I think that the pros and cons list of why we should or should not teach grammar is absolutely fascinating. On the one hand, we should teach grammar because it is a linguistic element that helps a learner understand a language and be taken seriously in the professional and cultural realm. On the other hand, we shouldn’t teach grammar just for the sake of grading, because we place importance on it, or because it empowers us as teachers to know more than our students. So it seems to me that we should teach grammar based on the relevance it has for learning a language (go figure), but we shouldn’t teach grammar for the wrong reasons. Sort of like when you’re in a long relationship and you don’t know whether you should break-up or not; you shouldn’t if it’s just to change things up, you’re kind of bored, or that one hot chick checked you out, but you should if you ain’t got that love anymore. Or something.
The fact, though, that some teachers teach grammar simply because it makes them feel powerful, now that’s difficult for me to believe. Like that’s their only motivation, to show students how much more the teacher knows than them. It seems like that may be the by-product of several of these other motivational factors, such as, “It Made Me Who I Am.” After all, if it was emphasized when you were young and now you’re an expert, it’s got to feel good to show off your expertise, yeah? But I just can’t believe that some instructor somewhere plans to focus on grammar on a certain day for the sole purpose of showing those little snot-nosed young’uns just how much Mr. Williams happens to know, thank you very much. If that is the case somewhere then Mr. Williams needs to go climb a tree and never come down.
I feel that most teachers emphasize grammar for the more realistic reasons presented in Chapter 13, and I feel that the most profound one is the grammar as a security blanket. I can speak from experience this summer on that count. I was team-teaching with two friends of mine at UHigh in a writing class and we were gathered together to discuss what we wanted to do with our lesson. We chose a fancy writing assignment that promoted all kinds of neat creative fiction elements, as well as a portion that would make the students’ written works come alive in a mini-play at the end of the unit. The problem was, we were about a day short in content. What was our answer? Grammar lesson. It’s easy to teach, easy to assess, and some argue that it is important in some capacity. Now, this wasn’t an ESL classroom so the emphasis of the grammar took on a degree of levity, but the point holds true: if my fellow teachers and I barely gave grammar enough credit in a freshman-level writing class, how can teachers around the world give it more credit than the “Security Blanket” or “Tidy” and “Testable” descriptions already have. It’s systematic and controlled and, consequently, easy.
I think grammar is an important foundational tool that students can use to build their body of language understanding, though I don’t believe it is the only tool. Also, I don’t think teachers use that tool correctly for the best understanding of their students. Rote memorization and practicing can be useful in trying to drive home a certain concept, but not an entire system. Promoting tasks that actually get students to think about the underpinnings of grammar rather than just filling out practice sheets to know the procedures, this is the direction grammar teaching should be going. Until we find a way to make the system more user-friendly we need to keep experimenting until we find some form of balance that takes our students’ grammar knowledge, both new and old, and makes it useful to them.
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