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[EnglishLanguage 3592] Re: Working withlearners withlimitedliteracy

Joan

owlhouse at wwt.net
Mon Jan 26 20:00:21 EST 2009


On the issue of teaching grammar...

I'm for it!

And, in general, the students are for it - if they're not Korean or Japanese or come from an education that has rammed grammar down their throats at the expense of communicative ability. Not to say that grammar is not communicative - it definitely is, it definitely is more than form, it definitely carries meaning, and our students need to know that and how to get their meaning across. I am skeptical that most people will intuit grammatical forms if they receive adequate input. I have worked with immigrant and refugee high school students - some of whom have lived their entire lives in the U.S. and gone through the school system every step of the way - and are still speaking some interlanguage that is neither English nor their native language, but some conglomeration of rules that they intuited absolutely incorrectly. At that point, it's nearly impossible for them to go back and get it right.

I'm not advocating a heavy form-based approach, but definitely some grammar.

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