Leaving school without a basic grasp of grammar in the 90s

[Hjsjshsn]

That’s it really. I even managed to get a degree. Thankfully my first job in the civil service, they gave us all grammar training. I managed to get through a state education with a national curriculum that didn’t teach grammar. Therefore, if like me your school education didn’t include grammar - when did you realise and how did you overcome it later (if you ever did)?

My discovery was similar. Degree in English and European lit and had to learn Italian (or another language) and the tutor realised not a single one of us understood ‘past participle’, ‘pluperfect tense’ or even what the definite article was!!

@Itsmetheflamingo refer them back to the state for complaint

Er? Who?

Thank you @furrysocks that makes sense!

This is something that always astonishes me when people wax lyrical about how much better the ‘olden days’ were. My SPAG is fine because I’m a reader but I struggle to teach my own subject

I hold no brief for Mrs Thatcher's and John Major's governments, but there was no National Curriculum in England until the early 1990s. It was the teaching profession, probably led by fashions in teacher training, that decided not to bother teaching English grammar, and presumably the exam boards followed suit.

Before the National Curriculum came in, with SATs introduced to see how well children had learned what was in it, league tables of SATs results published to give schools a spur to get better results, Ofsted going in to see what was actually going on in schools (all new features of education in the early 90s), it was entirely up to teachers to decide what to teach and how to teach it. There was no performance management in schools and it was rare for teachers to be observed at work, never mind assessed and given targets for improvement.

Obviously in secondary schools pupils were prepared to take external exams (O level, CSE, GCSE and A levels) so they had to follow the exam syllabus at that point, but prior to that many teachers did their own thing. In some primary schools headteachers insisted on a common approach and obviously teachers usually wanted to work from the reading and maths schemes in use in the school because those were the textbooks they had available to hand out to their classes. There was no requirement to work through them at a given pace, though.

My Mum was a pimary school teacher until the mid 1980s and she used to mention a colleague who always taught what we would now call year 3, i.e. first year of Juniors, aged 7-8. There was a parallel class of the same age. They were not streamed by ability, so both classes were mixed ability, and in theory should have moved up to year 4 at the same standard. They didn't. It was an accepted thing that whoever inherited Audrey's class would have a much harder year than the teacher of the parallel class because she would have a lot to do to help them catch up. Everybody knew this, probably including the parents, and nothing was done about it. It was just one of those things.

I started school in the 60s and we were taught grammar within an inch of our lives from a young age (state school). Spellings were corrected with a red pen and tests were given regularly. Although I am a little more lax now my spelling and grammar was spot on through most of my life (to the point of being part of the pedantic grammar police🫣). I can still get 🤨 though at the misuse of went instead of gone and of instead of have. I remember being given the Eats, Shoots and Leaves book year’s ago 😁

I realised when I started writing fiction. I'm an avid reader so I understand all the rules from that but when my editor tried to advise me using terms like ‘split infinitive’ I was lost!

Same here. I remember our teacher having to go back to basics with us, this would have been 2000.

It was clearly excluded from the curriculum in the 90s for some reason.

I was taught zero grammar at secondary school, and very little at primary. My spelling was atrocious too. I learnt some while teaching English to Asian women while at uni, at least I realised I needed to learn some at this point as they were amazed by my lack of grammatical knowledge. I’ve picked up much more as life goes on as I genuinely find it interesting, I’m 58 now and OK at grammar.

Left school in the early nineties and all my grammar knowledge comes from doing Latin and various modern languages.

For A-level modern languages we did what was considered the “trendy” exam board where you wrote all your lit essays in the target language but you weren’t penalised for grammar mistakes as long as it was clear what you were saying.

I would still die on the hill that this was the way to go as it really improved my fluency and confidence. Even today I’m more prepared to wade in and have a go where I know most of the vocabulary even if my grammar is ropey. I figure everyone understands what a non-native speaker means if they say something like “at the weekend we wented to the cinema” so my random grammar errors won’t be too much of an obstacle to conversation.

Something like this is worth getting :-

The New First Aid in English 2nd Edition
amzn.eu/d/g9w06P0

I remember all that from the 60s and 70s, @BunnyLake - but I still don’t recall being taught English grammar with the same intensity as that applied to Latin / French / German.

@Itsmetheflamingo the people who complain about your spelling

Oh ha ha! Lol no they appeared to think it was an indication I was poor and poorly educated, or maybe just thick 😭

Yup, same here, our French and German teachers were utterly exasperated that they had to teach English grammar first before they could teach their subject!

ETA: I totally agree with @Emori that the level that children are required to know (fronted adverbials!) is far too pernicketty. There's a lack of balance in there.

Similar to many PPs, I learnt English grammar in a few chunks - from French O level, (1982), then from A level and 7th term Oxbridge (1984), during which we had to learn how to appraise and deconstruct short pieces of writing, and then after university (English, but very much Lit not Lang) I did TEFL training.

I still feel pretty angry about the lack of formal grammar teaching, particularly in German O level, where our teacher was a bit of a hippy and thought it was very constraining to teach children cases and genders for pronouns/nouns. Luckily for me, my DM was a pretty high-powered French teacher so she helped me a lot. I still really struggle with German, but I can read most things in French.

DM was reminiscing about some of her teaching experiences recently, including coaching a very bright child in the early 90s who had learnt no grammar at all and whose GCSE was approaching. He said to her, "Mrs Dinosaur, I've noticed something. When you write out a verb, you always write it in the same order, don't you?" and so she could explain that structure and 1st/2nd/3rd person, singular and plural, etc. But it's shocking that at that point he had been learning French for five years and no teacher had ever explained something that basic.

I used to volunteer at a local FE college helping adults improve their literacy skills. A few were functionally illiterate but highly motivated and it was such a privilege to be able to help them realise their goal.

However many of the students were already in professional roles or were being promoted into higher management positions and knew their literacy skills were poor or needed to be vastly improved in order to succeed.

The irony is that whilst I was helping one group of students, I was a student on the ‘maths for the terrified’ course as I never learned basic arithmetic at school (I’m probably dyscalculic).

Yes, it was 2000 here as well! It seems utterly bizarre when my 5-9 year olds talk about all sorts of terms I haven't heard of!

I was taught grammar very well, but without any of the recent ‘fronted adverbial’ stuff. Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, phrase, clause, etc. were quite enough.

I do think learning foreign languages helps considerably with understanding grammar* plus of course IMO a lot of correct structures v will be unconsciously absorbed through reading. And it doesn’t have to be ‘literature’ - any well written book will do.

No definitely not, but are French students or German students taught it in their own language? I mean past imperfect, past participle etc?

That would be me, @Partickle. Not sure it would qualify as dyscalculia but I gradually became more and more baffled by Maths as I progressed through school. Failed O’Level; only a C in Biology enabled my Oxbridge entry; and despite several scholarships I was the dunce of the class in a professional skills workshop involving Maths while I was qualifying for a serious profession. Remembering that helps me to empathise with @Hjsjshsn, actually!

Also left school in the 90s and had no grammar lessons beyond what I learned in relation to foreign languages. And yet I use the English language very well! I’m envious my Dd has been taught all the grammar .

I'm really grateful that I wasn't taught grammar, I can't think of anything duller! I have an MA in education but couldn't tell you the different past tenses. It's just words to describe words to me. I do however do things that are very frowned upon on MN like saying 'I was sat next to a man on the train'.

DS did all that fronted adverbials nonsense and no doubt promptly forgot it all a week after the tests. Complete waste of time.