ABSTRACT

The teaching of grammar has been strongly debated for decades, often with reference to an alleged decline in the 1960s. This article takes a historical perspective on grammar, or knowledge about language, within English Education. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith’s Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles-lettres offered a discernibly modern combination of English language and literature. In the nineteenth century, however, university English courses were divided between belles-lettres and philology, while the conditions of elementary schooling favoured “factual” instruction in grammatical “correctness” based on an ideology rooted in the emergence of Standard English. In the twentieth century, the Newbolt Report and Blue Books questioned grammar teaching, but grammatical analysis remained part of public examinations until the 1960s. The last fifty years have seen major advances in linguistic education, but curriculum and assessment procedures continue to conceptualise grammar as the prescriptive teaching of “correct” forms of language.

摘要

几十年来，语法教学一直受到激烈争论，通常提到 1960 年代所谓的衰落。本文对英语教育中的语法或语言知识采取了历史视角。18 世纪，亚当·斯密的《修辞学讲义》和《美丽文学》提供了明显的现代英语语言和文学结合。然而，在 19 世纪，大学英语课程分为美文和语言学，而小学教育的条件有利于基于根植于标准英语出现的意识形态的语法“正确性”的“事实”教学。在 20 世纪，Newbolt Report 和 Blue Books 对语法教学提出质疑，但直到 1960 年代，语法分析仍然是公开考试的一部分。在过去的五十年里，语言教育取得了重大进展，但课程和评估程序继续将语法概念化为“正确”语言形式的规定性教学。