I've done another book review for tefl.net, which you can now find online. This time, I've faced up to my demons and read a grammar book. Find out how I did by following the link below:
http://edition.tefl.net/reviews/esl-grammar/my-grammar-and-i/#more-5065
There's no comments function on that page, so any feedback would be gratefully received here. Thanks.
Good review; the fact that humour is present in a grammar handbook is just a reason to give it a try.
ReplyDeleteI belong to the first group of teachers you mention and, as you said, I've been thoroughly trained into grammar - not just English grammar, but Spanish grammar and General Linguistics too. So, in a way, I ended up feeling something close to affection for this discipline - you have to hang on to something you can master if, as it was my case, you plunge into Heathrow madness for the first time to realize that, when it comes to understand oral messages, being at a Chinese airport wouldn't have made any difference.
I don't want my students to end up like this and, as I'm aware of my limitations as a non native teacher, I try to put them in contact with speakers other than me - native, whenever possible -, as often as I can.
However, in my opinion, grammar should be acknowledged due value, not only as a aid to fix and store new language input properly, but as a means to strengthen abstract thinking. I'm not talking about prescriptive grammar - that is, a set of imposed rules that sometimes can hardly reflect how language is used in real life; but, grammar as the description of a language at a particular point in time. Grammar shouldn't be a value judging field and should only comply with the organization and description of all rules and elements that make up a language. That is the only way it works, or at least, the way it worked for me.
@pacogascon