by Rebecca Baumgartner
I was looking at a grammar worksheet my fourth-grader recently brought home, and the instructions said to “Underline the predicate of each sentence.” I paused for a moment. What exactly is a predicate, again? Is it a fancy way of saying verb phrase? Or direct object? Or…what, exactly?
You might think I felt embarrassed to not know this, since I am a wordsmith by trade and by training. On the contrary! I think it’s damning of the educational system that someone with degrees in English and linguistics, who reads and writes constantly, has not found it necessary or important to know what a predicate is. The onus is on the educators to prove that it is in fact necessary and important to know this kind of information.
I love language. I love understanding how it works – so much so, in fact, that I suffered through tedious graduate courses in syntax and morphology taught by people who hadn’t had fun in 30 years. But linguists don’t use the term “predicate” (at least not in the way kids are taught to use it). Normal people don’t use it, either. Hell, the only time I ever even refer to the parts of speech nowadays is when I play Mad Libs.
So if a card-carrying linguist, erstwhile copyeditor, and hammer-wielding wordsmith has no need to know what a predicate is, the question is: Why does the school system, or the state, think my kid needs to know this stuff?
It’s never been explained to my satisfaction why explicitly teaching children the grammatical structures and terminology of their native language is worth spending time on, much less testing them on. My own personal experience – as well as, I think, sheer common sense – leads me to believe that the best way for someone to learn the conventions of standard communication (spelling, grammar rules, punctuation, etc.) is by reading, and reading a lot. In fact, these lessons basically come for free when you read a lot. And it’s internalized on a deeper level because it’s learned within an authentic and interesting context. Any kid who reads frequently will automatically pick up a large vocabulary, a strong foundation in spelling and punctuation, and an intuition about how sentences work together to convey an idea.
Teaching grammar to kids who can already read and speak fluently is like insisting that a driver take apart their car and memorize the names of all the parts and what they do in order to become a better driver. I am living proof that you can execute a flawless parallel parking job without knowing anything more about the inner workings of your car than where to put the gas.
The fact that we only truly need to understand grammar terms when we get around to learning a foreign language shows precisely why it’s unnecessary to do so in our native language. Learning a foreign language is an active and explicit process, so it makes sense that you’d need explicit instruction in grammatical structures (although even then, immersion can get you pretty far). But acquiring your native language is a passive and implicit process. No one needs to know how the sausage of their native language is made in order to be a smart, effective reader and writer.
Proponents of teaching grammar in school like to talk about how explicit instruction in things like passive voice, predicates, direct objects, and so on allows students to understand why authors made certain choices in a text, and how to make informed decisions in their own writing. “A child with a broad repertoire of grammatical knowledge can skilfully choose how to phrase what they want to say,” says one article. The following example shows how to teach grammar in a way that allows kids to “skillfully choose how to phrase what they want to say”:
“‘Earth turns on its axis in a full rotation. Each takes 24 hours, and this is what creates day and night.’ Each of the bolded words points back to another word (‘its’ back to ‘Earth’ and ‘each’ back to ‘rotation’) or phrase (‘this’ back to ‘each rotation’) that ties the text together. This makes the text flow. Imagine how cumbersome and confusing it would be to read a book if words repeated themselves instead of being ‘pointed’ back to.”
I don’t buy it. For one thing, this isn’t an example of “skillfully choosing” how to say something. This is just using English. The only alternatives are things that sound patently absurd: “Earth turns on Earth’s axis in a full rotation.” That doesn’t prove how important it is to know what a pronoun is, because no one is ever in danger of saying that, ever.
Knowing that it’s weird, and to all intents and purposes wrong, to say “Earth turns on Earth’s axis” is the kind of thing kids already know as native speakers of their language. Trying to argue that kids would use these structures incorrectly unless they were taught what a pronoun is, is simply insane.
Here we begin bumping up against what “grammar” really means. To the average person, “grammar” means “the way you have to speak or write to sound smart or get a good grade,” with rules that can be broken or adhered to based on how educated you are. But a more accurate term for that concept would be “the prescriptive dictates of the dominant form of a language in a given time and place.”
