William Macauley conducted a test on grammar knowledge of elementary age students. After daily thirty minute grammar lessons over five years, students completed an exit exam testing their knowledge on the parts of speech and their functions in fifty sentences. The average score after 131 students took the exam was 27.9 percent accuracy.
In 1998 Stephen Krashen reviewed research on teaching grammar. He concluded, “Research on the relationship between formal grammar instruction and performance on measures of writing ability is very consistent: There is no relationship between grammar study and writing.”
How do we fix the issue of syntactic structure is ungrammatical while not teaching prescriptive grammar lessons? Constance Weaver wrote a book called Teaching Grammar in Context to help teachers authentically help students speak and write using grammatical syntactic structure. Click the hyperlink below the picture to read a short summary of her book.
Trunnell's Observations on Language Learners 