NCTE’s Position Unchanged: Isolated Grammar Drills
Do Not Produce Good Writers

The National Council of Teachers of English has not changed its position on the teaching of grammar. Decades of research have shown that isolated grammar drills do little to improve student writing and are a poor use of instructional time.

In classrooms where much of the time is spent on grammar exercises, student writing suffers.  This happens because, in those classes, students are spending more time underlining random parts of speech or diagramming sentences than actually composing. A recent report has just confirmed these findings (see Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools by Steve Graham and Delores Perin, New York, Carnegie Corporation, 2006). NCTE stands by them.

"Teaching how language works is the basis for good grammar instruction," says Kyoko Sato, NCTE President.  Randy Bomer, NCTE Past President, adds, "Most English teachers do not see themselves as grammar police, on the lookout for mistakes and intolerant of diverse ways of speaking.  Rather, they want students to see grammar as an important resource for writing and for understanding the language around them in everyday life."

Students need to be able to compose complex, varied sentences, and they need to be able to proofread their writing for mistakes that might distract their audiences or distort their intended meaning. Skilled teachers of writing know how to teach grammar to their students as they write, when they have a particular need to know the information.

NCTE believes that, in a time when the education profession sees constant calls for teaching to be research-based, it is important to keep in mind the body of evidence about the teaching of grammar.

Research reviews about the teaching of grammar:

• Braddock, Richard; Richard Lloyd-Jones; and Lowell Schoerr. Research in Written Composition. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963.
  
• Graham, Steve, and Delores Perin. Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools. New York: Carnegie Corporation, 2006.
  
• Hillocks, George, Jr. Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching. Urbana, Illinois: National Conference on Research in English and ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1986.
  
• Hillocks, George Jr., and Michael W. Smith, "Grammars and Literacy Learning," in Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts. 2nd. ed. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2003.

To talk to a spokesperson about NCTE's unchanged position on grammar, please contact  or 800-369-6283, ext. 3630. 

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The National Council of Teachers of English, with 50,000 individual and institutional members worldwide, is dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education.  For more information, please visit http://www.ncte.org.