I [heart] Grammar

I love grammar.  Learning French grammar and all its ins and outs was one of my first enjoyable experiences with language.  For me, grammar is fun to think about and fun to teach.  This is going to sound really weird, but sometimes, in the middle of teaching a particularly complicated grammatical point, as I sum up the main idea of what I am trying to explain, I get a sense of the complexity and beauty of the grammar of English and experience a little frisson of joy.

Told you it was going to sound weird.

In some ways this is a great thing, since teaching grammar is one of my duties as an ESL teacher.  When I teach writing, however, even ESL writing, I consciously restrain myself from spending too much time teaching grammar.  If I am teaching a reading class, there is little reason to go into any grammatical explanations.  In an ESL writing class, there is more reason to go into grammar, but the focus of the class still needs to be the writing.  I spend some time discussing grammar in such a class, but there are other concerns that are more important that need to be addressed.  When I begin teaching Basic Skills writing or first year composition, I think I will put grammar even more into the background.

My background is in linguistics, so I am more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist.  I try to teach the language that people actually speak (or write), not some idealized version of English that might never have existed. I think of grammar in a writing class as a rhetorical tool.  Just as it is important to write in a tone that is appropriate to the genre and context, it is also important to write in a grammatical style that is appropriate.  That is not to say that conventions should never be flouted; in fact, making a statement in a unconventional or “nonstandard” voice can be rhetorically powerful.  Such shifts from what  is expected should be intentional, though.  When a shift to something “nonstandard” seems like an error, it dilutes the rhetorical power of the piece of writing.