October 1, 2025 • 34 mins
Grammar—the eternal battleground of language education. Is it the foundation of language learning or a distraction from real communication? In this eye-opening exploration, we cut through decades of misinformation to reveal what research actually shows about grammar's role in language acquisition.
Drawing directly from ACTFL's guiding principles, we examine the surprising truth: "explicit teaching of grammar has little effect on people's language acquisition, comprehension or writing abilities." This doesn't mean grammar is irrelevant, but its place in our classrooms demands serious reconsideration.
You'll discover why "linear grammar"—that neat textbook progression from present to past to future tense—completely misaligns with how our brains actually acquire language. Through fascinating examples (like why third-person "-s" in English is mastered so late despite being "basic"), you'll understand why frequency and meaningful context matter more than grammatical simplicity.
For those who love analyzing language (and as teachers, many of us do!), we offer practical guidance on finding balance. Learn when grammar instruction becomes genuinely useful (hint: it's not at the beginning), how to shift from grammar-driven to communication-centered teaching, and why creating "play time" with language might be the most valuable gift you can give your students.
Whether you're struggling to move beyond traditional grammar-focused instruction or seeking validation for a more communicative approach, this episode provides the research-backed perspective needed to make confident instructional decisions. Transform your understanding of what truly drives language acquisition and discover how grammar can support—rather than dominate—the joyful journey toward proficiency.
Join our community of forward-thinking language educators by subscribing to the Practical Proficiency Podcast and accessing additional resources at LaLibreLanguageLearning.com.
Find out more and join the Practical Proficiency Network here
or go to lalibrelanguagelearning.com/join
Let's connect:
Get the Free World Language Teacher Toolkit
Get the Free Roadmap to Proficiency
Website
TPT
Instagram
Youtube
Facebook
Love this episode? Get access to over 150+ trainings, instructional coaching, and an amazing peer community of proficiency-oriented teachers in the Practical Proficiency Network
Submit your questions about proficiency, grammar, or creating communicative classroom environments through this link: https://airtable.com/appOp9IY7Ah77oYup/pagpRzuEqAVZgBnrk/form
and I'll answer them on the show!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What's up?
Que lo que Et salut worldlanguage teachers.
Welcome to the PracticalProficiency Podcast, where we
make the transition toproficiency-oriented instruction
in your world language class ina way that works for you, your
unique context and teachingstyle, and doesn't sacrifice
(00:21):
your well-being along the way.
I'm your host, devon Gunning,the teacher author, conference
host, curriculum creator andconsultant behind La Libre
Language Learning.
This podcast is for thecreative world language teacher
like you who's ready to ditchthe overwhelming pressure of
switching to acquisition-driveninstruction and CI overnight.
(00:42):
You're ready to discover howusing more target language in
class can actually bring you andyour students more joy instead
of adding to your plate.
With practical, authentic anddown-to-earth strategies that
don't require reinventing thewheel or more training, we'll
work together towards the magicof a community-based,
(01:04):
target-language-rich classroom,rooted in the power of community
and comprehensible input.
Let's go, proficiency Podcast.
(01:27):
Thank you so much for joiningme.
I'm your host, devin, and we arehere today to settle the debate
on what is the role of grammarin a proficiency-oriented
classroom.
There's a lot of chatter aboutthis.
It's very difficult to figureout what's actually going on
with this, because there areteachers who are as far to the
extreme as never use grammar,and the other extreme which yes,
(01:48):
it's an extreme of grammar, isessential and it needs to be an
integral part of our programsbecause it quote unquote ensures
accuracy as well as rigor.
So there's a lot happeningbetween these two sides of the
story, so let's figure it outtogether and where all of this
comes from.
(02:09):
What you're going to belistening to today or watching
if you're on YouTube, then we'regoing to be discussing where a
lot of this comes from, as wellas what is the modern stance as
of the recording of this episode, which is in 2025, from the
organizations that are doing therecording of this episode,
which is in 2025, from theorganizations that are doing the
(02:30):
research on this and speakingwith the most language teachers,
as well as writing and guidingthe principles that we use in
class.
So let's start off with thisfirst essential question, and
that is what does grammar meanto you?
