Long-time literacy educator Margaret McBride says our teachers are doing an exceptional job in working with the highly complex grammar model in the national curriculum – and her recent PhD research only confirms this.

Involving four schools and 35 teachers from vastly different contexts, McBride investigated the grammar pedagogy underway in classrooms, honing on teachers’ focus on clause-level and word-level grammar.

The researcher from Charles Sturt University was “really impressed” with what she saw.

“This model of language in the Australian curriculum is actually gaining kudos around the world,” McBride tells EducationHQ.

“Other countries are saying, ‘oh, look what Australia is doing’, so these teachers are almost trailblazers in [their practice].

“Even though there is still lots to learn – it’s a very complex model – they’re doing a great job. And it’s not just about ‘back to basics’.

Having delivered professional learning to teachers in grammar for years now, as well as within initial teacher education training, McBride was encouraged by the finding that teachers placed a great deal of value on grammar.

“All the teachers in this study saw it as a very positive inclusion in the Australian Curriculum.

“They saw it as critical to students’ literacy and oral development. And this was a whole range of teachers – not just from city schools, but very remote, rural schools.

“And this was really interesting, because grammar has had such a chequered history; it’s been in and out of curriculum, and not just in recent years, but for centuries…”

However, many teachers also expressed a lack of confidence in their grammar knowledge, McBride flags.

“Some teachers related that to missing out on grammar in their own schooling experiences.

“Others saw it as a lack of preparation in teacher training. They said, ‘we didn’t learn much about grammar’. Others did, but that was still raised by a number of teachers,” she explains.

Conducted as an action-research project, McBride says her study allowed participants to evaluate and improve their instructional approach to grammar as a whole team, casting aside any lingering stigma or shame in the process.  

“They were able to establish really good relationships with each other, where they felt safe to communicate.

“Because grammar has often been [a case of] ‘I should know this’. And they felt a bit embarrassed that they don’t.

“But teachers were saying, ‘this is not such a big deal’, and ‘that makes sense’.

“It sort of demystified grammar for them, and they gained a lot of confidence.”

A clear theme emerged around the critical role of explicit instruction, the expert adds.

“There was a strong tendency for teachers to talk about, ‘oh, we like to teach grammar in context, as part of a larger genre’.

“But then they recognised that they found it difficult to apply that,” McBride says.

“And when they researched their practices, they decided themselves that they needed to teach the concept of grammar more explicitly.

“So, most of them came to that conclusion: that we need more grammar knowledge, and we need to be able to explicitly teach it to our students.”

Nevertheless, McBride says teachers are excelling at incorporating both structure and meaning in their grammar lessons, showing students the different grammatical choices that can enhance their writing and communication.

She offers some examples of this:

  •  Year 2 teachers are showing their students how they can combine and connect their ideas through using compound sentences.
  •  Year 3 teachers are not just teaching students that a verb is a “doing word”, but exploring how verbs represent all sorts of processes for doing, feeling, thinking, saying and relating.
  •  Year 4 teachers are showing students how using adverbs and adverbial phrases can add circumstantial detail to their sentences, indicating how, when, where or why something happened.
  •  Year 5 teachers are exploring the use of complex sentences in enabling the writer to provide reasons, express conditions, make concessions etc.

This is vastly different from grammar lessons of the past, McBride says.

“The model of grammar in the Australian curriculum is highly sophisticated. It’s not the grammar we learnt in the ’70s and the ’80s, it’s not about parsing a sentence and identifying ‘this is a noun and this is a verb’,” she begins.

“It’s a relational model of grammar that incorporates both traditional and systemic functional grammar concepts, so teachers are learning about what’s the meaning behind my grammar choices – and they’re teaching that to students.”

McBride says Aussie teachers have really stepped up to the plate on this front.

“What teachers have to do today is far more complex than was ever in the past, and so they’ve being tasked with an enormous job and they’re doing it well – they’re really doing it well.”