Grammar for Young Learners. Gordon Lewis

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What is grammar to you?

      Grammar is certainly one of the most controversial areas of language teaching. In fact, your approach to grammar will in many ways determine your position on communicative language teaching, task-based learning, lexical grammar, and any other of the many methodologies and approaches in the world of language teaching.

      Maybe you’ve never stopped to think about grammar much. Before you continue reading this introduction, do the following activity (either for yourself or with colleagues). Tick the statements which best represent your own beliefs about grammar in English language learning. If you can’t find anything that suits you, think about your own opinion or belief.

      My experience is …

      

Children love grammar! They are keen to follow rules, enjoy doing grammar exercises and coming up with the correct answer.

      

Children understand grammar if you don’t bother them with abstract rules.

      

Children don’t like grammar. They get bored because it’s hard to understand.

      

Very young learners don’t need explicit grammar; older young learners do.

      

My students expect me to teach grammar because they (or their parents) are convinced it is of value to them.

      

It takes children a long time to understand grammar. I notice it can take years sometimes, so children have to keep on repeating what I teach them, and I need to keep on explaining it.

      

It’s OK to make mistakes, because applying grammar without errors is a long process that most people will never achieve.

      

If there is a grammar point I want to deal with, I just make sure I use it in everything I say or do. I don’t teach explicit grammar.

      

I find it hard to explain grammar, because my grammar is not perfect either. So, I avoid it.

      

I feel comfortable teaching grammar to my young learners – it gives me something to hold on to, because it tells my students that certain things work in certain ways.

      

I always focus on both form and meaning – the one can’t exist without the other.

The grammar continuum

      For many teachers, grammar is the backbone of all language learning. ‘Structure’, as it is often called, is perceived as the core thread of the language syllabus and, indeed, the majority of school curricula and the majority of course books are designed according to grammatical criteria.

      At the other end of the grammar spectrum, a huge population of communicative language teachers oppose the explicit teaching of grammar. They object to isolating grammar as a system within a system. For many who adhere to the notion of communicative language teaching with a capital ‘C’, grammar should be learnt intuitively through context; grammar should be inferred through meaning and task.