So, grammar, let's get clear onwhat this concept really is.
Grammar is.
There's two ways that languageteachers see it.
There is the grammar that is intextbooks, that describes the
(02:56):
patterns that language uses inorder to create meaning and all
of the mechanics of that,including conjugation, spelling,
morphology, syntax, blah, blah,blah.
And then there's also thesecond language acquisition
definition of grammar, which isgoing to be really important to
us today, which is morecomplicated.
In that definition, we aretalking about the
all-encompassing way that thelanguage functions, and there's
(03:18):
five pieces of it from the SLAperspective.
So we're going to take a lookat both of those.
But, most importantly, whatwe're going to discuss today is
about what really should be therole of grammar.
If you are a teacher who caresa lot about your students
acquiring more language, solet's jump into it.
The first thing we're going todiscuss is that, well, this
(03:39):
doesn't come from nowhere, sothere's a lot of misinformation
that we need to extract fromthis conversation.
However, we're going to startwith the end in mind, and that
is we're getting to ACTFL'sguiding principles on this.
So ACTFL, the American Councilof Teaching Foreign Language, is
what guides most of thedecisions for teachers in the
(04:01):
North American sphere, and it'salso very much mirroring and
related to CEFR if you're out ofthat sphere.
So here are some guidingprinciples that we have from
ACTFL about what really is therole of grammar.
So I'm going to put a researchlink below here where you can
see more about this concept here.
But number seven of the ACTFLguiding principles is that
(04:23):
grammar in context as a conceptis how we see grammar
instruction and its role in theclassroom.
And here's a quote from ACTFL.
It says grammar is an importantelement of communication, but
research shows that explicitteaching of grammar has little
effect on people's languageacquisition, comprehension or
(04:48):
writing abilities.
So since those are the maingoals that we have in class
increasing acquisition,increasing comprehension I would
add interaction to that orwriting abilities.
We've seen from the researchhere.
It's demonstrated that that hasvery little effect on the
outcomes that we want in ourclassrooms.
So with that in mind, we alsoneed to look at the definition
(05:11):
of proficiency, which isfocusing on proficiency means
you're focusing on what studentscan do with the language, not
what they know about it as well.
As this whole idea that we knowfrom second language
acquisition research as well isthat if your goal is for
students to communicate better,the only way that you can
increase communicative abilityis putting students in
(05:32):
communicative contexts.
So if anything, grammarinstruction, especially explicit
grammar instruction, is verymuch a sidebar to support that
goal.
But with all of that being said, that does not mean that it's
easy to let this go or to movebeyond what we know to be a
(05:52):
really intense part of what mostteachers are experiencing in
the classroom every day, whichis a grammar-driven program.
So let's talk a little bit aboutwhat actually is grammar.
What even is it for the secondlanguage acquisition definition?
So we're talking about, grammaris what allows us to organize
sound into words and words intosentences, which is what makes
(06:14):
language complex.
So it's the whole kit andcaboodle, the whole system.
It is much, much more than justsimple features.
And I know that when you thinkof grammar, you're probably
thinking of features, the onesthat are easy to boil down and
explain and put into a worksheet, like conjugations, por versus
para, things like that.
But that's not really whatgrammar is.
(06:34):
It's honestly just the tip ofthe iceberg.
So if you've ever studied secondlanguage acquisition or if
you're really into it, like I am, then you may have seen before
that there are actually fiveproperties of grammar.
We want to keep this as conciseas possible, so we're not going
to get into the five propertiestoday, but just so that you are
, if you want to explore this alittle bit on your own, there
(06:54):
are.
These are the five Phonetics,which is sound, phonology, the
rules of how those sounds arecombined Morphology, which is
the rules of word formation.
Syntax, which is the rule ofsentence formation, and then
semantics, so how meaning isexpressed by words and sentences
.
There's also this element ofprescriptive versus descriptive
(07:16):
grammar.
So there's what grammartheoretically looks like in
academic settings and intextbooks and things that are
handed down by authorities, andthen there's what people
actually use on a daily basis.
So there is a differencebetween that.
So, with that in mind, well,what's actually true about
grammar in class?