The term “grammar” should be reserved for the meaning that linguists have assigned it, which is the system of rules describing how a particular language is used by its speakers. Under this definition, no one can speak their own language ungrammatically (unless they’re being intentionally funny or asked to come up with something that makes no sense, like “The dog is widespread” or “Marcus knew German loudly in the hallway” or “a brick, small house”). When a linguistic researcher visits a remote community and documents a language for the first time, they create what’s called a “grammar” of that language – a descriptive record of all the rules the native speakers know without even knowing they know them. That’s what grammar is.
(In one episode of Rick and Morty, Morty mentions that he needs to finish his English homework and Rick responds with, “You’re still learning English? It’s the language you speak. How dumb are you?”)
Even the less insane examples of explicit grammar instruction fail to convince. Take this claim, from the same article cited earlier:
“When I want to teach a student to ‘zoom in’ on an object using specific nouns, I open up the first page of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which reads: ‘There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.’ This grammatical construction dehumanises the person whose hand it is, giving agency to the hand. It’s a spooky effect cemented by the final noun – knife.”
This is closer to the kind of knowledge that I think curriculum developers think they’re instilling by teaching grammar terminology, but I still don’t buy it. Let’s say you’re teaching fourth graders how to write effectively to convey a particular mood – in this case, a spooky mood. You can take Gaiman’s sentence and explain, without ever uttering words like “object” or “noun” or “subject,” how the focus on the hand withholds information about whose hand we’re talking about, making us wonder who’s there and what’s going to happen. You can compare this with a less spooky formulation, such as “John was standing in the darkness, and he was holding a knife in his hand” (although to be honest, that’s still pretty spooky, which highlights just how much our choices about language usage come down to preference and style rather than hard and fast rules).
I think we underestimate kids if we assume that they won’t understand why one formulation is more interesting than the other, and what makes it so, without the baggage of grammar. We can trust them to organically grow into more sophisticated writers as they become more sophisticated readers and thinkers. There’s no need to fall back on overwrought metalinguistic explanations or misapplications of prescriptivist Latin and Greek instruction.
Students forced to learn this way are wasting time that could be better spent on music, science, or longer recess, and they’re also learning the wrong things about language and what it’s for. With its over-emphasis on “rules” (in the sense of norms – they already know the other kind of rules), students get the impression that language creation is a performance where the important thing is knowing how to identify a helping verb, rather than whether you’ve said anything interesting or true in a piece of writing.
In fact, this perverse obsession with knowing how to circle subjects and underline objects rather than learning how to think and write critically is part of a larger trend in education of teaching to the test and using education as a means to an end. Dissecting sentences fits snugly into a curriculum based on grading rubrics, rote memorization, and a fetishization of standard formulations (I’m looking at you, five-paragraph essay) at the expense of true critical thinking or exploration.
Reading and using language expressively in an authentic context teaches kids everything they need to know about communicating effectively in the real world. The instructional focus should be on giving them as much exposure to compelling texts and chances to practice their writing as possible, with the assessment criteria being primarily about higher-order things like setting a tone, developing an authorial voice, experimenting and playing with different styles and genres, building an argument, using evidence, finding reputable sources, and letting their personality and interests shine through their writing.
In lieu of this, kids are made to memorize abstract, pseudo-academic jargon that is often completely divorced from scientific descriptions of how language is actually used. They’re asked to analyze sentences in isolation, write essays about topics they don’t care about, and memorize rules that prescribe a particular language ideal that does nothing but instill insecurity and the bad habit of hypercorrection, which results in stilted language that’s less elegant and authentic than what they were using before – and which they will have to unlearn once they’re in college or on the job, when there is less time and less forgiveness for bad ideas cloaked in perfect clothes.
Grammar worksheets force us to think about what the study of language is for and what we want our kids to get out of it. Is it about sounding confident, passing the test, and presenting technically correct but intellectually superficial arguments? Is it about producing a “general resemblance to effective writing” contrived to satisfy a grader? Or is it about having original thoughts and ideas and finding the best, most beautiful way of sharing them in your own personal voice?