Back then grammar was all the rage! I mean, of course, in the 1970s and 80s. It certainly formed the way I started teaching. Most lessons I offered (or was asked to offer) were based on a grammar structure, with vocabulary slotted in so that students could make sentences to talk about something. Of course I wrote about it in those days (Harmer 1983, 1987) partly influenced by the amazing after-lunch lectures by the young David Crystal at the University of Reading during my MA year. Week after week he took us through issues in A University Grammar of English (Quirk & Greenbaum 1973) teasing out the ambiguities and the awkwardnesses of describing the complexities of the grammar system.
Later on we had a range of pedagogic grammars for students, notably, of course Practical English Usage (Swan 1980 – and now in a newer edition, 2019) and of course, at a more ‘classroom’ level English Grammar in Use (Murphy 1985, and most recently, 2019) and many practice books, all following in the wake of a book than only some of us still remember (in my case originally published a very long time before I did my first 4-week training course), A Practical English Grammar (Thomson & Martinet 1960). There have been countless other titles too, too numerous to mention, so I hope all those authors will forgive me for not mentioning them if they ever read this!
There were other ways of looking at/dissecting language too, however, from the attention paid to language Functions (Wilkins 1976), to an increasing focus on Lexical English – language-chunk influenced accounts of language – (see for example Lewis1993 , Thornbury 2004, Dellar & Walkley 2017) and more recent discussions have coalesced around ‘Emergent Language’ (see for example Chin & Norrington-Davies 2023) where rather than building teaching programmes around a ladder of (mostly grammar) items teachers are encouraged to deal with language that comes up based on what students want to talk about,. Content and language Integrated Learning (CLIL) eschews a strict grammar progression because the content – rather than that progression – determines what the students need to say (see, for example, Doyle, Hood & Marsh (2012) and Dale .& Tanner (2012)).
I think my point here is that while grammar was a central part of our lives and we talked about it a lot – and grammar books were amongst the most popular titles ever published – it seems to have ceased to be a subject of intense interest and presence and many commentators (but perhaps not ‘chalk-face’ teachers) inveigh against the grammar syllabus and, as we have seen, propose all sorts of alternatives. At least that’s what it feels like. You may want to correct me of course, and that’s fine because that, after all, is the function of blogs rather than books.
And yet, of course, the world of language teaching is dominated by high-stakes testing and however much such tests are becoming more humane and more task- and communication-based they still demand a mostly two-varieties linguistic accuracy (for a short and somewhat polemic account of the basics of, and arguments about assessment see Phakiti & Leung 2024).
You may think that this has been a vey sketchy post, not much more really, than some passing thoughts, and you’d be right, I suppose. After all you’d need a few hundred pages to deal with all this (or maybe a PhD in Linguistics!) let alone studying the latest findings from the computational linguistics that have fed into modern systems, and the current behavior of Artificial Intelligence. But as I start writing methodology again after a time away, the role of grammar and the place it should occupy in teaching is, once again, preoccupying me.
What do you think? How central is English Grammar in your life ( in your professional life)? How much time do you devote to it? How much do you draw your students’ attention to it? What’s the proportion of grammar focus in your lessons compared itch all the other things you (have to) do? I’d love to hear, if you feel like leaving a comment here.
References:
Chin, R & Norrington-Davies, D (2023) Working with Emergent Language. Pavilion Publishing.
Coyle, D Hood, P & Marsh D (2012) CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge University Press.
Dale, L & Tanner, R (2012) CLIL Activities with CD-ROM: A Resource for Subject and Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press and Assessment.
Dellar, H & Walkley, A (2017) Teaching Lexically: Principles and Practice. DELTA Publishing.
Harmer, J (1983) The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.
Harmer, J (1987) Teaching and learning Grammar. Longman.
Lewis, M (1993) The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. 2nd ed. Cengage Learning.
Murphy, R (1985) English Grammar in Use. Cambridge University press and Assessment.
Phakiti , & Leung, C (2024) Assessment for Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press and Assessment.
Quirk, R & Greenbaum, S (1973) A University Grammar of English. Longman.
Thomson, A & Martinet, A (1960) A Practical English Grammar. Oxford University Press.
Jeremy Harmer ELT 
Leave a comment