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What do people say about grammar?

Those who criticise the teaching of grammar - or at any rate, the centrality of grammar in the curriculum - do so for a number of reasons concerned not only with the nature of grammar itself, but also with the kind of teaching which frequently accompanies grammar study. Here are some of their claims.

Which one, if any, do you agree with the most?
Grammar is only popular because it gives the teacher more power, enabling him or her to stay in charge, transmitting knowledge rather than allowing students to acquire it.
Most grammar teaching is all sentence-level – which detracts from lexical phrases and meaning-based approaches.
Grammar teaching can be amazingly boring.
We don’t get a language by learning rules, we acquire it through non-threatening exposure leading to opportunities for use in motivating settings.
None of the above.

Yet there are perfectly good counter-arguments too. Is your view reflected in one of these?
Students want and expect to understand the rules of language.
Without good grammar students never get beyond a basic ability to communicate.
Grammar teaching and learning helps students notice things about how language is formed.
Children may acquire language without formal teaching, but most young and older adults benefit from some focus on language at various stages during their learning.
None of the above

 

Whatever your view, the teaching of grammar takes place. So how can we make it more relevant and useful? Find out some of Jeremy Harmer's ideas in the next part.

The Grammar Development Pack looks at these issues in more detail.

Back to Is there any point in studying language?

 

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