Learning to Read through Grammar

Abstract

In the last decade, throughout the English-speaking world at least, researchers have been arguing that literacy education, at its best, emphasizes both code and meaning (for example, Freebody 2007; Schleppegrell 2004) as well as skills development and social practice (Purcell-Gates, Jacobsen and Degener 2004). These arguments deliberately turn away from the unproductive late twentieth century debate that made much of the apparent opposition between literacy teaching that emphasized phonics (skills related to the code) and literacy teaching that emphasized whole language (meaningful language use).Similarly, over recent years in the English-speaking world, there has been growing interest in the value of teaching children knowledge about language, in particular, grammatical knowledge, as a means of enhancing literacy development (Christie 2005, Williams 2.005). This renewed interest follows several decades during which teaching children explicit knowledge about language, and about grammar in particular, fell out of favour, largely as a reaction to the grammar taught to earlier generations, grammar that emphasized correctness at the Expense of meaning.