The Case for Teaching Grammar: “The soldier was hit by the sailor.”
Science Daily reports that UK researchers at Northumbria University have found that many people who speak English don’t understand its basic grammar. Apparently this has nothing to do with intelligence:
[Dr Ewa Dabrowska] also stressed that the findings have nothing to do with intelligence. Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly. She speculates that this could be because their attention was not drawn to sentence construction by parents or teachers when they were children.
She adds: “Our results show that a proportion of people with low educational attainment make errors with understanding the passive, and it appears that this and other important areas of core grammar may not be fully mastered by some speakers, even by adulthood.
The less-educated test subjects had difficulty understanding sentences which contained the qualifier “every” and sentences in the passive voice, like this one:
“The soldier was hit by the sailor.”
According to Science Daily:
Dr Dabrowska comments: “These findings are ground breaking, because for decades the theoretical and educational consensus has been solid. Regardless of educational attainment or dialect we are all supposed to be equally good at grammar, in the sense of being able to use grammatical cues to understand the meaning of sentences.
The study raises questions about the Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar:
The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky‘s theory of universal grammar. The theory assumes that all children learn language equally well and that there must therefore be an underlying common structure to all languages that is somehow “hard-wired” into the brain.
Dr Dabrowska notes, “If a significant proportion of the population does not understand passive sentences, then notices and other forms of written information may have to be rewritten and literacy strategies changed.”
The study seems to me to have at least two implications:
Teachers and parents should instruct children in grammar. (Vindication here for all lovers of diagramming sentences.)
There’s some new dissertation fodder and ammunition for Chomskyites and anti-Chomskyites.
The press release from Northumbria University is here.
