Why do we *really* teach grammar to those who want to learn a language?
Pardon my subject transfer over to sports. I love sports. Sports are easy to see, diagnose and clearly separate issues and outcomes.
In sports you have two divisions - recreation is for participation and competition is for challenges. In sports you never mix recreation and competition sports programs.
Teaching English methodologies have never been clearly divided into the two divisions of competition and recreation. There are English teachers who still try to teach retired travelers the same way as hyper-active 20 something's trying to get a perfect TOEFL to enter the Harvard MBA program.
In competitive basketball you can equate dribbling, passing and shooting to the English parts of speech. In competitive basketball you can equate "plays construction and strategy" to English grammar.
In competitive sports the winning coaches are praised. Winning Coaches are praised about superior skills instruction, strategy, team work, cooperation, execution, used strengths of individual players in a team concept etc. etc. Winning coaches use both dribbling, passing and shooting skills and plays construction and strategy to create superior performances.
When has this ever been done in Teaching English?
I would like to see all the we don't need grammar promoters show us how many of their students entered Harvard. How many of their students easily landed their first job, received the raise and were promoted.
The recreational teaching English as a second language methodologies are great for kids, leisure, non-credit and general interest programs. In the competitive world of finding jobs, entering competitive university programs and having a future using the recreational English teaching methodologies will just make your student a loser.
Why do I really teach grammar?
I want to give my competitive students every skill available.
******
Comments:
ESL In Canada gave a reason for teaching grammar.
These are excellent points. I also teach grammar so my student says, "That vending machine is broken," rather than "You broke the vending machine" when trying to be helpful to a stranger. Control over grammar is necessary to make oneself clear in everyday situations that a misunderstanding may make unintentionally awkward or, even worse, dangerous.
Rich Flierl
New York
**********
Great post...great analogy!
Regards,
Marianne Hsu Santelli
***********
I think there are lots of different points here connected with grammar.
There is the academic question of how effective overt grammar teaching is in helping students acquire grammar. Whether other methods are better, efficient etc.
If we divide teachers into two camps, those for and against teaching grammar, it would appear that each side assumes certain beliefs of the other camp. Those who don't believe in teaching grammar overtly are seen by the other camp to be wanting to deprive their students in some way and those who are for overt grammar teaching are seen by those in the other camp as adherents of some ancient monastic system.
Having been in the teaching of English game for nearly three decades and having used and seen a number of methodologies, I can't really say that any of the methods I used actually failed to teach English to my students. One could say certain methodologies are more boring (repetitive), enjoyable or useful in certain circumstances, but by and large they all achieved their broad aim.
I think English, in comparison with many European languages, at least, is unique in that there are no declensions and very little case to be learnt. This allows in some ways for it to be taught at some early stages in a quasi-grammarless way. If the adherents of 'grammarless' teaching methods were to teach other languages in the same way they would reach the point where their students were just producing non-sense since there would be little sense of who is doing what to whom or when, since so much meaning is conveyed by those boring verb endings and noun endings in languages which are analytical (?).
Having learnt three foreign languages, I would feel very insecure in learning a language without grammar input. There is a certain kind of English native speaker who boldly goes abroad and sticks foreign words together cocktail fashion and succeeds in making himself understood amongst giggles. I've had very few students who have the same approach to learning English. Many want to put off communication until they have mastered the grammar. I can't imagine any academic student (and who needs English badly) being pleased with a course based on passive acquisition of grammatical phenomena.
It would be interesting to hear what teachers' students' ideas about grammar
are.
Michael Hughes,
Greece
Blog URL
http://teachenglishblog.blogspot.com/
