Siete malas razones para enseñar gramática y dos buenas

Seven bad reasons for teaching grammar -and two good ones

(In Methodology in Language Teaching, ed. Richards and Renandya, CUP 2002, pp.148–152)

Seven bad reasons

1.- Because it's there

It is important to choose grammar points relevant to our students' needs, rather than blindly going through the syllabus from left to right. This is an idea in which most of the teachers have. According to this idea, Chen Zen, a very important teacher of English in China, wrote in 2002, that the lack of appropriate teaching materials, as books, is one of the most important difficulties while learning a foreign language as English. He says that the books are too limited to satisfy the students' levels and demands. While most of the books are focused in grammar, we realized that we have to teach grammar because, as this point says: It is there, and since books are a link that can't be neglected in the teaching-learning process, we can't leave them behind.

2.- It's tidy

Learning grammar is a lot simpler than learning a language because it is tidy, the student doesn't have to deal with the pronunciation of the words. Grammar can be easily in exercises to help students to learn. Also, in my experience, I thing that learning the grammar of a foreign language with exercises, can help to improve your knowledge about your own mother tongue, you make an impressive meta cognitive process in which you realize differences and similarities between your mother tongue and the foreign language and your learning, instead of stay there like in the black box, turns to be a significative learning.

3.- It's testable

Students like tests, educational authorities love test, and good news, grammar tests are relatively simples because they usually are standardized tests. We use them as a sheer administrative requirement. So, why not using them to evaluate our students' grammar? We can easily teach what is going to be tested, and test what was taught. This idea is global, not only in the grammatical field. Nowadays, you need to make a test for everything. Our students are in a world wide competition against students from every corner of this planet, to show they are good enough to turn into productive adults. So, if we teach grammar and test it, we will help them to learn the language and to prepare for international standardized tests as PISA.

4.- Grammar as a security blanket

Grammar rules gives the feeling that students can be understood, control the situations and understand. It improves their self confidence enough to turn grammar into a security blanket that can lead students to focus in other aspects (equally important) of the language. And considering that English is the global language, it is important that they increase their self confidence while communicating in this language. Supporting this idea of the English importance, David Graddol, a British linguist, notes that in many parts of the world, English is regarded as a basic skill which children learn at an early age so they can study other subjects in English. So, nowadays, we can say that to have a proficient domain in English it's vital if you want to success, and this proficient domain will only be achieved if you practice the language, and to practice the language you have to have self confidence, and to have self confidence you have to have a very good level ok grammar knowledge.

5.- It formed my character

When you are a teacher, most of the times, you teach your students what you learned, the way you learned it. So, I share this idea with the author. Since I spent my three years of secondary school learning grammar because it matter a good deal and the syllabus was focused in grammar, and my teachers thought that it was important to incorporate in the classes, because that is the way their teachers did it. These kind of costumes hardly change. We, as humans, tend to copy to other humans, because that is the way we achieve our first -and probably most important, learnings. And I think that our students will perceive grammar as a very important element of a language, because they are being taught in this way.

...