The Importance Of Grammar In English

Let me first step back to a point I brought up in my summary. Although I agree with the need for grammar in the language classroom, I feel the evidence Nan cited was not helpful to her argument. Obviously, someone who has taken a course in any subject will do better on an exam than those who have not been exposed to the material that rigorous fashion. In my experience, as a student in the language classroom, tests consisted of questions that can be answered by changing the order of the original sentence and adding a word off that week 's vocabulary list. It might have helped people progress further in the English language, but that is another obvious truth. Learning grammar is like having a cheat sheet with you; once you understand where all

Much of what we are doing in this grammar class is helping me as a writer. There is a certain power in understanding the way something works, and being aware of the rules means we can find ways to bend them without breaking. To avoid confusion, I would never try to force English rules into the minds of unsuspecting brains. The Linguistic mode is only for advanced instruction. I compare it to the material you learn while progressing through a Biology degree. The first few courses you take are an overview to get you situated into the realm of the science, but the further you dive into the material the more specific and detail-oriented your lessons become. To start with the small stuff would confuse students because they have no view of the larger picture. Language should be viewed with the same

I feel that most would agree, but that idea is not always welcome in the classroom. There is definitely a measurable amount of learning to be done in courses that present language as the set of rules because once a student understands structure they can treat speaking or writing like an equation. The problem comes when those students enter the real world and experience the natural way people speak. Workers communicate in rigorous and controlled fashions in a lot of places, like hospitals or business offices, but people communicate through stories that do not always follow the rules. Reality needs people who can understand and respond with similar experiences. After they are comfortable with that, they can go on to learn why the rules dictate that a certain punctuation should signal a pause or the end of a