ABSTRACT
We begin this chapter with this quotation for a couple of reasons. By now you’ve gotten the message that teaching grammar in isolation doesn’t work, a conclusion supported by almost all the existing research on the subject. Yet, as Smagorinsky notes above, this fact hasn’t consigned this practice to the educational museum. Both Smagorinsky (2008) and Weaver (1996) ponder the odd staying power of traditional grammar instruction; rather than repeating their insights, we refer you to their cogent and helpful discussions. For our purposes here, it’s enough to know that worksheets, drills, and conventional textbook approaches to language learning are pretty much a dead end. We’ve also mentioned in several places that you shouldn’t use the grammar approaches in Chapter 4 as a workbook or a handy set of ready-to-go lessons for students, and we mean it. Even if students were to find such work marginally more interesting than conventional grammar drills, without an integrated connection to the other work in an English course, it’s unlikely to make a difference in their language use. A gussied-up, funny, or engaging-but-still-stand-alone grammar lesson is little more than a curiosity shop oddity: a diversion that might be interesting or worthy of attention but is ultimately insubstantial and easily forgotten.