It's actually a surface leveldefinition of a lot of
(07:37):
complicated structures andfeatures that we really barely
understand ourselves.
And the important thing to noteis that grammar is not linear.
It's very messy.
However, it's predictable.
I like to say it's like atoddler up two hours past nap
time.
It's a mess and you don't knowexactly what you're going to see
, in what order, but you knowwhat to expect.
(07:58):
You can expect meltdowns, youcan expect yelling, you can
expect tears for no reason, allof those.
So grammar is a lot like that,where it is pretty messy, how it
ends up in our heads, but it'spredictable.
I like to call it the blackhole of SLA.
If you like anything aboutastronomy.
You might know that black holesyou can't actually see them,
(08:19):
but we see the results of themall around and black holes are
one of the most complex and outthere things that physics
studies because there's so manyunknowns about it.
But we can see some finiteripple effects that happen
around black holes that allow usto identify them.
And that's what grammar is like.
Grammar is the result of thisreally complex linguistic system
(08:40):
being played out and reallyimportant for what we're talking
about today.
This is a quote from Bill VanPatten, whose books are really
helpful to understand thisconcept.
We did this as part of thePractical Proficiency Network,
my PD program.
We did a summer book study on,while we're on the Topic, which
is an AFL-endorsed book andpublication by Bill Van Patten
(09:00):
that talks a lot about the roleof grammar in your class and
debunking a lot of the commonmisconceptions around it.
And in that book it'semphasized very often that what
we see in guides or in textbooksyou know when you're just
straight up looking up, likewhat is the morphology of this
word or what is the syntax,which is like the order of how
words work in differentlanguages.
(09:21):
You know if you're working witha romance language like Spanish
or French.
You know that that syntax is alittle bit flipped to what an L1
language learner coming fromEnglish is going to experience.
So why is that?
Why is that rule there, youknow, like why do the adjectives
come after the noun instead ofbefore most of the time?
(09:41):
Well, these are all results ofan intense grammar system, using
all of those different features, that has a lot of different
parts to it.
If you've ever takenlinguistics, you know that
there's a lot of invisiblelevers being pulled that create
that system that makes sense ina specific language.
So, with that in mind, let'stalk about linear grammar.
(10:04):
Linear grammar is something thathas been holding our field back
for several decades and I wouldlove for this myth to be
destroyed.
If you remember nothing else,remember this what is linear
grammar?
Linear grammar is this falseidea that we have that grammar
moves in a linear fashion, thatyou start with the quote unquote
simplest ideas from grammarsuch as and we're going to go in
(10:29):
again just one tiny piece ofthe whole grammar SLA picture.
But let's go to our classicfave textbooks, where you open
up the textbook and you can seefrom the table of contents that
we are moving from presentregulars to present tense,
irregulars, to then progressive,to then simple past tense, to
then complex past tense, andthen irregular past tense, and
(10:52):
then maybe future, simple future, irregular future, and then we
do subjunctive, regular,subjunctive, irregular
subjunctive, and it keeps goingwith more complex stuff, moving
in what you could say is anupward progression, linear
progression, and that's how manypeople like to manage what they
teach and when, thinking thatthis is a great way to look at
(11:12):
and design a program that movesup in complexity and difficulty.
However, linear grammarliterally does not exist outside
of textbooks.
The brain doesn't even acquirelanguage this way.
There's a lot of researchbehind at least Spanish and
English, and there's more to bedone with other languages, but
(11:33):
for Spanish and English, we knowthat the brain acquires things
in a specific order.
If you've ever heard the termlate acquired, that's what we're
talking about.
It happens by order offrequency in used speech, not by
what's neat or what's easy,medium, difficult or what is a
(11:54):
linear progression into moresimple, into more complicated
timeframes, moods and tenses.
So that is not how languageworks.
It's not neat, it's actuallyquite messy.
So here are some examples foryou to think about.
Is that in English when an L1learner no-transcript, all of
(12:20):
those learners for Englishacquire the present tense pretty
well in every other subjectpronoun except for third person,
because in English all of thoseare the same.
Like I jump, you jump, we jump,they jump.
Those are all the same, right.
