Many people don't realise that most English-speaking people are grammar illiterates. This has everything to do with the history of English teaching. In the 1960s, educators came up with the novel idea that English grammar was too difficult for children and it would take away their interest in creative writing. This idea soon spread to schools in all other parts of the world and children were taught how to communicate effectively and correctly in English but grammar itself was left out. However, it became clear a few years ago to educators in Britain that this was a huge mistake. We now have a whole generation of people who may be English-speaking but have no knowledge of English grammar at all. The government in the UK took the decision, even though it's an unpopular one, to re-introduce English grammar in all schools and make it essential for all 11-year-olds to sit an examination that tests their knowledge of grammar.
It was in this context that Nick Gibb, the UK education minister embarrassed himself when a BBC presenter asked him if 'after' in the sentence 'I went to the cinema after I'd eaten my dinner' was a preposition or a subordinating conjunction.
This is a typical example of the kind of questions a grammar illiterate can't answer. His answer was 'preposition' and newspapers all over the world talked about how Nick Gibb failed an English test for 11-year-olds. His interviewer laughed at him mercilessly. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, Gibb went on to say, 'After is a preposition. It can be used in some contexts as a word that co-ordinates a sub-clause'. By saying that he exposes not just his ignorance of the parts of speech but also his lack of understanding of what coordination in grammar really is. But Nick Gibb later conceded that he didn't study grammar in school and the government is now taking steps to teach children what a whole generation of people has missed out on.
Nick Gibb is absolutely correct in his desire to educate British children, never mind the fact that he himself did not receive any education in English grammar. But this problem is not addressed in other countries, notably, Singapore. Schools continue not to teach English grammar. In Britain, schools are now teaching grammar to children as young as 7, whereas schools in Singapore continue to avoid grammar like the plague.
But can we teach children grammar without incurring the wrath of parents which is what has happened in England where parents stop their children from going to English grammar classes and organise protests outside schools? I think Singaporeans are different. I'm sure parents in Singapore, unlike those in Britain, will welcome the introduction of English grammar in the curriculum. I'll explain why I'm so sure.
As my readers should know by now, I have repeatedly asserted that the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) is totally ignorant of English grammar and yet it attempts in its bungling way to teach the young in Singapore a version of English which is non-standard and will lead students who already speak standard English to shun it. I have shown in my many blog posts instances of the SGEM telling students they are wrong when they are not and getting them to construct sentences which are in fact ungrammatical. You can click here for a one-page summary of the language horrors of the SGEM, complete with links to my many blog posts on this subject.
Despite the utter incompetence of the SGEM to teach anyone English grammar, it has the barefaced cheek to print at least three volumes of English grammar - ENGLISH AS IT IS BROKEN PART 1, ENGLISH AS IT IS BROKEN PART 2 (both published almost ten years ago) and GRAMMAR RULES (published about two years ago). In the link above, I have included my blog posts in which I criticised all three volumes (click on my link in the preceding paragraph). In one of my blog posts, I commented that you could not flip through two pages of the SGEM's publications without spotting some egregious blunder in grammar. They are that bad and I'm really not exaggerating.
The Speak Good English Movements' publications have only one use
- as a floor mat for your boots.
Now, here is where you will see a big difference between Singaporeans and parents in the UK. In spite of the appalling garbage that the SGEM dishes out to Singaporeans, both Parts 1 and 2 of ENGLISH AS IT IS BROKEN remain to this day on the top of the bestselling chart in all Singapore schools. Can you imagine that? Singaporeans' hunger for grammar is so great that they are willing to buy up even books that are riddled with errors on every page. They are clearly interested in learning grammar even though they have no idea that what the SGEM teaches them is mainly incorrect English that violates the rules of standard grammar. Every time I see these two volumes prominently displayed on the book shelves in book shops, I feel sorry for purchasers who buy these books without any awareness that they can only ruin their command of English and that of their children.
When GRAMMAR RULES was released in early 2017, the SGEM decided not to sell them but to give them away. Again, the interest Singaporeans have for grammar can be seen in how they snapped up all 10,000 copies two days after they were released. It's not unjust to say that the book managed to ruin the command of English of 10,000 Singaporeans in two days.
