Joan Rothery and the class teacher, Ruth French, are collaborating with me in developing the project. The uses of transitivity analyses have been mainly developed through their reading of a feminist text concerned with gender stereotypes in domestic work. The children looked particularly at ways in which the patterning of grammatical roles for the characters changed over the text to effect the development of character. There is a range of data, which we are currently analysing. It includes videos and transcripts of key lessons, extensive samples of draft and final copy writing from the class and a parallel class in the same school which has not been introduced to the grammar, interviews with the children about their uses of the grammar and their reaction to learning it, and formal tests of their grammatical knowledge.
Initial results are very positive.
There is a strong sense of the children's enjoyment of this work, contrary to the popular stereotype. Visual images of grammatical relations seem to play a key mediating role. There is a considerable shift evident in what the children understand a grammar to be. At the beginning of the year those few who knew anything about grammar talked exclusively about rules, correctness, being right etc. They were also quite puzzled about whether grammar only had to do with writing, or was also concerned with speech.