Cont metalanguage yes Hudson

In the world-wide debate about grammar teaching one of the main questions concerns terminology: should the teacher use specialist metalanguage? In the UK context this is not an issue: technical terminology is accepted as a necessary part of explicit teaching. Indeed, the documents that launched the National Literacy Strategy included a glossary of 200 technical terms, of which about 90 related to grammar. These are terms which teachers are expected to use in class, and which children learn to use; so the UK's primary schools are now full of five-year olds talking about phonemes and adjectives. Since these documents had the official stamp of approval, this glossary counts as the first-ever government-sponsored glossary of grammatical terminology in the UK.

The Bullock Report

The UK government's Bullock report in the 1960's on English teaching was a classical study and found that grammar teaching needed some drastic changing. It concluded: 'What has been shown is that the teaching of traditional analytic grammar does not appear to improve performance in writing.'[6] (HMSO 1975:169)

The Bullock Report was intending to encourage teachers to improve standards of English grammar teaching but with in the space of the next decade rather than improving standards England saw a dramatic end of grammar in English schools.