How does playing with grammar impact on pupils’ writing? – A mixed methods research project into the efficacy of contextualised grammar tasks

Thesis

This research and development project explores the impact of a contextualised approach to teaching grammar upon the writing skills of year 7 pupils at a comprehensive school in Kent. The approach required pupils to imitate complex sentence structures whilst writing creatively. The intervention took the form of starter tasks that were delivered at the beginning of English lessons for three months. I hypothesised that through frequent opportunities to write with this process of creative imitation, pupils would internalise the complex sentence structures and grammatical formations, developing their use of sentence structure and grammatical accuracy in their own writing.

A controlled trial method was used to produce quantitative data measuring the progress of an intervention group against a control group. Collaboration with another English teacher aided the delivery of the intervention as well as moderating the marking of the baseline and post-intervention tests. Furthermore, through interviews with this teacher and the department, I was able to explore other teachers’ perceptions of the intervention which, in particular, provided valuable ideas regarding how the intervention’s design could be improved and differentiated. Following the controlled trial, focus group interviews were held which revealed that the intervention’s efficacy could be partly attributed to its tendency to motivate pupils. However, these interviews also found that pupils were cognitively disengaged from the concept of grammar.

The results of the controlled trial suggested that the intervention had had an overall positive effect upon the grammatical proficiency of pupils’ writing, and was particularly effective for pupils who had performed below average in the baseline test. Further empirical research needs to be conducted to corroborate this project’s findings across different school contexts.

Authors: Ashwell, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-4roqm8vqk
• Type of award: MSc
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Keywords: MLT; MLT2018
• Subjects: Education