语法学习之争（上）

Culture

文化

Johnson -- More than the sum of its part

约翰逊语言专栏——整体大于部分之和

Teaching grammar is useful if not principally in the way you may think

教语法是有用的，如果不是主要用你以为的那种方式

Absence of evidence is not, as the saying goes, the same thing as evidence of absence.

正如俗话所说，没有证据不等于证据不存在。

But if you continue looking for something intently, and keep failing to find it, you can be forgiven for starting to worry.

但如果你持续专注地寻找某样东西，却总是找不到，那么你开始担心这东西不存在也是情有可原的。

And so it is with the vexed -- and in Britain, highly politicised -- subject of explicit grammar teaching in schools, and its link or otherwise with improved writing ability.

学校里的明晰语法教学这一令人为难的——在英国，它也是高度政治化的——学科，以及它与提高写作能力之间的联系或别的什么，就是这种情况。

Another study, in this case a large randomised controlled trial, has recently been added to the expansive literature on the subject.

另一项研究，这回是一项大型随机对照试验，最近加入到有关这个学科的海量文献中。

Like nearly all its predecessors, it found that teaching kids how to label the bits and pieces in a sentence does not make them better writers.

和几乎所有之前的研究一样，该研究发现，教会孩子们如何标记句子中零碎的单词短语，并不能让他们成为更好的写作者。

It was novel in that it tested six- and seven-year-olds who used a digital platform called Englicious to take grammar lessons, alongside the rote classroom teaching of grammatical particulars and their functions.

这项研究的新颖之处在于，它对两组6-7岁的儿童进行了测试，一组使用一个叫作Englicious的数字平台学习语法，另一组接受惯常的教授语法细节及其功能的课堂教学。

The Englicious group did no better than those receiving ordinary instruction when it came to writing narrative passages.

在写作记叙文方面，Englicious组并没有比接受普通教学的那组儿童表现得更好。

(The extra help slightly improved their performance on a task called "sentence combining", which requires pupils to turn two sentences into one in logical ways, such as the addition of "because". But even this effect was not statistically significant.)

（教学的额外帮助略微提高了他们在“句子组合”任务中的表现，这项任务要求学生按照逻辑将两个句子合并成一个句子，比如加上“因为”。但即使是这一影响，在统计学上也不显著。）

Bas Aarts, one of the researchers on the project and one of the scholars behind Englicious, holds out hope that with longer exposure, or a study of older students, an improvement in writing skills might be detected.

巴斯·阿尔茨是该项目的研究人员之一，也是Englicious背后的学者之一。他希望，通过增长接触时间，或对年龄较大的学生进行研究，能够检测到写作技能的提升。

Other observers may begin to wonder whether the National Curriculum in England, which since 2014 has made grammar such a central part of its English programme, might have gone down a blind alley.

一些观察人士可能会开始怀疑，自2014年以来一直将语法作为其英语课程核心部分的英国国家课程是否已经走进了死胡同。

The force behind the reforms, Michael Gove, a Conservative former secretary of education, is sometimes maligned for other political reasons (especially among opponents of Brexit, which he championed).

这些改革背后的力量，保守党前教育大臣迈克尔·戈夫，有时会因为其他政治原因而遭到中伤（尤其是他支持英国脱欧，成为了反派的一份子）。

He is said to have insisted on the insertion of personal bugbears into the grammar curriculum, notably the subjunctive form, "If I were".

据说，他坚持在语法课程中加入一些难点，尤其是虚拟语气“If I were”。

Mention of his name alone wrinkles many teachers' noses -- partly because some of them were hardly prepared to teach the new material themselves, after decades in which grammar was largely absent from classrooms.

单是提到他的名字就让许多老师感到不快——部分原因是他们中的一些人自己都还没有准备好要教授的新材料，因为几十年来，语法基本上不出现在课堂上。