GRAMMAR RULES is so badly written that I concluded in my blog post on the book that
The countless grammatical errors in this new grammar book, the occasional lapses into Singlish by the SGEM which they are clearly unaware of and the shocking inconsistency in its use of grammatical terminology give me no choice but to conclude that the SGEM's new grammar book, Grammar Rules, is a hotchpotch of different sources brought together, altered and edited by a confused panel that knows nothing about English grammar.While the British public is up in arms against the government for teaching their children grammar, the Singapore public has such a voracious appetite for the learning of English grammar that they lap up every morsel of the SGEM's publications without knowing that what they are consuming is nothing more than outrageous errors, disinformation and non-standard made-up rules that contradict standard grammar rules.
In the UK, Nick Gibb may not know grammar but he's not the one teaching students grammar. The government has employed a battalion of excellent teachers who are perfectly au fait with standard English grammar. It saddens me to see that the UK government is doing a good job for its undeserving people who don't even want their children taught. Teachers had to be re-trained as this 2015 newspaper report tells us. But in Singapore, the government feeds the public which is hungry for a good grammar education with the wildly erroneous publications of the SGEM.
I have shown that the Singapore public is ardently interested in English grammar. But that doesn't mean anything. There is no point teaching interested people something which is of no practical use. We are all pragmatists in Singapore. For instance, the young in Singapore seem to be interested in K-Pop but nobody will suggest that we should get all teenage boys to dress up in bizarrely androgynous clothes and put on makeup so that you can't tell them apart from girls. The interest must have some value before it should be encouraged. The next question we have to examine is whether a knowledge of grammar is really beneficial.
Although schools all over the world have stopped teaching English grammar since the 1960s, not everyone is left in the dark. Some of us may have a parent or a grandparent who was insistent that grammar ought to be taught to children and who made arrangements for us to receive a proper grammar education. Those of us who were forced to study English grammar outside of the school curriculum will recall how much we hated it. Hours of parsing exercises will most certainly not endear grammar to any child. It's only when the child can see the overall picture of grammar and its significance in the structure and syntax of a clause that he will begin to appreciate the real value of all the tedious work he has done.
I used to think that all the grammar technicalities were designed to make life unendurable for a child. I had a lot of problems with grammatical terminology, e.g. the distinction between an adverbial and a complement. What is the point of learning all this? And they are not simple for a child. Whenever I read a grammar written by a different grammarian, I became more confused. It was only after I was in secondary school that I understood the concept of gradience in grammar and how some grammarians classified clauses differently because of this and in the case of a complement, everything depended on a balance between its centrality and its peripheral element. It's that simple and yet I was totally befuddled as a child. Good English teachers are of course important.
But how important is the learning of grammar? How will an understanding of, for example, the complement, aid us in our understanding of the English language?
As long as a language is spoken or used in a community, a knowledge of its grammar is essential. We were all taught our Malay nahu, our Chinese 语法 and our Tamil grammar in Singapore. Why should the teaching of English be any different?
A good knowledge of grammar is absolutely needful if you want to know if a clause complies with the rules of standard grammar. If you have no knowledge of grammar, there is no way you can be sure if a sentence is correct and when you think that something is wrong, there is no way you can be sure it is wrong.
The usefulness of a knowledge in grammar can be seen in a conversation I had just two weeks ago with a friend who is perfectly proficient in the English language but who, as it became clear later in the conversation, is not at all knowledgeable in English grammar.
This friend of mine mentioned during a conversation with me that he liked a modern hymn called 'Mighty to Save'. It's such a modern hymn that I would not have known what hymn he was talking about if not for the fact that a couple of years ago, I was given a copy of the music score by the conductor of my church orchestra and I listened to it on YouTube for the first time. It's a horrendous hymn with abominable lyrics and the most inelegant phrasing. But the one grammatical blunder that stands out in the hymn comes from the hymn writer's failure to understand complementation in grammar, in particular, the adjective complementation by a to-infinitive clause. The lyrics are so awful that I'm a little embarrassed to print them here but you have to see them for yourself to know how bad they really are:
Well, everyone needs compassion
A love that's never failing
But let mercy fall on me
Well everyone needs forgiveness
The kindness of a Saviour
The hope of nations
My SaviorIt was this argument with my friend that showed me how useful my grammar education was. I have already said that as a child, I had a problem with complementation and now, I see a grown man, a famous hymn writer no less, struggling with the same problem I had as a child.
