CHAPTER 2: Putting Grammar to Use

Nancy, an ESL teacher at Hunt Middle School, and Elizabeth, a MATESOL professor at Saint Michael’s College (co-authors of this chapter), were good professional friends. Nancy had graduated from the MATESOL program more than a decade earlier and in the intervening years as a school-based ESL specialist had developed considerable expertise in content-based language and academic literacy instruction. She had also mentored Elizabeth’s student teachers from the College and, as professionals in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), we had spent several coffee dates discussing how best to bridge the gap between language teaching theory and practice. We shared a respect for knowledge about language (KAL), and specifically knowledge about grammar, as central to writing instruction. Both of us were advocates of “grammaring” (Larsen-Freeman, 2003); that is, of understanding the reasons behind grammatical rules. However, when it came to implementing these convictions, we went back to our different instructional settings and followed our different paths.