Seven Bad Reasons for Teaching Grammar－and Two Good Ones

By Michael Swan
Summary
Grammar is important but most of the time people probably teach too much of it. Swan thinks we can identify at least seven reasons for this.
Seven bad reasons
1. Because it's there
Teachers think because it’s there so it has to be taught. But the grammar points in the course book may not all be equally important for particular students because the book may have been designed for students with different purposes and in different environments. A famous experiment shows that nonnative teachers for English often regard grammar errors as more serious problems which often trouble native non-teachers.
2. It's tidy
Grammar looks tidy and is relatively teachable. Grammar can be presented as a limited series of tidy things which students can learn, apply in exercises, and tick off one by one. Learning grammar is a lot simpler than learning a language.
3. It's testable
It’s hard to value your own progress in a foreign language and a good test can tell you how you are doing. On the other hand, grammar tests are relatively simple so grammar is often used as a test and because of washback effect of testing, this adds to pressure to teach it.
4. Grammar as a security blanket
In the convoluted landscape of a foreign language, grammar rules gave students the feeling they can understand and control what’s going on. However, the security blanket aspect can lead students and teachers to concentrate on grammar to the detriment of other aspect of the language.
5. It made me who I am
If you have struggled to learn something, you feel it must be important. Many foreign language teachers spent a good deal of time when younger learning about grammar. They feel these things matter a good deal. In this way, the tendency of an earlier generation to overvalue grammar can be perpetuated.
6. You have to teach the whole lesson
People often think all of grammar should be learnt if it is to work properly, but it is more realistic to regard grammar as an accumulation of different elements. We should teach selected subsystems, asking for each: 1. How much of this should students know already from their native language? 2. How much of the rest is important? 3. How much of that have we got time for? To try to teach the whole system is to ignore these three questions.
7. Power
Some teachers enjoy the power. A teacher nay have a worse accent, less vocabulary and fewer idioms than some of his students but there is always grammar to fall back on. Some teachers feel they win by knowing complicated rules of grammar and terminology.
Two good reasons
1. Comprehensibility
Knowing how to build and use certain structures makes it possible to communicate common types of meaning successfully.
2. Acceptability
In some social context, serious deviance from native-speaker norms can hinder integration and excite prejudice. A person who speaks badly may be considered uneducated and stupid. Students may thus want or need a higher level of grammatical correctness.

Reference
Swan, M. (2001). Seven bad reasons for teaching grammar - and two good ones. In Richards, J. C. and Renandya, W. A. (Eds)Methodology in Language Teaching(pp. 148-152) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.