He can move the mountains
My God is Mighty to save
He is Mighty to save
Forever Author of salvation
He rose and conquered the grave
Jesus conquered the grave
I began by telling my friend that there are only a set number of ways for that particular complementation and 'My God is mighty to save' is not one of them. To show that his favourite hymn writer is right, my friend sought to give an example of a sentence which is unexceptionable and grammatically equivalent to what the hymn writer wrote. Of course it would have been easier if we had a good book on grammar and usage but we were in Starbucks at the time.
The first example he gave was this sentence:
I am willing to give the beggar money.This is of course a bad example. It's totally irrelevant. It merely shows the normal function of a semi-auxiliary and is by no means a grammatical equivalent of what the hymn writer wrote. But it's a pardonable mistake and anyone can make it if he isn't alert and my friend did say, as I've heard many people say, that his grammar was 'rusty'.
My friend said he would give another example. He thought for quite a while and he finally came up with this example which he announced with a triumphant flourish:
She is averse to all kinds of vaccination.I couldn't believe what I heard. He couldn't even tell that his example of a prepositional phrase is totally unrelated to what we were talking about! I knew immediately that he had no knowledge of grammar and it's not just a case of 'rusty' grammar. Anyone who has the faintest knowledge of grammar cannot possibly give such an example even if he is semi-comatose. My friend is another example of the huge number of people who don't know grammar but sincerely believe they do, a phenomenon I explored in an earlier blog post which I will refer to in the next paragraph.
This is how disadvantaged a person really is when he has no knowledge of grammar. He can never be sure if a sentence is wrong. He frequently draws an analogy with another sentence without even knowing that that sentence is grammatically not equivalent to the sentence he is examining. In an earlier blog post (click on the link at the bottom of this paragraph) I talked about the conversations I overheard between two Englishmen and their children on grammar, and the cruel online abuse of a teacher by an Internet mob for an alleged language error which was not an error at all. The Internet mob and the fathers are without a doubt ignorant of grammar. In that blog post, I also brought in the SGEM and I examined if the SGEM, the two fathers, and the Internet mob, all of whom represent themselves as skilled and competent in grammar, are fools or liars. If you are interested in reading about this highly prevalent but seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of people believing that they have a knowledge of grammar when they have none, please see the discussion here: Fools or Liars?
When I call someone a grammar illiterate, I'm not insulting him. I'm just stating a fact. Nick Gibb is a grammar illiterate. But then one may argue that Nick Gibb is worse than just a grammar illiterate. In February last year, he was asked by a TV presenter on Good Morning Britain:
What is 8 x 9 ?He replied, 'I’m not going to get into this. I’ve learned through bitter experience never to answer these kinds of questions on live television.' His grammar failure on television two years before must have been fresh on his mind. [Note: my quotation of what Gibb said comes from the Guardian newspaper.]
Nick Gibb is not the only Minister who couldn't get his answer right on a test question for 11-year-olds. The then Prime Minister David Cameron was asked three questions on grammar in Parliament and he refused to give his answers. He replied in Parliament, 'The whole point of these changes is to make sure our children are better educated than we are!'
David Cameron is undoubtedly right. The fact that we now have a whole generation of grammar illiterates across the entire English-speaking world is precisely what motivates the British government to make sure that future generations are not similarly deprived of a grammar education. Of course nobody should expect cabinet ministers or the Prime Minister to be knowledgeable in grammar. They have far more important things to worry about. I don't even think it's necessary for the education minister to have an in-depth knowledge of grammar. These are rulers and policy makers. They are not teachers. If you are an English teacher or if you are in the committee of the Speak Good English Movement, and you have no knowledge of English grammar, you must at least accept that you are of course not suited for the job.
But before we embark on an ambitious programme to teach grammar in schools, we must first disband the Speak Good English Movement. I have no doubt the SGEM will be the single most disastrous stumbling block to all our endeavours.
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