Chapter 7: Linguistic and Grammatical Knowledge Development Through Text

Language is a powerful tool for sharing information, acquiring knowledge, and building relationships with others (Young & Fitzgerald, 2006). As teachers, we guide students to use language in constructing coherent written texts or spoken dialogue for academic tasks, which requires explicit grammar teaching. But sometimes, a focus solely on grammar is not enough.

In the snapshot below, a teacher is trying to elicit from students the correct form of a question. What understandings of grammar foreground the discussion?

Grammar teaching should provide students with opportunities to engage and practice language (de Oliveira & Schleppegrell, 2015). The teacher initiates this discussion with the goal to correct the students’ sentence constructions but ends up simply telling them the correct features by using traditional grammar terms (e.g., subject, verb, object). Any elaboration surrounding the function or meaning of the different terms is not part of the discussion. The teacher emphasizes rules for correctness, supporting the perspective that grammar is a set of static or fixed rules. Rather, emphasis could have been placed on the meaning of students’ original sentence constructions. While teachers should respond to students’ mistakes and teach grammar rules, these aspects should not constitute the most important part of grammar teaching. It is more important to encourage students to discover ways to make meaning using grammar and then become familiar with the patterns of grammar used in connection to the context and the intended purpose. Thus, knowing the grammar rules is only one part of understanding how to effectively use language.