How does effective teaching of spelling, punctuation and grammar improve children’s confidence in writing across the school?
The teaching of spelling punctuation and grammar has been of particular interest amongst researchers in the recent years. This is perhaps due to the introduction of the new statutory spelling, punctuation and grammar test for the end of Key Stage Two in 2013. There have been several significant debates highlighted within the recent literature around what effective teaching of spelling, punctuation and grammar is. Controversially, the literature highlights a lack of significant evidence for the benefits of explicit teaching of spelling and grammar (Herrington 2015, Andrews 2006) and debates whether the subject should be
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It is also widely agreed upon by researchers that the teaching of spelling is important in creating efficiency within children’s writing (Patel, 2014, p.4). Contrastingly, however, research in recent years focuses chiefly on the lack of evidence that the explicit teaching of grammar has benefits on the improvement of children’s writing (Myhill 2014, Herrington 2015, Andrews 2006). In a dated yet informative article, Vavra (1996, p.32) highlights the importance of grammar teaching, stating that employers expect their employees to have a high level of literacy. Despite this, however, in Andrews’ significant research (2006) they found that the teaching of formal grammar is ineffective (p.39). Although Andrews’ study does lack in validity, due to the lack of recent research used in the systematic research reviews, the scale of the research is the largest to date; this makes it a highly relevant …show more content…
The recent literature suggests that these ‘basic’ (Borg, 2003, p.105) gaps in knowledge lead to children not being taught grammar effectively (Louis, 2015, p.14) Furthermore, this poses a reason for the decontextualized teaching of spelling, punctuation and grammar as Stafford (2016, p.18) found, teachers felt unable to have discussions about aspects of language with their pupils. Adoniou (2014, p.147) found in their study that spelling instruction was challenging particularly for first-year teachers. Although, Adoniou’s study comprised of only newly qualified teachers all of whom graduated from the same training programme, meaning the results from this may not be generalisable to all