ABSTRACT
Many teachers (and students) believe grammar to be a linguistic straitjacket. They think that grammar consists of arbitrary rules of a language, to which speakers must adhere or risk the penalty of being misunderstood or of being stigmatized as speaking an inferior or inadequate form of the target language. It is easy to understand why grammar is viewed in this manner. Many of us have felt the despair of receiving a paper back from a language teacher filled with red marks related to the form of what we had written, not to the content that we had worked so hard to express. Also, speaking the standard dialect of a language accurately does provide speakers with access to opportunities they might otherwise be denied. I recall the late Carlos Yorio’s sharing with me his challenge in helping his students, many of whom were New Yorkers and spoke English fluently, learn to speak Standard English accurately so that they would have more options for employment. Indeed, grammar does relate to formal accuracy, and there is a cost to those who fail to adhere to it.
