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Grammar, spelling, and word choice have always been taught in mother tongue classes around the world, but many students question why these seemingly arbitrary rules matter. Is teaching grammar an elitist practice meant to distinguish posh educated folks from the peasantry, or does teaching grammar matter for more than just a status symbol?
Recent research suggests that the way grammar, spelling, and word choice are being taught is ineffective and students do not utilize what they learn. However, this does not mean that learning grammar is a waste of time.
This article will discuss why teaching traditional grammar and spelling conventions is still vitally important for students and suggest research based ways that teachers can change their lessons to teach grammar in a way students can actually use in their daily lives.
What is Grammar?
Grammar is the current rules for how words and symbols should be utilized and manipulated in sentences to clearly communicate a specific meaning. Things included in grammar are punctuation, conjugation, and word order.
Grammar, along with word choice and spelling, is often prescribed by an education system as having only one “correct” usage. For example, commas must appear between items in a list in English and capital letters are used for proper nouns like names for people and places.
Different languages have different grammar rules however. For example, in German, all nouns must be capitalized instead of just proper nouns. In addition to this, grammar rules change over time.
Some strict formal grammarians used to suggest that prepositions like “from”, “to”, and “at” should never “dangle” at the end of sentences, and should always precede the word they modify. With this archaic rule however, even simple sentences like “Where are you from” would be grammatically incorrect and should instead be “From whence do you hail.” This shows that grammar is not some biological or cultural imperative, but something that changes naturally over time just like spelling conventions and word meaning.
Word Choice vs. Spelling vs. Grammar
One of the most confusing aspects of grammar is how it differs from things like word choice and spelling. In reality, the differences are not that important to understand unless the student desires to become a linguist as they should all be taught together and serve similar purposes. However, a quick overview can be useful to ensure all aspects of language choice are covered in class.
Word choice
Word choice refers to the specific word a person will choose to give a specific idea to their conversation partner or reader. Different words have different meanings and connotations and so choosing even very similar words can have a massive effect on the implications of a sentence.
For example, a person could either say “the light is bright” or “the light is blinding”. While both sentences suggest there is a powerful light, the first is quite neutral and could either be positive or negative while the second has a more negative quality that focuses on the negative or at least overpowering quality of that brightness.
Another, possibly more amusing example for students to understand is “You’re looking beautiful” vs. “You’re looking sexy”. Despite both beautiful and sexy meaning “pleasant to the eye” students will giggle when hearing this and be immediately able to understand that one word choice may elicit a pleasant smile while the other could very likely elicit a slap to the face.
Spelling
Spelling refers to the specific letters chosen to write a chosen word. Spelling has been formalized to prevent confusion between similar words and allow readers to quickly recognize words and read more quickly. Spelling is only a concern in written language, but spoken language has pronunciation which similarly varies how words are presented differently between language variants.
While spelling rules are quite rigid, there are some differences between different types of English used around the world. Commonly cited examples include the American “color” and “neighbor” in contrast to the British “colour” and “neighbour”.
The American spellings are more traditional latin spellings while the British versions were changed in the late 1800s to prevent spelling confusions between other similar sounding words where only “ou” variants are allowed like “rigorous” and “righteous”.
America has also changed some spelling rules to simplify some words’ strange spelling. A common example here is the word “donut” which was simplified from the more traditional “doughnut” still used in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Grammar
Once a person has chosen a word and how to represent it through spelling or pronunciation, the user must now choose how to organize it into a sentence to get their meaning across. This is where grammar comes in to decide which order the words should go in and how they should be broken up by punctuation to help readers quickly understand meaning.
Grammar is the most difficult of these three concepts to teach as it includes multiple elements and varies in strictness from an absolute requirement to personal style. One example of grammar which is absolutely required in order for a sentence to be correct is word order.
No matter the personal style of a speaker, in English, adjectives come before the word they describe unless a verb is between them. This is why “the cute baby” is correct and “the baby cute” is incorrect. Other languages have different rules for this, but in English, it is a quick sign that a speaker or writer is not fluent in English if they have incorrect word order.
One example where grammar is more up to personal style is comma usage. Sometimes commas are really required, such as between items in a list. Other times however, a comma is really more up to the style of the writer and what makes sense in the specific sentence.
The Oxford Comma is a commonly discussed optional comma. The oxford comma is the comma that can go before the “and” in a list of things. For example, both “He likes apples, bananas, and oranges, as well as “He likes apples, bananas and oranges” are both commonly accepted.
Two Ways to Teach Grammar and Spelling
There are two styles of teaching grammar that are vehemently defended by their adherents.
Prescriptive Grammar
Prescriptive grammar is the teaching of a single “correct” way of writing and speaking that students must learn to follow in order to be accepted by society. Prescriptive grammarians feel that students need a single set of rules to follow so that writing can be organized and traditional ways of speaking and writing can be conserved to prevent old styles from becoming unintelligible.
Descriptive Grammar
Descriptive grammarians feel that grammar should be taught by describing the various ways different groups use grammar over time and what that says about them as a speaker or writer. Descriptive grammar does not assert that there is one correct way to speak or write, but understands that grammar rules can change depending on the culture, education level, and time period the speaker or writer is communicating in.
How Should Grammar be Taught to Students in School?
