Grammar returns to high school after 16 years. The curriculum, contested by some teachers. “She's loaded beyond measure! That's what we want 14-15 year olds to know?!”
The Minister of Education Daniel David says that the reintroduction of the study of grammar in high school will help reduce the phenomenon of illiteracy among students. PHOTO: Shutterstock
Messages full of mistakes, missed chords, unrelated sentences, “k” instead of “c”, randomly placed commas. For years, the signals that teachers have raised about how 15-17 year old students express their ideas have drawn attention to a structural problem: the lack of continuity in teaching grammar after the 8th grade and the visible consequences in the expression of teenagers. The new Romanian language and literature program for the 9th grade, now under public debate, reintroduces, for the first time after 16 years, explicit notions of phrasing and sentence construction.
After almost two decades, the Ministry of Education wants to reintroduce notions of grammar in the high school Romanian language curriculum, and for pedagogical high schools it proposes a separate discipline: “Applied grammar of the Romanian language”.
The proposal includes wording such as “the relationship between word and utterance, between sentence, phrase and utterance”, i.e. elements of functional grammar that have not been taught in high school since 2009.
We remind you that during this period the new high school programs, aimed at modernizing the curricula, which will be implemented starting from the next school year, are under public debate. Teachers and linguists are divided. Some say that students want more pure grammar, not language and communication components (ie they are more interested in how they communicate than how language is constructed). Others believe exactly the opposite: that the classical grammar structure is essential in the 9th grade because it provides a solid foundation.
The Ministry of Education justifies the reintroduction of grammar concepts by the need to strengthen communication skills: the logical organization of ideas, understanding the relationships between sentences, the correct and coherent formulation of arguments, the interpretation of complex texts.
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