Is English Language Learning Should Precede Grammar?
Knowing English grammar is essential because it is what allows you to construct clear and correct sentences. Having good grammar in English is also a real advantage for being able to express you fluently and to convey your ideas and intentions to your speakers or audience.
It is wrong to suppose that grammar must be learnt by heart before the study of language is taken up. To suppose that the learning and repetition of grammar rules and vast lists of their exceptions must precede speech and writing, is every bit as absurd as to suppose that the learning and repetition of hygienic rules and lists of food values must precede meals…… Teach a child grammar rules when the time comes, but don`t keeps him without speech and composition until he has learnt them….. The time comes to teach him grammar rules after he has been given a good many of the examples with which they deal. It is rather foolish to hire a gardener if you have no flowers for them to look after, to build yourself store rooms for different kinds of grain to put in them if you have no grain, or to buy a saw if you have no wood to cut.
No one in pre-historic times sat down and wrote out set of rules for a language, then made language obey the rules. The rules were made by the language and followed it.
Let them follow it in our teaching them. By the study of a language we have observed certain tendencies certain customs and certain laws and have collected and modified those tendencies, customs and laws, and called the result, the grammar of the language.
Let us then, in teaching, follow the natural process and teach the language first and then notice its tendencies, customs and laws: and so teach grammar.
Hence it is advisable the teaching of grammar only when the children have gained sufficient command over the English language. If we start with the teaching of grammar from the very beginning we are likely to kill their enthusiasm and love for the new language because the concepts of grammar are abstract to them.
It requires a more mature intelligence to grasp these abstract notions. Instead of making things easy grammar makes it doubly difficult for the students to learn the English language.
Lamborn says, “There may be a case for the teaching of grammar to adult students. There is none for teaching it to children under fourteen.”
The study of grammar can be profitable only when sufficient has been acquired in the language of itself.
However, since I have been teaching a foreign language, in this case English. I have seen this practice as a possibility of knowing and recognizing the language beyond a system of grammatical rules. I thus open up the possibility for children to have access to quality education which allows them to develop language skills in addition to their mother tongue, which emphasis on their abilities. So, as a matter of principle, there should be no teaching grammar at the early stage of teaching.
The teacher can profitably make of use of the students` knowledge of grammar in the mother tongue.
By the time he joins the high school in the VI class, he has been given in his mother tongue the idea of noun, pronoun, adjective and verb, etc. by giving the English equivalent terms the teacher can bring home to him the significance of those terms. Similarly, at the seconder stage the teacher can teach him the tenses by contrast with the mother tongue expressions.
All along an effort should be made note to let grammar appear to be a separate subject of study. It should be incidentally in the course of teaching the text or conducting an oral lesson that the teacher should draw the attention of the students to a certain point in grammar.
In a nutshell, Grammar should be a subsequent subject of study and not a prior acquisition. Basic ability in expression, both oral and written, should come first and grammar afterwards.
