grammar has held in Western education since the days of Plato and Aristotle so
that they can better understand and appreciate why we expect students to learn
something about the English language.
Chapter Two. Chapter 2 explores various approaches to teaching gram-
mar, and in many respects it is central to developing an effective classroom
methodology. There are many different ways to teach grammar, and this chap-
ter examines the most common, assessing their strengths and weaknesses with
the aim of identifying best practices.
Central to this chapter is the section on grammar and writing. Most teachers
and many textbooks, such as Weaver’s (1996)Teaching Grammar in Context
and Noden’s (1999)Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach
Writing,advocate teaching grammar in the context of writing. However, few
recognize the difficulties and faulty assumptions inherent in this approach as it
usually is applied. Emphasizing the linguistic perspective that informs the en-
tire book, this section makes an important distinction betweengrammarand
usage, explaining why most of the sentence errors we see in student writing are
not problems of grammar but rather problems of usage. An important feature of
The Teacher’s Grammar Bookare theUsage Notesthat appear at key points to
explain a wide range of common usage problems. Finally, the chapter examines
existing research and explores the most pedagogically sound ways to link
grammar and writing.
Chapter Three. Although chapter 2 is important for every English/lan-
guage arts teacher, chapter 3, “Traditional Grammar,” may be even more im-
portant because it provides the foundation for actually teaching grammar. The
subsequent chapters are built on this foundation, and together they will elimi-
nate any lack of confidence readers may have about their knowledge of gram-
mar. The chapter begins by introducing basic grammatical terms and
explaining their role in language study. It does not assume that readers have any
significant knowledge of grammar at all so as to create a comfortable space for
learning. Taking a standard approach, grammar is divided into two categories
of analysis,formandfunction.
Chapter 3 also builds on the grammar/usage distinction by introducing a
fundamental feature of modern language study—appropriateness conditions.
Based in part on Hymes’ (1971) principles of communicative competence, ap-
propriateness conditions contextualize language use and allow students to un-
derstand more thoroughly the factors that make writing different from speech
and that enable us to recognize that the language we use when talking with
friends over pizza and beer will be different from the language we use during a
PREFACE xi