2022.03.12 学校语法教学的规则

shiyi18

Johnson
Rules for teaching grammar in schools
It may not make children better writers. But it is valuable all the same



Mar 12th 2022

Absence of evidence is not, as the saying goes, the same thing as evidence of absence. But if you continue looking for something intently, and keep failing to find it, you can be forgiven for starting to worry. And so it is with the vexed—and in Britain, highly politicised—subject of explicit grammar teaching in schools, and its link or otherwise with improved writing ability.

Another study, in this case a large randomised controlled trial, has recently been added to the expansive literature on the subject. Like nearly all its predecessors, it found that teaching kids how to label the bits and pieces in a sentence does not make them better writers. It was novel in that it tested six- and seven-year-olds who used a digital platform called Englicious to take grammar lessons, alongside the rote classroom teaching of grammatical particulars and their functions. The Englicious group did no better than those receiving ordinary instruction when it came to writing narrative passages. (The extra help slightly improved their performance on a task called “sentence combining”, which requires pupils to turn two sentences into one in logical ways, such as the addition of “because”. But even this effect was not statistically significant.)


Bas Aarts, one of the researchers on the project and one of the scholars behind Englicious, holds out hope that with longer exposure, or a study of older students, an improvement in writing skills might be detected. Other observers may begin to wonder whether the National Curriculum in England, which since 2014 has made grammar such a central part of its English programme, might have gone down a blind alley.

The force behind the reforms, Michael Gove, a Conservative former secretary of education, is sometimes maligned for other political reasons (especially among opponents of Brexit, which he championed). He is said to have insisted on the insertion of personal bugbears into the grammar curriculum, notably the subjunctive form, “If I were”. Mention of his name alone wrinkles many teachers’ noses—partly because some of them were hardly prepared to teach the new material themselves, after decades in which grammar was largely absent from classrooms.

In retrospect it scarcely seems surprising that learning to underline a modal verb, such as “can”, “should” and “may”, does little to help students use them effectively in their own writing. These words are anyway grasped by tiny children without the need to know what they are called. This may tempt the conclusion that the teaching of grammar should be shelved altogether. But there are reasons to reform it rather than scrap it.

Understanding of language is part of a wider education in what makes human beings human. How concepts are turned into sounds, and how those sounds combine to form propositions, commands or questions, are issues that have occupied many linguists in philosophy departments. What they reveal about the mind has exercised psychologists and cognitive scientists.


There are practical reasons to ask children to grapple with grammar, too. One is that an explicit knowledge of it will make learning a foreign language easier. Even if you did intuit how to make subordinate clauses in your native languages as a toddler—just without instruction—getting to grips with them in German or Russian in later years is simpler if you know how to define and spot them. As it is, many English-speakers come to understand grammar by studying a foreign language, rather than the other way round.

For grammarians keen on the jobs of the future, the field of natural-language processing is booming. After many years of poor results, technological wizards have devised programs for automated translation, speech recognition (as in dictation software) and other services that are actually usable, if far from perfect. These tools may rely more on knowledge of artificial intelligence than of the subjunctive, but linguistic expertise still matters, and may give budding programmers an edge over rivals whose best language is Python.

Grammar could still be taught better. One small study showed improvement in some students when concepts are linked concretely to writing tasks. Even so, it may never be easy to point to a widget-output increase that results directly from improved tuition. A cook does not need to know chemistry to make a delicious sauce. But the science of how words combine to make meaning is fascinating as well as fundamental.



约翰逊
学校语法教学的规则
它可能不会使儿童成为更好的作家。但它的价值是一样的



2022年3月12日

俗话说，没有证据和没有证据是两回事。但是，如果你继续专注地寻找某样东西，却一直找不到它，你可以原谅自己开始担心。因此，在英国，学校中明确的语法教学，以及它与写作能力的提高是否有联系，是一个令人困惑的问题，也是一个高度政治化的问题。

另一项研究，在这种情况下是一项大型随机对照试验，最近被添加到关于该主题的广泛文献中。和几乎所有的前辈一样，它发现教孩子们如何标记句子中的碎片并不能使他们成为更好的写作者。它的新颖之处在于，它测试了使用名为Englicious的数字平台上语法课的六岁和七岁儿童，以及在课堂上死记硬背语法细节及其功能的教学。在写叙述性段落时，Englicious小组的表现并不比接受普通教学的孩子好。(额外的帮助略微提高了他们在一项名为 "句子组合 "的任务中的表现，该任务要求学生以合乎逻辑的方式将两个句子变成一个句子，例如添加 "因为"。但即使是这样的效果在统计学上也不显著）。


该项目研究人员之一和Englicious背后的学者Bas Aarts希望，通过更长时间的接触，或对年龄较大的学生进行研究，可能会发现写作技能的提高。其他观察家可能开始怀疑，自2014年以来将语法作为其英语课程的核心部分的英国国家课程，是否已经走入了一条盲道。

改革的幕后推手、保守党前教育部长迈克尔-戈夫(Michael Gove)有时会因为其他政治原因而受到诋毁（尤其是在他倡导的英国脱欧的反对者中）。据说他坚持在语法课程中加入一些个人问题，尤其是 "如果我是 "这一从句形式。提到他的名字，许多教师都会皱起眉头--部分原因是他们中的一些人几乎没有准备好亲自教授新材料，因为在过去的几十年里，语法在课堂上基本没有出现。

现在回过头来看，学会在 "可以"、"应该 "和 "可能 "等情态动词下划线，对学生在自己的写作中有效使用这些动词没有什么帮助，这似乎并不令人惊讶。无论如何，这些词都能被小小的孩子们掌握，而不需要知道它们叫什么。这可能会诱使人们得出结论：语法教学应该被完全搁置。但是，我们有理由对其进行改革，而不是将其废除。

对语言的理解是使人类成为人类的更广泛教育的一部分。概念如何变成声音，以及这些声音如何组合成命题、命令或问题，这些问题占据了哲学系许多语言学家的心。它们所揭示的关于心灵的东西，让心理学家和认知科学家们感到兴奋。


要求儿童学习语法也有实际原因。其中一个原因是，明确的知识会使学习外语变得更容易。即使你在蹒跚学步时就能凭直觉在你的母语中做出从句--只是没有指导--如果你知道如何定义和发现它们，那么以后在德语或俄语中掌握它们就更简单了。事实上，许多英语国家的人是通过学习外语来理解语法的，而不是相反。

对于热衷于未来工作的语法学家来说，自然语言处理领域正在蓬勃发展。经过多年的不良结果，技术奇才们已经设计出了自动翻译、语音识别（如听写软件）和其他服务的程序，虽然远非完美，但实际上是可用的。这些工具可能更依赖于人工智能的知识，而不是从句的知识，但语言学的专业知识仍然很重要，并可能使刚起步的程序员比那些最好的语言是Python的对手更具优势。

语法仍然可以教得更好。一项小型研究显示，当概念与写作任务具体联系起来时，一些学生会有所改善。即便如此，要指出改进教学直接导致的小工具产出的增加，可能永远都不容易。厨师不需要知道化学就能做出美味的酱汁。但是，关于词语如何组合以产生意义的科学是迷人的，也是基本的。