Teaching Grammar in Writing Context

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Table of Contents

Problem statement
Research questions
Research method
Data collection method
Data analysis
Works Cited

Grammar as an inseparable element of the language lesson is of significant importance for developing the communicative skills of the students. There have been many views on the very essence of grammar, but they all come down to the statement that it a set of rules helping put words together in some allowable order to make the speakers thought understood (Amogne 145). The role of grammar can be viewed from different perspectives. First of all, it can be investigated from the standpoint of oral communication, even though grammar is often ignored in this aspect. What is more crucial for the research is the role of grammar in the writing context whether it be formal or informal written communication.

Problem statement

The role of grammar instructions has long been neglected as the factor that influences the development of writing skills. Since recently, it has been acknowledged that it has a significant impact on writing because students are expected to follow certain rules or have a certain level of knowledge of grammatical instructions (Myhill et al. 78). What has long been ignored, however, is the role of teaching grammar in the writing context. It was not until recently that the concept of pedagogical content knowledge was included in the study curriculums, as they recognized that the level of teachers knowledge of grammar, besides other factors such as disposition to learning languages or whether the student is the native speaker of the language studied, also has a robust effect on developing students writing skills.

Research questions

The purpose of the research is to address numerous questions. They are:

What specific aspect of writing does grammar contribute?
How does sentence combining improve writing?
What is the role of a teacher in teaching grammar in the writing context?

Research method

The proposed research will be based on three methods literature analysis and investigating the teachers and the students perspectives on the role of grammar in developing writing skills. As part of the study regarding the literature analysis, the researcher will consider theoretical approaches to the teaching of grammar with the special focus made on the acknowledgment of the importance of grammar and including it in the writing curriculums (Myhill and Watson 45). Moreover, the study will focus on the empirical researches on the teaching of grammar with paying special attention to sentence combining as a tool for improving writing (Myhill and Watson 49). This step is essential for providing the theoretical background for the study.

The second part of the research will focus on the teachers perspectives on the teaching of grammar and its role in developing writing skills. The study will use a comparatively small and similar group of the participants, all being the teachers of the English language in schools and colleges. The researcher will exploit the purposeful sampling selecting the participants based on the level of their knowledge of grammar. This step is necessary to understand whether the perspective of the respondents will be truthful during the study. The additional criterion is the number of years of teaching experience (Jones et al. 1247).

The third part of the study will focus on the students perspective on the teaching of grammar and its role in developing writing skills. The research will again use a relatively small and similar group of participants with the only difference that they will not be tested to become a respondent. The criterion for choosing them is that they are the students of the teachers mentioned in the second part of the investigation.

Data collection method

The primary tools for data collection for the second and the third part of the study will be in-depth interviews with the teachers and tests written by the students. The objective of the study is to define whether the level of the teachers knowledge of grammar influences the level of the students writing skills.

The process of data collection will comprise of four stages. The first phase will be the test for the teachers aimed at defining whether they will be truthful respondents during the study. The teacher will be provided with the abstract from Pride and Prejudice and a set of questions concerning it. They will center on word classes, sentence structure, the function of the word in the sentence, etc. (Myhill et al. 81). The objective of the test is to discover the level of pedagogical content knowledge.

The second stage of the research will include in-depth interviews with the teachers. They will be separated into two parts. First, what the respondents think about the role of grammar teaching in writing. This part should be their reflections on the topic. In the second part of the in-depth interviews, the research will ask the teachers about what they think grammar teaching is with special attention to the use of grammatical terminology (Watson 4).

Finally, the students will be asked to write a narrative passage with a focus on grammar and style. To avoid bias, first, the topics will not include the questions that imply answers pointing out the gender, and, second, all papers will be anonymous (Amogne 147). The only criterion for selecting the students is that they attend the teachers classes.

Data analysis

The data analysis will comprise of few steps. First of all, the researcher will check the preliminary tests of the teachers and develop charts with the results, the most typical right and wrong answers, and the average result of the test. This step will help determine the level of pedagogical content knowledge that will later be used for discovering the correlation and whether there is a relation between the teaching experience and the answers.

The second step of data analysis will include studying the in-depth interviews. The objective of this phase is to find whether there are some trends in the teachers answers. Based on this action, the researcher will make up a list of all similar responses and define what are the most frequently met perspectives on the role of teaching grammar in developing writing skills.

The next stage is analyzing the writing skills of the students. The focus will be made on the grammar and style mistakes. The researcher will as well develop a chart of the most typical mistakes. What is crucial about this stage is trying to find out whether there is a correlation between the writing skills of the students and their teachers knowledge of grammar. The pollster will try to detect the similar mistakes made by the students and the teachers in the tests they passed prior to in-depth interviews. The task here is to determine whether the students of the teachers who showed better results in the tests and used more grammatical terms in the interviews are higher than of those whose teachers results were lower. The researcher will focus on developing a chart representing the results by pointing out individual discrepancies if such is detected.

Works Cited

Among, Dawit. The Effect of Communicative Grammar on Journalism Students Writing Skills. Journal of Media and Communication Studies 6.9 (2014): 144-149. Print.

Jones, Susan, Debra Myhill and Trevor Bailey. Grammar for Writing? An Investigation of the Effects of Contextualized Grammar teaching on Students Writing. Reading and Writing 26.8 (2013): 1241-1263. Print.

Myhill, Debra and Annabel Watson. The Role of Grammar in the Writing Curriculum: A Review of the Literature. Child Language Teaching and Therapy 30.1 (2014): 41-62. Print.

Myhill, Debra, Susan Jones and Annabel Watson. Grammar Matters: How Teachers Grammatical Knowledge Impacts on the Teaching of Writing. Teaching and Teacher Education 36. (2013): 77-91. Print.

Watson, Annabel Mary. Conceptualizations of Grammar Teaching: L1 English Teachers Beliefs about Teaching Grammar for Writing. Language Awareness 24.1 (2013): 1-14. Print.

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