Many learners of English don’t like or even hate working on Grammar. This can even happen to teachers! However, there are many opinions putting grammar in the foreground in language learning, here are some of them:
1. You need to learn words, phrases, structures, etc for production; your knowledge of grammar will provide you with the means to generate a potentially enormous number of original sentences.
2. Intelligibility and correctness: take a look at this sentence: “Last Monday night I was boring in my house”, well… you might guess the message, though with difficulty…. you have also spotted a few grammar mistakes there; as you can see, this example leads to ambiguity and needs to be grammatically improved to convey its real meaning. Listeners/readers can have a hard time trying to understand ungrammatical English. Besides, ungrammatical communication can lead to important grades of confusion…
Mind you! native speakers do make grammar mistakes as well…
Grammar allows greater subtlety of meaning. There comes a point where simply stringing words and phrases fails to communicate, particularly in the case of written language, which needs to be more explicit than spoken language.
3. You need to learn grammar in order to progress, so that your linguistic competence does not fossilise. Besides, learning how to produce language properly and accurately is motivating for students who want to progress towards a proficiency level.
4. Grammar is a solid base for further practical learning. Students with a good linguistic knowledge are aware of certain features of the talk which enable a better comprehension as well as a more fluent production.
5. Native speakers often make grammar mistakes, however they make different types of mistakes. Read this article for more information: click. Did you know that from all US Presidents so far, George W. Bush had the lowest level range of grammar and vocabulary? and Abraham Lincoln the highest?
Let’s reflect then on what we’ve just read: What do you think? Do you agree with me on the importance of having a good grammar range? Do you remember Tarzan? What a great character! A great swimmer too…., but his grammar knowledge was pretty basic, wasn’t it? He got by, but…. well… we don’t want to be Tarzans, do we?…. Then, we better get down to work on our grammar, and we’ll easily and quickly get better…. even much better than ‘funny’ George W. Bush ….
Now, you may want to click on the links below for some fun and funny links for grammar mistakes:
Some of the most amusing misuses of the English language
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