TEACHING formal English grammar to children does not help to improve their writing skills, a government-funded study concluded yesterday.

Teachers were wasting their time explaining the meaning of nouns, verbs and pronouns to pupils as part of the national literacy strategy in primary schools, academics at the University of York said.

They were more likely to improve children’s compositions by abandoning the rules of syntax and encouraging them to try experimental methods of sentence construction.

The study by the English review group at York was funded by the Department for Education and Skills, which did not distance itself from the conclusions, even though the literacy strategy emphasises “the centrality of grammar in the teaching of writing”. A DfES spokeswoman said that the national curriculum “supports a range of approaches to teaching of grammar”.

The review group said that the curriculum should be revised to take account of its conclusions. They emerged from what the group called the largest systematic review of research from the past 100 years into the effect of grammar teaching on writing in English-speaking countries for children aged 5 to 16.

It found “no high-quality evidence that the teaching of grammar . . . is worth the time if the aim is the improvement of the quality and/or accuracy of written composition”. Richard Andrews, the group’s joint co-ordinator, said: “I would not like this to be seen as a swing back of the pendulum to 1960s liberalism. I would like to see it as a clearing of the ground to put behind us the notion that teaching formal grammar would help to improve the writing of the nation.

“We should have a series of studies evaluating different approaches to see which of them are the most effective. I would not want to feel that teachers and pupils are wasting their time learning formal grammar when there would be better ways of teaching writing.”

Professor Andrews said that the Government was frustrated by the failure of the literacy strategy to achieve targets for achievement in English by pupils at age 11. He suggested that it placed too much emphasis on grammar.

“I am not saying that grammar is not interesting in its own right, but there is no evidence over 100 years to show that there is a strong connection between the teaching of formal grammar and improvement in writing,” he said. “There will be better ways of teaching writing and our findings suggest that the teaching of sentence combining may be one of the more effective approaches.”

“Sentence combining” has been used in America since the 1960s. It had been shown to achieve sustained improvements in writing. Children practised ways of combining simple sentences and “embedding” elements of language into them to express more complex ideas.

Michael Plumbe, chairman of the Queen’s English Society, described the research as “absolute balderdash”. He said: “I hated being taught grammar at school, but I now appreciate in later life that it is extremely useful. If the tools of language are instilled at a young age in primary school, then children don’t even have to think about using language because it comes naturally. Lack of grammatical knowledge is also a key reason for the failure to learn a foreign language.”

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education pressure group, said: “This research looks like it is advocating a return to the laissez-faire attitudes of the 1960s, when youngsters were not taught grammar because teachers thought it would restrict their creativity. Now we are left with a generation of teachers who don’t know grammar.”

LEARNING CURVES

• The place of grammar in school has long been disputed. Rote learning was the norm until the 1950s, but the tide turned against formal teaching in the 1960s, particularly after the Plowden report on child-centred primary education
  
  
• The conversion of grammar schools to comprehensives in the 1970s accelerated the trend at secondary level
  
  
• The pendulum began to swing back in the 1990s, with national curriculum testing at 7, 11 and 14
  
  
• Labour introduced the literacy hour in 1997, with explicit requirements for formal grammar learning

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