Student Attitudes Towards English Grammar

The literature on English grammar is mostly on its history, standardization, educational implementations, how ideologies shape its frequency of usage, and how it is perceived by students learning English as a second language. This study seeks to address a gap in the literature that reviews the attitudes of college students towards English grammar as their first language and how these attitudes correlate with any past experience with English grammar up to this point. To gain a better understanding of student’s attitudes towards English grammar, an online mixed-methods survey was distributed to graduate and undergraduate students in all departments of the University of Mississippi in which the participants were asked to respond to the survey in two parts. Respondents were first asked to rate their level of agreement to a set of statements on a Likert scale, and then given the option to answer two open-ended questions. The results showed that overall, students had more positive attitudes to grammar than might have been hypothesized based on the literature review. These results indicate that though a small number of students find grammar to be a possible means of discrimination, for the majority of students there is a positive orientation towards grammar as a means of communication in specific settings where it is most useful, as well as a deprivation of the teaching of grammatical principles in the United States that college students generally do not appreciate. From this study, it can be concluded that the explicit teaching of grammar is valued and appreciated for various reasons, despite contradictory views and other previous research studies