven effective in helping students improve as writers: actual reading and writing. Their grammar instinct will grow naturally as a byproduct of your diligent efforts in guiding them through the writing process and as they churn out drafts of essays and research papers and proposals and blog posts and discussion threads and analyses and reports. And if, by chance, they find themselves down the line face-to-face with some grammar-heavy assessment, they will likely do much better on it if you have been diligently teaching them how to write things people actually want to read rather than just making them memorize grammar rules.