Teaching grammar without grammar

[Kirsten Middeke]

Any comments?

[Marina Gutierrez Riera]

In my opinion, teaching grammar without knowing grammar, which is what I understand that you are asking, makes no sense at all. Would you teach someone how to swim without being able to swim?. At the end of it, you may be able to float up in the water through some kind of moves but they will never be as precise as if you actually knew how to swim. I believe it is the same with grammar. Even though you may be able to learn some in your daily life, if you have never been taught grammar or you are planning to teach without knowing it, you are lacking a great and important piece of the language.

[Kirsten Middeke]

The phrase is from a poster that announced a talk, it was about teaching grammar without mentioning grammar.
You’re perfectly right, of course, it’s impossible to teach (or to use) language without grammar. But YouTube has many videos with titles like “Learn English without grammar”, and many of my own former students of German said things like “Ich suche einen Konversationskurs, ich möchte lieber ohne Grammatik Deutsch lernen.” So my question is: how can we teach grammar without talking about grammar? 🙂

[Mascha Paul]

Well, I would say it is possible to teach grammar without talking about grammar. Most people learn a language (English) just by hearing and talking to a native speaker. They native speakers don’t need to mention any grammar rules because by time a person will get used to the correct use of the language. Of course it is more helpful to learn and understand the rules of grammar so that you are not just going with the flow while speaking.
In my opinion it is much easier  to learn a language by talking to a native speaker so you get a feeling for a language. And after that I would say it is important to learn grammar rules and to complete your knowledge. That is how I learned English.

[Kirsten Middeke]

It’s possible (and useful) to teach grammar without using grammatical terminology. If you don’t talk about grammar at all, you’re probably not actually teaching. Some schools have language assistants to offer their expertise as native speakers in addition to the teacher, who does the actual teaching. Be careful not to eliminate your own (prospective) jobs by claiming that we don’t actually need people who are able to offer explicit instruction in the language. If you just hope that people are going to pick it up themselves, what should we pay you for? 🙂
I agree that authentic input is important, but learners of a language as a second language differ from children acquiring their first language in that they already speak a language, so they already have linguistic habits that need to be un-learned to a certain extent, and in that they have less time because they have a lot to do besides learning the language. That’s why we do want to give people explicit instruction. A lot can be done to help them learn more effectively.

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