Grammar’s wisdom
From Philip Pullman
Sir: I’m grateful for the attention Charles Moore pays my Guardian article about the teaching of grammar (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January), but I don’t seem to have made myself clear because he misrepresents what I thought I was saying.
He commends the point I made about the need for children to begin their engagement with language through play, but goes on to say that I ‘trash the belief that grammar could assist this originally playful desire to understand’.
Not at all. The point is to do play and grammar in the best order, and get the timing right. What young children need more than anything else is lots of play and lots of talk: children whose parents talk to them from the very beginning grow up to have a fuller and more confident command of every aspect of language. Moore says, ‘Pullman is right about nursery rhymes, clapping games and songs, but it is essential to these forms that they have rules.’ Of course it is, and children learn what the rules are not by being instructed in them, but by joining in and playing. What they’re doing is internalising the rules by using them. Most people get most things about their language right, whether or not they’ve been drilled in grammar.
The best time to teach grammar explicitly is when it becomes genuinely helpful to talk about it: but you can only do that when pupils have the intellectual maturity to grasp a certain degree of abstraction, so as to map principles on to concrete examples. The real mistake is to think that we can’t speak or write correctly unless we’ve been taught grammar. What grammar does is show us why it is that we’re already doing things correctly, and help us see the principles that underlie our usage. The pity of the present system is that children who aren’t ready for it are being drilled in things that they can’t grasp now, but could absorb in a week if they encountered them in the sixth form.
Philip Pullman
Cumnor, Oxford
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