Yes, Teaching Grammar Does Help

Abstract

People tend to make term grammar mean many different things: (a) conventions for using language forms and formats, (b) an area of school instruction, (c) materials presented in that instruction, (d) tricky points of usage, and (e) most recently, a formal description of a language. If we want to tell whether or not it helps to teach grammar in English classes, we first have to decide what we mean by grammar. It is often assumed that content of school grammar is pretty well fixed, and all we can do is argue about whether and when we're going to teach it. I'd like to present a different case. I feel that teaching grammar, though it doesn't have a very good record in past, can be both helpful and effective-on one condition. At present, most textbooks and lesson plans offer what deserves to be called a teachers' grammar. English textbooks are not written for learners so much as for other English teachers, who-please remember-decide which book learners have to buy. Publishers consistently see to it that teachers find same terms and rules they have come to expect through force of long tradition. Consequently, textbook seems obvious and easy to teachers, who can't understand why their students have so much trouble. In reality, textbooks have failed to develop and present a clear and accessible mode of discourse for naive learner. Instead, they waver between two equally unhelpful tactics. Either grammatical terms are defined by content, in which case definitions are unworkably vague, or terms are defined by structure, in which case definitions are unmanageably technical. Picture yourself as a naive student with no idea what subject and predicate mean. Would it solve your problem to be told that the subject tells who or what sentence is about, and predicate tells something about subject? Or, would it help you if someone said that the subject is a noun phrase whose head noun governs finite verb of predicate? Such definitions work only in practice when you have to find parts of a real sentence if you already know your grammar beforehand-precisely case with teachers, not learners.