Teaching Grammar in Literature
Descriptive grammar teaching is a more advanced version of teaching grammar as it not only teaches the most accepted formal version of language usage, but understands that variance can also reveal a lot about the user as well. In addition to this, instead of simply creating a false dichotomy of “correct” vs “incorrect”, descriptive grammar teaching discusses how different types of variance all include different clues that can give further understanding about the writer/speaker and their intended meaning.
Being literate in grammar, spelling, and word choice is about being a detective that uses words as clues to understand meaning. Rather than seeing differences in word choice, grammar, or spelling as signs a person is lacking intelligence, students should be taught to understand the nuances of the unorthodox choice and what it says about the writer.
Prescriptive grammar teaching is an oversimplification of a very complex and ever changing process. In prescriptive grammar teaching, any variance from the norm is simply denoted as “wrong” and no further investigation is done to gain understanding from that variance.
Descriptive grammar teaching goes more in depth into understanding variance in grammar and what the specific variance can teach about the user. Descriptive grammarians do not dispute that there is a formalized and more accepted version of language and still teach this style as one of the ways humans can communicate.
Descriptive grammarians teach that formalized versions of language can often tell a lot about a user’s education level, cultural background, and formality of speaking which is also called “register”. The reason that descriptive grammar is a more advanced version of grammar is that it does not allow students to simply stop at “correct” or “incorrect” but pushes them to dig deeper into the style to learn more about the speaker or writer.
For example, as discussed above, if an English speaker uses “the baby cute” instead of “the cute baby” it can be quickly inferred that the speaker is still learning English but this does not necessarily suggest anything about their intelligence or education level in other subjects. Alternatively, if a speaker says something like “I ain’t gonna go there”, it is highly unlikely that the speaker is a foreigner as this style of grammar variance is more commonly used in casual speech in the modern day.
Historically, there are actually three different types of “ain’t” that have been used by different groups. The first is a shortened version of “am not, which was simply a contraction even used by high class British writers in the 1600s. The second began in the 1800s as a shortened version of “have not” used by lower class British people who dropped the H sound at the beginning of the word and didn’t pronounce the V clearly either. The last version of “ain’t” began being used by African American slave communities as a replacement for “didn’t”.
Though all of these versions have merged in pronunciation and usage to being more of a lower class or very casual speech signifier in today’s world, they all had a unique historical, cultural, and socio-economic background behind them. Prescriptive grammarians would simply denote all usages as “wrong” while descriptive grammarians could use clues from the time period of the usage to gain further understanding about the author.
This is a vast oversimplification of the grand history of the word “ain’t” and is only one example of the ways digging deeper into grammar variance can teach a lot about the user’s background or gain understanding on authorial intent in stories.
Teachers should encourage students to not simply stop at their first impression of an apparent grammar “mistake” and encourage them to figure out why the author had the character speak that way and what it might suggest about the character, the author, or even the audience that the writer was writing for.
Teaching Grammar in Modern Texts
Learning about old books and the messages from authors from hundreds of years ago is not the only reason that grammar can be useful for students, however. Grammar errors can also be a sign of a poorly edited text that does not come from a reliable source.
While grammar knowledge is not required to be incredibly intelligent in scientific and political issues, the most reliable information in these domains comes from groups of professionals at research labs and news organizations that fact check information before publishing as well as ensuring a standard grammar convention is used. If a scientific or political article online contains grammar or spelling errors, this suggests that it does not come from a source that is careful about the information they publish.
Recent research suggests that adolescents do not use grammar queues to vet the quality of information they come across online. Researchers from a study published last month presented students with short health messages that could appear on social media platforms and asked them to rate how trustworthy they found each message to be. (Greškovičová et al.)
Shockingly, students did not use grammar mistakes that would have been caught by an editor to decide the quality of information they were presented with. In fact, one of the only things that would make students trust a message less was if it contained a “clickbait” headline that uses sensational language to get readers to open the article but has little to do with the content.
While, as mentioned above, grammar knowledge is not required to be knowledgeable in other areas, many scams contain grammar and spelling mistakes. The researchers suggested that teachers teach students to use grammar clues to give understanding about the credibility of the information they read online.
“When we help adolescents to become sensitive to cues, they will direct their attention to these cues…Spotting editing cues could later become adequate cognitive heuristics that could help to appraise online health messages effectively, accurately, and correctly” (Greškovičová et al.)
Rather than simply suggesting that any grammar or spelling mistake guarantees the information presented is wrong, students should use these mistakes as a red flag to do more research to verify and not simply blindly share information that could be a scam. This will give students something to look for in messages that may contain information far above their level to understand.
Rather than simply being at the mercy of experts who write about things they have no background in, teaching grammar gives students a jumping off point for judging the quality of information they come across online and teaches them that further research is often necessary to verify things they read online.
Conclusion
While grammar can seem a stiff and uninteresting topic, it can give quite a bit of insight into the background and education level of the author. While grammar variance is not always a sign of ignorance, it can be. However, it is important to keep in mind that it also can be a sign that the writer comes from a different country, is writing from a different time period, or has a different cultural background.
Students should be made aware of formal grammar conventions in order to be able to vet information they read online, but also be taught about how grammar “mistakes” are not always black and white. Grammar, spelling, and word choice are simply clues given by the author that the language detective student can use to gain more understanding about what they are reading.
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References
Greškovičová, Katarína et al. “Superlatives, Clickbaits, Appeals To Authority, Poor Grammar, Or Boldface: Is Editorial Style Related To The Credibility Of Online Health Messages?”. Frontiers In Psychology, vol 13, 2022. Frontiers Media SA, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.940903.
