Literacy in Schools

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Sam House

Literacy in Schools –

When a large number of English Language students cannot define a sentence, should schools really be teaching less grammar?

A couple of experts on the English language argue their points for and against the evolution of language, sparked by Government’s decision to scrap grammar lessons in primary schools

No, thinks Language Professor Sally Forty, who lives in Oxford with her husband and children

Change is a fact of life, and we have to accept this. But we don’t have to help it on its way. “Education, education, education!” was the promise of the Government, but over the last decade, what have we seen? A sure and not-so-steady decline in literacy in children; their vocabularies have been crippled, their sentence structures held back, and it is doubtful whether they could even define common grammar points, let alone apply them!

But I know that you don’t need a report from a newspaper to tell you this, though, because you can hear it on the streets. “’Right, blood?” “Yeah, mate.” will be the monotone introduction to conversations regularly punctuated with expletives. The same word can be repeated several times within a sentence. Even when younger people do have a hash at more complex vocabulary, the way in which they construct their sentences means that half of it is incomprehensible to anybody over thirty. Just how describing a girl to be “fit as f***” makes sense, or is even supposed to be a compliment, I’m not sure. And now the Government want to aid this decline!

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Prescriptivism worked well for generations, why now does it all have to change? When will it be accepted that we have to stop this so-called “progress” and return to the methods which we know will work? It is not realistic to think that all changes will be for the betterment of society today, and this persistent sliding away from prescriptive teaching and general school of thought is a prime example.

Many younger people are already showing the negative effects, and even some adults as well – in case you hadn’t already noticed. An article in the Guardian ...

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