conclusion would be incorrect, however. There are many legitimate reasons for
teaching grammar. One of the more important is related to the fact that we use
language to define ourselves and the world around us. Anything so important
deserves study. In addition, knowledge of grammardoesplay a role in writing.
It provides information about form and function that enables students to study
language and how we communicate. When teachers and students share a com-
mon vocabulary, discussions of writing can be more efficient and clear.Thus,
grammar itself does not lead to better writing, but grammar study gives us tools
that allow for more effective teaching of writing.
Another answer—less palatable, perhaps—is that grammar is inherently in-
teresting and intellectually challenging, at least when it is taught as an interest-
ing subject. Many things are worth doing simply because they are hard. Finally,
a knowledge of grammar has been deemed a characteristic of well-educated
people throughout Western history. As Hirsch (1988) convincingly argued,
there are certain things worth knowing.
Best Practices
The real question is not why we teach grammar, but how. We saw in the previ-
ous sections that native speakers have internalized the grammar of English.
They may not know grammar terminology, but they are able to produce gram-
matical utterances and recognize ungrammatical ones with great consistency.
Indeed, they rarely produce ungrammatical sentences. What they lack is mas-
tery of the usage conventions that govern Standard and formal Standard Eng-
lish, which accounts for most of the errors we find in student writing. The
typical language arts curriculum, however, ignores the native understanding of
grammatical patterns and aims to teach students as though they are learning a
foreign language. Usage is seldom addressed. This approach is at odds with the
basic educational principle of building on what students already know, but it
nevertheless remains the most widely used in our public schools. To make mat-
ters worse, this approach usually insists on grammar study without a context.
There are few attempts to relate grammar to the lives of students outside the
classroom, few attempts to encourage students to see grammar in the communi-
cation that they engage in on a daily basis.
How, then, are we to teach grammar effectively? What constitutes best prac-
tices? I would suggest that in an ideal world, we would teach grammar in our
public schools for its own sake, as an independent and inherently interesting
subject. One of the more effective ways to do so would be to focus on the socio-
logical and psychological dimensions of grammar and language, using gram-
TEACHING GRAMMAR 41