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Date Posted: 19:47:48 05/02/07 Wed
Author: Clarissa (Task Two)
Subject: Task Two


Teaching Grammar: Is it necessary?

“Grammar is about form and one way to teach form is to give students rules; however, grammar is about, much more than form, and its teaching is ill served if students are simply given rules.”(Larsen-Freeman, 2001). All languages follow grammatical patterns and the awareness of these patterns can help students in the process of learning a language, however, the way many teachers still teach grammar is been highly debated nowadays, since they don’t provide the students the opportunity to learn the language as something meaningful and useful in terms of communication. Teaching grammar is important, however, the focus should be communication, and not only the teaching of meaningless forms and rules.
“Knowing how to build and use certain structures makes it possible to communicate common types of meaning successfully. Without these structures, it is difficult to make comprehensible sentences.” (Swan, 2002) That is, teaching grammar is important in the process of learning the language as a tool to communication, since it allows the students to be comprehensible and convey meaning through the target language. Besides that, knowing some grammatical rules allows the students to think and discuss about the language, being able to become not only a passive receiver of the language, but an active agent in the communication process.
In order to achieve better results in the process of teaching grammar, teachers can use different techniques for the students to find grammar most interesting and meaningful. One of them is to apply authentic texts, which are closer to their reality and consequently are more meaningful to them. Although many teachers maintain that the textbook is enough in providing the students the input they need to learn the language, many times this material is so far from their reality that they are not able to use the language, the grammar points they were exposed to, in a real situation, in their real life. They can’t find a tangible meaning in the learning of that specific grammar rule and, therefore, the teaching becomes useless.
In conclusion, the teaching of grammar is essential and can be really useful to students if its focus is to provide communication through meaningful activities and situations. If the focus is mainly on form, the grammar points are explained in situations that are not contextualized and far from students’ realities, it can become something useless, completely unnecessary.

Larsen-Freeman, D. 2001. Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring. Boston, MA: Heile & Heinle.
Swan, M. in Richards, J. & Renandya, W. (Eds) Methodology in language teaching. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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