Redefining Grammar: A Linguistic Approach to the Language Arts

Public education often receives criticism for standardized testing, rigid schedules, letter grades, and outdated classroom models, practices whose harmful effects are immediately visible. But what’s less discussed are the actual lesson plans teachers use every day. Despite educators’ consistent concerns, many required curriculums still fail to help students build relevant skills, especially in subjects like math and language arts. Grammar instruction, in particular, remains trapped in outdated frameworks, with few meaningful reforms since the 1950s. Students are taught to memorize terminology, diagram sentences, and follow prescriptive rules, often without understanding how language actually works in the real world.

This disconnect between school grammar and real language use leaves many students confused, disinterested, or convinced that they’re simply “bad at English.” It also reinforces linguistic biases, penalizing nonstandard dialects and multilingual students for using grammar that doesn’t match a narrow, outdated ideal. If we want to build real literacy—literacy that includes critical thinking, communication skills, and an understanding of language as a living system—we need to rethink grammar education through the lens of linguistics.

In her article, “Will the Common Core Step Up Schools’ Focus on Grammar?”, Liana Loewus highlights how the Common Core fails to clarify or prioritize grammar standards, leading to confusion and inconsistency in classrooms. As Timothy Shanahan notes in the article, “the formal teaching of grammar has typically not improved reading comprehension and not improved writing quality.” These findings show that current grammar instruction is not just outdated, it may actively hinder students’ ability to communicate. In support of her argument, Loewus references research showing that “explicit, systematic grammar instruction had a small but statistically significant negative effect on students’ writing ability.” This finding reveals a central contradiction: grammar, when taught in isolation, can actually impair the skills it’s meant to build—especially writing. These findings show that current grammar instruction is not just outdated—it may actively hinder students’ ability to communicate. Loewus draws on expert testimony and decades of research to highlight the haphazard nature of the education system’s approach to grammar, reinforcing how inconsistent and confusing language arts curricula have become..

Most school systems teach prescriptive grammar (if they teach it at all), “prescriptive” refers to the concept that language and its structure dictate how we communicate and think. Most linguists however, use Descriptivism when studying a language. They use the vocabulary and theory specific to their field to describe how we use language, not how we react to it. Prescriptivism and Descriptivism are two contrasting schools of thought when using linguistics to describe a language. Though they are both technically true, descriptivism is usually a more accurate lens through which studies are presented. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, has been historically weaponized to put down minority languages and cultures as less than their colonizer counterparts. While I’m sure children aren’t inheriting all of that baggage when being taught “proper” English, prescriptive teaching does perpetuate these discriminatory standards in the classroom.

Unlike some other languages, the grammar and structure of English isn’t standard. It’s an entire language of irregulars. If we teach grammar as a set of rules that English follows, we come across more exceptions than adherences. Especially when we consider the 30 different regional English dialects in the U.S. alone, it’s difficult to explain how people talk and construct ideas through 1 grammar variation.

To understand why grammar instruction often fails students, we first need to look at the linguistic and historical complexity of the English language. Unlike other Indo-European languages, English is a unique (and infuriating) blend of Celtic, Norse, and Germanic languages. That fusion created a grammar and vocabulary unlike any other language that came out of Europe. Then, during the Norman Conquest in 1066, French rulers replaced the Futhark lettering system, originally suited to English, with the Latin alphabet. The Latin script was poorly matched to English sounds and grammar, and omitted dozens of key phonetic structures. At the same time, the Normans injected as much French grammar and vocabulary into English as they could. English didn’t just evolve, it collided with itself, leaving behind a trail of exceptions, contradictions, and patchwork rules.

That chaos only multiplied with colonization. In 1583, when Humphrey Gilbert claimed Newfoundland for Queen Elizabeth, it marked the beginning of British imperial expansion—and wherever the British went, English followed. Today, around 350 million people speak English as a first language, and another 430 million speak it as a second. With such a massive and globally diverse speaker population, no two groups of English speakers sound the same. Especially in places where English is a second language, communities reshape it to fit their communicative needs, blending it with their own cultural and linguistic traditions. English is not one uniform system, it’s a shifting, multilingual spectrum.

But despite this complexity and diversity, English is still often taught prescriptively—as if there’s only one “correct” way to speak it. Teaching grammar as a rigid set of rules for how English should sound ignores the reality of how it’s actually used. It not only reinforces outdated standards of correctness, but also marginalizes speakers of regional dialects and non-native varieties. Prescriptive grammar doesn’t just fail students—it quietly promotes discrimination, telling entire groups that the way they speak is “wrong” or “uneducated.”

