Grammar Teaching: Does It Help Learn a Second Language?

After the publication of the Braddock Report in 1963, an intense debate broke out regarding the role of traditional grammar teaching in the improvement of learners’ language skills and the debate continued for several decades.

Grammar Teaching: Does It Help Learn a Second Language? 

Grammar Teaching: Does It Help Learn a Second Language? 

After the publication of the Braddock Report in 1963, an intense debate broke out regarding the role of traditional grammar teaching in the improvement of learners’ language skills and the debate continued for several decades. It was concluded in the report that far from improving learners’ second language skills, grammar teaching had a negligible or even a harmful effect on language learners. So began the war against the teaching of grammar in language learning classrooms. First setting a firm foot in the US, then spreading to the rest of the developing world much inspired by anything fancy in the American way.  

David Mulroy, a professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee recounted several real-life incidents related to the contemporary situation in grammar teaching and lamented the status quo in his book The War Against Grammar published in 2003. Mulroy remembered how a professor of English from Ball State University reported that his students thought the passive voice was used in sentences in which the subjects did not exert themselves. They classified, to the professor’s utter dismay, sentences or expressions that spoke of somebody else’s experiences as passive voice. By definition, then, a sentence like ‘I feel your pain’ would be classified by them as an example of passive voice.  

Recent studies, however, show that the inferences and conclusions in the Braddock Report were drawn from incorrect and misconstrued data. Contrariwise, instances of significant improvement in learners’ language skills after instructions in formal grammar have been widely reported in studies conducted in various parts of the world. Emphasizing the importance of grammar teaching, Mulroy states, “sentences always have and always will consist of clauses with subjects and predicates and of words that fall into classes fairly well described as verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections”. It is further claimed that there is a distinct advantage accrued to the individuals with adequate knowledge of these concepts in situations where the use of language is involved, over those without the knowledge. 

The climate has surely changed in academia because of such studies leading to random rollbacks to the old way of grammar teaching. Clearing the clouds of doubt willfully spread by its detractors. Today, the real issue confronting teachers and instructors is not about solving the dilemma of teaching or not teaching grammar, but about deciding the components and the methods of grammar teaching.

Another important debate in recent studies on grammar teaching has been the possibility or otherwise of the acceleration of the natural learning of grammar through instruction. Since Noam Chomsky’s observation in his book Language and Mind published in 1968 that native English speakers continued to be in the process of acquiring certain grammatical structures in English well into their adolescence, the debate has been taken up using multiple perspectives.  

Manfred Pienemann, the proponent of the teachability hypothesis, observed in a study reported in 1984 that language learners receiving grammar instruction progressed through the learning stages quicker, after two weeks, than an untutored group in which the normal learning progress took several months. He very convincingly provided evidence for the efficacy of grammar teaching.  

Additionally, some studies concentrating on comparisons between the effect of grammar instructions on helping learners acquire the proper use of grammatical concepts and the effects of the absence of such instructions proved the positive value of form-focused instructions for the improvement of learners’ accuracy over instructional approaches without such focus on forms. 

But the need for fundamental changes in the field has also been emphasized. Presenting grammar teaching as a transformative agent in language teaching workshops, it has been observed that there is a need to bring in changes in the instructional methods and approaches in grammar teaching. Since the traditional grammar instructions, as outlined in official textbooks, are complicated, cumbersome, and illogical, they should be completely replaced by the concept of a newly designed and psychologically viable useful grammar. 

Several ways have also been suggested for the construction of such useful grammar and it has been broadly defined as any instructional technique involving the attention of the learner to some specific grammatical form. These instructional techniques are designed in such a way that the quick internalization of the concerned grammatical forms by the learners is enabled by the assistance provided to the learners’ metalinguistic processing in the comprehension and/or production of these forms. 

The earlier grammar teaching begins the better. As was observed in the 1673 edition of Lily’s Grammar, stating the truth of the natural advantage of youth in learning grammar, 

“Grammar, as she is a severe mistress, is also a coy one and hardly admits of any courtship but of the youthful votary.” 

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