This is the best article I’ve read so far in our SLA class: incredibly clear, concise, engaging… and on a topic so potentially deadly, no less. At the same time, the author didn’t compromise her academic integrity.

She begins with a survey of definitions of grammar, and then presents the following as a working definition for the article:

“Grammar is that dimension of the language system that is concerned with words and how they can be combined in various ways.”

She goes on to compare pedagogical to theoretical grammar, examines the four primary approaches to its study, and suggests implications for the language teacher.

“The teacher is the interface between linguistic theory and the learner,” she concludes. While we don’t need a linguist’s knowledge of the subject, we do need to have a solid grounding in theoretical approaches. “A pedagogical grammar is often a simplified version of a more theoretical grammar… the result of a process of filtering and interpretation at different levels” from descriptive or theoretical linguist to applied or educational linguist to teacher-educator or syllabus writer to textbook writer and teacher.

That was interesting to me because it helped me conceptualize how much formal grammar a teacher needs to know. When thinking about teaching, one thing that genuinely panics me is that I have forgotten the traditional grammar I used to know, and fear I need to learn it anew — and quickly. While I do need to learn it anew, I’ll be learning something different: not simply the grammar taught in my era, but a subset that includes it, along with newer approaches. Still daunting, but differently so.

“Grammar is at the heart of language teaching.”

I guess I suspected that, but to have it stated so plainly is enlightening. Here is why we need to know it:

• Identifying students’ needs
• Developing appropriate programs
• Responding to student questions
• Assessing students’ language
• Understanding influences of mother tongue on L2
• Evaluating, selecting and developing teaching materials

She presents a really good and clear description of the history of the study of grammar, which I didn’t realize the ancient Greeks like Aristotle were already analyzing. From Halliday (1977): “[T]he Stoics were the earliest scholars explicitly to separate linguistics from philosophy, and grammar with logic.” I’d never even realized they’d been connected.

Here is a brief outline of the four grammar paradigms she presents:

Traditional

• Began with Latin
• Mental gymnastics
• Focus on writing and accuracy
• Sentences divided into parts of speech for parsing and analyzing.
• Grammar-translation method (or classical method) sprung from this (and is still used in many countries today
• Not based on any theory
• Taught in L1

Structural

• Began in 1930s
• Patterns of language use rather than idealized set of rules
• Speech primary; analyzed sound system
• Parts of speech defined not by “meaning” but where they are in the sentence
• Origins in anthropology
• “Slot and filler” and substitution table exercises
• Discourages use of L1 and explanation of rules
• Habit-formation exercises (audiolingualism)

Transformational Generative

• Chomsky: deep structure rather than surface features
• Underlying rules rather than what has been observed
• Innate mental phenomenon
• Transformations
• Learn = active, creative processor of language, not only mimicking sounds and structures
• Chomsky said no point in teaching explicit rules
• Krashen said need comprehensible, meaningful input
• Much criticized

Functional