A better model for grammar instruction lies in linguistics, a field that values how language is actually used rather than how it “should” be used. Linguistics is the scientific study of language, how it works, its structure, its evolution over time, and how people use it. It looks at everything from the sounds and grammar of languages to how meaning is made, how language is processed in the brain, and how it reflects culture and society. And that’s the difference between teaching in a language arts class and in a linguistics course. In any introductory linguistics course, one of the first things you learn is that no two groups of people use language in the same way. Language variation is just as important on the intra-language level as it is on the dialect and idiolect level. Grammar is taught as a system by which languages are described, not governed. Linguistic researcher Lauren Gartland warns against teaching methods that separate grammar from real communication. She argues that “activities that don’t link form and meaning aren’t particularly helpful for anyone and may be harmful.” In other words, if grammar is taught as a disconnected set of forms or corrections, it becomes both forgettable and frustrating. This reinforces the idea that grammar should be taught through language use, not as an obstacle to it. If students are taught at the fundamental level that language and grammar are fluid and constantly changing, rather than a series of hard and fast rules, we can shed more light on how grammar works, not just what they can and can’t say. This teaching style also reflects the values that are encouraging schools to implement application based learning now.

Teaching grammar descriptively equips students with tools to express themselves more creatively and precisely, allowing them to use grammar as a tool, not as a barrier, to communication.. For example, English has a unique feature where any word with semantic significance, when placed carefully, can become a verb. Eg. “I velociraptored around the living room.” Velociraptor isn’t a verb, but here it acts as one, and it’s a lot more descriptive than simply “I ran” or “I scuttled.” It’s an example of how we can expand our communicative abilities before our vocabulary, simply using grammar.
Complicated questions of how slang works, or why one word conjugates this way but that one another, are clarified by providing a basic explanation of language as a whole, and grammar as a piece of that puzzle. Revealing this to them at a young age also makes them more perceptive readers. It shows them how vocabulary isn’t the only thing that affects tone, mood, and clarity in writing, it’s also structure. Teaching grammar this way also lets them keep up with how fast the internet is changing the way we talk, and what parts of that language they find useful or cumbersome.

Centering grammar instruction on students’ natural language use encourages inclusivity, particularly for non-standard dialects. It helps bilingual children or speakers of dialects with greater variation from “standard” American English understand that the way they speak isn’t wrong, it’s just a reflection of their cultural background. Establishing those ideas at a young age also reduces the stigma around dialects like AAVE, which, today, are usually seen as a sign of a poor education or unprofessional..

Public education falls back on this concept mostly because it’s easy. Asking students to memorize a variety of arbitrary rules is an easier metric to judge whether they understand the grammar they’ve learned than checking how they use it effectively. Unlike math, where formulas are objective, it’s easy to apply grammar rules too strictly or in the wrong situation. Michelle Navarre Cleary, a professor at DePaul University, acknowledges how appealing prescriptive methods can be to time-strapped teachers. As she puts it, “It’s frankly easier to teach grammar in a prescriptive way, … But if [students don’t learn the rules] in context, they’re not going to carry them over.” This reflects a common classroom reality: prescriptive grammar is simpler to implement, but without real context, students may memorize rules without ever learning how language actually works or how to apply those rules on their own. The only real way to evaluate a student’s ability to use grammar conventions is asking them to write, read, and write about their reading. Introducing higher level reading and writing into classrooms earlier prepares them for the difficult literature for which grammar is important to understand in the first place.

Although these convoluted revisions in language arts education may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial in terms of today’s concern over child literacy rates. Throughout history, researchers have observed that each new generation is more literate and academically capable than the one before it. Recent studies however, show how kids born after or during the COVID-19 pandemic have had significantly lower lexile scores and media literacy. It’s a wake-up call to change a system that has remained stagnant for too long. The world is changing, language is adapting to match it, the way we teach language arts needs to catch up. Taking what we learn from linguistics and using concepts like Descriptivism and studying language as a constantly-changing entity can create more inclusive and intelligent kids. Establishing these updated standards of communication at a young age will make more inclusive environments for adults too. Teaching kids how to describe language rather than the rules language uses makes them more receptive to other languages and variations of English. It brings down the barrier between different cultures and dialects, and creates safer spaces for everyone.