But we found that people intheir both their L1 and their L2
(12:43):
will acquire past tense andfuture, and more than that,
before they start to reallymaster and finalize the she
jumps adding of an S, and thereason why is because it's not
actually that frequent in spokenspeech and it doesn't follow
the same pattern, so it'sdifficult to pick up on.
(13:04):
So there's an example of wherethe brain acquires all this
present tense information andthen we'll move on to what we
might think of as morecomplicated stuff, but like past
tense used a lot, by the way,or other irregular present tense
used even more than regularright, the reason it's regular
is because it's used a lot, soit gets tweaked and moved and
(13:25):
warped around over the centuries.
And then we have this regular,neat, cute little rule which is
that you add an S for the thirdperson in English and kids don't
even acquire that for a longtime, like into their toddler
years and L2 learners of English.
It will take them a long timeto get that.
So that's just one of many,many examples of where the way
(13:48):
that our brain acquires languageis.
I shouldn't say completelynothing in science is completely
, but that is very much basedoff of orders of frequency and
how well you can distinguish itfrom other features, which is
called saliency.
So it's important for us, whenwe're thinking about what is the
role of grammar, that it shouldbe supporting these goals.
(14:09):
This is a huge mission for mewhen working with world language
teachers and if I was lookingat your curriculum, I would say
hey, you beautiful teacher.
The key component to any secondlanguage acquisition
environment is really this highquality, compelling,
understandable, crystal clearinput, structured to follow your
(14:32):
target language's natural orderof acquisition and frequency of
use, with appropriateopportunities for output and
self-reflection.
Those are all really importantpieces of your program.
So we should instead bethinking about how can grammar
support these goals instead ofgrammar is the goal.
(14:54):
Now you might be thinkingthat's all well and good, but
like this is a very pervasivetheme.
It's in a lot of programs thatwe are very grammar first and
that we decide what units toteach in order to support
grammar goals, because that'sreally how it is in most
classrooms that I'm working with.
It's not the other way around.
The other way around is oureventual goal, which is that you
(15:14):
have your units of learning andyour focus of study and the
chunks and the ideas and thecommunicative context that you
want your students to be able tofunction in and thrive, and
then grammar supports thosegoals.
Usually, people are doing itthe other way.
Where it's we want students tothrive with this grammar and
(15:35):
we're going to set upcommunicative goals to help them
with that.
But it doesn't work that way.
So where does this come from?
Why is it so common?
Well, it comes from a legacy of19th century language education
.
So when we were comes from alegacy of 19th century language
education, so when we werereally into this idea of you
have to be a very smartconversationalist, we were doing
Greek and Latin ancient Greekand ancient Latin for literacy,
(15:57):
not for acquisition.
So students in those 19thcentury classrooms and in those
classical educations that werebased off of the university
system at the time, in the 17th,18th and 19th centuries, those
students were learning Greek sothat they could participate in
conversations and understandroot words in English and all of
that.
It was really to make betterreaders who could be good
(16:21):
conversational partners at thedinner table in their L1.
It was not at all related tohaving functional acquisition of
another language Like that ideaexisted very much so in that
time frame and has for a longtime, because it used to be a
lot more important to Americansthat we could speak another
language, because we did a lotof commerce with a lot of other
(16:42):
nations and people so well andwe do that, of course, now too,
we're in a globalized society.
But what I mean is that therewasn't any tool to help you with
that unless you had atranslator, and those weren't
always available.
So it was far more importantfor people to get functional
communicative ability ratherthan have that like good and
fancy literacy ability.
So, since our school systemfunctions based off of the
(17:06):
examples that we have from a lotof this 19th century
educational policy, which is, asyou can guess, pretty outdated
that we're working with anoutdated paradigm of how
students acquire anotherlanguage, so you can certainly
teach for literacy in yourprogram and make sure that your
students are well and good ableto read more higher level
(17:27):
Spanish if you teach them a lotof explicit grammar, but will
they be able to access that incommunicative situations?
The research says probably not.
So we're going to move withwhat the research says, which is
that the more that you haveaccess to communicative
situations at your level, whereyou are given the tools and the
skills you need to interact,it's much more higher level, by
(17:48):
the way, it's not justmemorization, and it ensures
that those centers of your brainwhich are separate from recall
and memory and accuracy, thatthey grow instead of just the
recall memory accuracy part.
