Language education – grammar

Richard Hudson, UCL,

 last changed 11 April 2005

Bibliographical information

This is an entry, written in April 2004, for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Elsevier), edited by Keith Brown. What you can download is/are the first proofs.

Abstract

Grammar teaching has a long and distinguished history, but in the English-speaking world it has recently fallen out of favour, though this trend has now been reversed in England. Grammar teaching always includes the word classes but can include the whole of language structure. It can apply to the teaching of writing and reading, L2 learning, liberal self-knowledge or scientific method. When the target is writing, the aim can be either error-reduction or growth and the method may be independent, reactive or proactive (anticipating specific writing needs). Research evidence suggests that proactive teaching works.