10/25

I have a lot of opinions about the way grammar should be taught, because personally, I wish I was taught differently. I was taught in a way where grammar instruction was explicit and we covered a new structure each week and then we took a test on it. It was simply memorization and teaching to the test. Learning this way made it EXTREMELY difficult when I was presented in real world situations. I struggle a lot in the area of fluency and communication with native speakers, but I can do the grammar perfectly.


Because of my personal experience, I feel very strongly about how grammar should be taught. When I read the quote in the book on page 149 "Learning grammar is a lot simpler than learning a language", I agreed completely. Grammar should not be the only area that a language learner practices, because they are still going to have a very difficult time communicating in the real world. I wish that my teachers would have presented our lessons with more task work. I do think that some explicit grammar instruction is necessary to have a basic understanding of the language, but after that is taught I think there should be a lot of focus on task work and grammar lessons can be incorporated into that. Obviously, some people are learning the language for different purposes so there might be cases of people that need more grammar instruction than others, but I still feel that including grammar lessons into more task focused instruction is the best way to go about teaching it. Learners will focus less on using every correct structure and more on getting the point across and communicating effectively with the native speakers.