ne unanticipated consequence of school closures and remote learning has been a focus on the teaching of grammar. While supporting their children with home learning, many parents have been confronted with their own lack of knowledge of the basics. What exactly is a fronted adverbial you may ask, or how do you spot a past continuous verb form? From my point of view, as someone who has been researching the teaching of writing for more than 20 years, this can only be a good thing as it surfaces many misunderstandings and confusions about grammar, which merit discussion. As a nation, we remain both divided and uncertain about what teaching grammar is for. Much of this stems from the history of grammar in English schools over the past 50 years. In 1966, a major international conference of English educators in Dartmouth, in the US, came to the conclusion that teaching grammar was pointless because there was no evidence that it benefited children’s writing. This was highly influential in forming a strong voice in the UK against the teaching of grammar, and the subject was largely dropped from English lessons throughout the 70s and 80s. But grammar schools and public schools often retained it – I recall, not with great affection, lessons of parsing and six-column analysis at my grammar school in the 1970s. The introduction of a national curriculum in 1988 mandated the content of the English curriculum for the first time, and grammar was again a bone of contention. In fact, every one of the five versions of the national curriculum has included grammar, though to varying degrees. As a consequence, many parents today were themselves not taught grammar in their own schooling, which may account for some of the current anxiety. The latest version, without doubt, gives it the greatest emphasis, and this is amplified by the grammar, punctuation and spelling test for 11-year-olds. But no version of the national curriculum has ever been clear about the rationale for its inclusion – what is the point of teaching grammar? This absence of clarity is in part attributable to the distinction between implicit and explicit grammar knowledge. Children know about grammar, even if they are not taught grammar. All of us have a deep understanding of the grammar of our own language and use that understanding all the time to communicate, in speech or in writing. We would all know that to say “a red leather big handbag’” sounds wrong, and could alter it to “a big red leather handbag”, but few of us could explain the rules that govern adjectival order in English. It is implicit, not explicit, and so we cannot verbalise or explain our understanding. This difference between implicit and explicit understanding is the source of one longstanding disagreement about grammar teaching: if we understand grammar naturally and implicitly, why do we need explicit knowledge of grammatical terminology? This is a fair question. One answer, supported by our research, suggests that this explicit knowledge helps to develop understanding of how the language choices we make shape meaning. Writing is a craft – using phrases, images, sentences and paragraphs to make the text do what we want it to do. Of course, crafting a piece of writing is not just about grammar, but helping children to understand how grammatical choices affect the nuances of meaning demystifies the craft. Let me clarify this with one simple example. In Arthur, High King of Britain, Michael Morpurgo’s retelling of Arthurian legend, Morpurgo describes Arthur’s first sight of Guinevere: “It was her fingers, long, white and dancing, that I loved first.” Note the position of the adjectives here, a pattern of three after the noun, when he could have written, “It was her long, white and dancing fingers that I loved first.” Moving the adjectives after the noun draws attention to the adjectival description, and it changes the rhythm of the sentence. The point here is not that one sentence is better than another, but the difference in how they describe this moment. Explicit teaching of how different grammatical choices create different effects is valuable, useful learning about writing. This does not imply that when we write we are constantly muttering, sotto voce, “I think I’ll front an adverbial here”. For the inquiring mind, a “fronted adverbial” is when a phrase is added before the action, rather than later in the sentence, for example, “With great patience, she helped her son with his long division”: I’m sure you use this formulation all time. Expert writers have already internalised these patterns and structures from their experience as writers and readers (and we must not forget the power of reading in supporting young writers). But children are not experts – they are still learning; and teachers are inducting them into the craft of writing. It is hard to expect children to become more confident and capable writers if we don’t show them how. Teachers can draw attention to these grammar patterns without using the terms, and it is important not to let the grammar get in the way of learning. If you are a parent supporting your child’s learning, you can very helpfully read sentences aloud with your child, and talk about the different patterns and emphases in the sentences. But the terms are useful for discussing language choice, just as musical notation is useful terminology for teaching singing; or the terms “multiplication” and “division” for learning maths. Research has demonstrated that teaching how different language choices create different effects can have a real impact on children’s writing. We also have evidence that when these connections are not made; when children are not discussing language choices; and when children are taught formulaic, and nonsensical, rules about “putting in” more fronted adverbials, they do not benefit from being taught grammar. The real question is not should we teach grammar, but what are children learning about grammar – are they learning that “good” writing means randomly inserting a fronted adverbial here or there; or are they learning how moving adverbials alters what is spotlighted or connected in a sentence? When my youngest granddaughter was six, playing school with us, she taught my husband about noun phrases by making him draw a unicorn’s garden and label the things in it to show that he could describe it clearly. Parents – embrace the fact that your children know something you don’t, and learn from them. Debra Myhill is director of the centre for research in writing at the University of Exeter