Grammar expert: schools not doing enough to teach kids the basics

According to grammar expert Deb Doyle, Australian educators are failing to teach grammar and punctuation adequately.

Doyle has worked as a grammar and punctuation educator for 25 years. She teaches grammar and editing at the Australian Writers’ Centre and The University of Sydney.

“The reason I have a job is that so many students are slipping through the cracks in the school system. Commentators should discuss grammatical ability alongside mathematical ability,” Doyle said.

“High-school teachers aren’t trained to value correct sentence construction. They don’t police it enough. When they’re marking assignments, they let too many mistakes through. Unfortunately, either they’re too busy to correct the mistakes or grammar isn’t important enough to them to bring it to the student’s attention.

“In my experience, the biggest error is that grammar and punctuation aren’t priorities in the crowded English curriculum. Primary schools might make grammar a key part of their curriculum, but in high schools it’s barely a footnote.

“As a result, students might be reasonably grammatically literate when they graduate Year 6, but when they go through high school, they forget all the knowledge they’ve acquired.”