Oh, How We All Love Grammar.

In the readings for this week one of the things that stood out to me was the explanation of grammar to our ESL students. In our HDB text, Brown stressed that as teachers we should keep the focus off of grammar and we should focus on more communicative practices instead (with a few exceptions of course). From my experiences in my own L2 I've noticed that most of my teachers have followed this advice. Those classes were aimed at the beginning levels of German (Novice low to Novice high from Ch.7) and that maybe the most important reason why my L2 teachers never taught a lot of grammar. But when they did use it, it was always used to show us the important differences between English and German sentence structures. Of course there was always the one student in each of my classes who couldn't get enough of this, for what reason I could never comprehend, but even this minimalistic approach to grammar got slightly confusing to many of the students when it was taken further than just sentence structures. Proof, I guess, of the relative unimportance of too much grammatical explanation.

One difference though between these classes in my L2 and the ones that I will most likely be teaching is that in my classes we were learning from non-native speakers (except for one class in about six years) and so most of the instruction was in English instead of German. This allowed for more explanation of grammar, but I honestly don't think it contributed much more to my learning experience. It actually may have detracted from it. Since the lessons were mostly in English, it made it hard to fully grasp the new language and its grammar. I know that in my High School the most proficient L2 speakers were in the Spanish classes and coincidentally the teacher was a native speaker and (much more importantly) most of the classes were taught in Spanish with minimal grammar, which was not translated into English for easier digestion. Even in all my years of English study there was only one year (8th grade, age 13) when we discussed English grammar extensively and it wasn't even the main focus of that year, vocabulary was. It's not that grammar isn't important, it's just that I think English (and other language) grammatical structures should be internalized by the student rather than memorized. Once they become proficient at the language (as Brown says) then the students can benefit more from grammatical instruction because they already intuitively know what is and isn't correct. Then conscious awareness of grammar is a more useful and realistic goal.