The effect of grammar teaching on writing development

By Richard Andrews, C. Torgerson, S. Beverton, Allison Freeman, T. Locke, G. Low, A. Robinson, Die Zhu. 2006

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reports on the results of two international systematic research reviews which focus on different aspects of teaching grammar to improve the quality and accuracy of 5–16-year-olds' writing in English. The results show that there is little evidence to indicate that the teaching of formal grammar is effective; and that teaching sentence-combining has a more positive effect. In both cases, however, despite over a hundred years of research and debate on the topic, there is insufficient quality of research to prove the case with either approach. More research is needed, as well as a review of policy and practice in England with regard to the teaching of sentence structure in writing.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb06ba3f66284ea7ad8614c2f6287f52b09c4007

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Language and Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

Examining the transcription-writing link: Effects of handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy on writing performance via planning and translating in middle grades (2017, background): “…support the relationship between sentence-level translating skills and writing performance. into one syntactically complex sentence (Strong, 1986), is highly effective in raising students’ overall writing performance (for reviews and meta-analyses, see Andrews et al., 2006; Graham & Perin, 2007).”
Teaching planning or sentence-combining strategies: Effective SRSD interventions at different levels of written composition (2013, background): “Evidence has been accumulated on the effectiveness of this approach to enhance syntactic complexity and overall compositional quality (Saddler, Behforooz, & Asaro, 2008; Saddler & Graham, 2005; for reviews and meta-analyses, see also Andrews et al., 2006; Graham & Perin, 2007; Hillocks, 1986).”
Primary Grade Writing Instruction: A National Survey. (2008, methodology): “Furthermore, the available data call into question the effectiveness of systematically teaching grammar and usage (Andrews et al., 2006; Graham & Perin, 2007a).”
Grammar for writing? An investigation of the effects of contextualised grammar teaching on students’ writing (2012, unknown): “Contrary to previous studies (Andrews et al. 2006; Hillocks 1986, this study offers robust evidence of a positive relationship between grammar and writing.”
What We Know, What We Still Need to Know: Teaching Adolescents to Write (2007, background): “Instead, an alternative approach such as sentence combining, which improves the syntax as well as the quality of students’ writing (Andrews et al., 2006; Graham & Perin, 2007), provides a better candidate for commercial writing materials.”
A meta-analysis of single subject design writing intervention research. (2008, background): “In a narrative review of the research in this area, Andrews et al. (2006) also indicated that such instruction did not enhance students’ grammar in text.”
Research-Based Writing Practices and the Common Core (2015, background): “Most of the reviews examined the effectiveness of teaching students how to write (e.g., Andrews et al., 2006), but others examined the effectiveness of using writing as a tool for promoting learning of content material (e.g., Bangert-Drowns et al., 2004) or enhancing reading (Graham & Hebert, 2011).”
Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction (2011, background): “, diagramming sentences or daily oral language exercises) do not have empirical support indicating their effectiveness, most likely because most students do not apply what they learn from these activities to their own writing (Andrews et al., 2006).”