However, all that being said,that's the recall memory
accuracy part.
However, all that being said,grammar is not the enemy.
(18:09):
You can check out the otherepisode that is coming out well,
that came out before this.
Talking about here are somepractical ways that grammar can
support your proficiency goals,not be the enemy of it.
I would also say, too, thatwith this outdated surface level
linear model of grammarstructure, that a big thing
that's going on here, too, isthat we think that it has to be
that way so that we have morerigorous instruction, like the
(18:30):
more complex your tenses get,the more complex your class is.
But what you're asking studentsto do when you present a
difficult, intense structurethat is difficult for students
to really wrap their mindsaround.
What you're asking them to dois much more like a science
class, where you're asking themto wrap their heads around an
(18:51):
academic concept, but askingthem to use that tense in real
communicative situations, likewhen you ask them a question and
then they have to respond toyou without notes, using
spontaneous prior languagethat's already in their heads.
That's actually much higher onBloom's level of taxonomy.
On Bloom's taxonomy levels, Imean for classroom efficacy, and
(19:13):
it also is not just recall,memorization and concept
understanding.
It is that super fast,subconscious process of
processing input and responding,which is extremely difficult,
and your students need a lot ofsupport to do that.
So we've had this lingering fora while, driving a lot of the
(19:38):
train in grammar, and so we needto make sure that we dispel
this notion that well, isgrammar bad?
Well, at the end of the day,think of it this way what I see
in many classrooms and teachersand programs and districts that
I work with is that it's stillvery common to have perhaps a
multiple choice test thatcorrects the spelling of things
that we often teach in level one, like masculine and feminine,
(19:59):
which is actually a lateacquired idea.
Students can understand theconcept in level one, but they
can't really produce accuratelymost of the time until they've
had quite a lot of exposure tothis new binary form of language
that they're not used to ifthey're coming from an English
background.
With this whole idea, being ableto accurately identify
(20:19):
masculine and feminine doesn'treally add more words, it
doesn't add more fluency intoyour student's language system
and it doesn't really help themunderstand what those words
actually mean.
It just helps them understandwhy they're spelled with an E or
not in French, or an O or an Aor some of those typical
masculine feminine rules which,by the way, those rules break
themselves all the time.
(20:40):
So it's confusing for studentsas well, because there's a lot
of exceptions to each grammarrule.
Because, again, even somethingas simple as masculine and
feminine, if you teach a romancelanguage, is directed by all
these invisible pulley leverslike the black hole of grammar
that we don't even fullyunderstand.
And in second languageacquisition, linguists are
(21:01):
spending lots of time decodingand understanding.
So what does that mean for usin class?
Well, if you go deep intomasculine and feminine in your
level one Spanish class, it willhelp them spell better Sure,
and that's helpful.
They may know that A usuallymeans feminine, but how is that
really going to help them whenit comes time to speak with a
native speaker or when it comestime to sign?
(21:23):
If you teach ASL Like knowingthe grammar rules isn't going to
help their hands be moredexterous and fluid when they're
speaking or interacting.
So is it really getting youtowards the goals that you have
of more fluency, morecommunication as well as more
language in their heads?
Not really.
However, teaching grammar incontext is very helpful to
(21:45):
students, especially at certainstages in their journey.
Not really.
However, teaching grammar incontext is very helpful to
students, especially at certainstages in their journey.
So it's not like grammardoesn't have a role.
The easiest and simplest way tothink of it is this is that if
your students don't have a lotof language in their heads, if
they're at the very, very bottomof the ACFL cone of proficiency
in that novice low and novicemid they don't even have enough
words to apply those rules yet.
Proficiency in that novice lowand novice mid they don't even
(22:06):
have enough words to apply thoserules yet.
But if they've started to filltheir cone a little bit and
they're.
In some it's all approximate,right.
But if it's somewhere betweenlike levels three and five, or
they've had five years or so oflanguage and so they've got
words to work with and they'vegot structures to work with, a
lot of memorized phrases, andthey might not understand how
can I recombine these phrasesthat I know in my own way, using
creative language.
I'm ready to do that, which is,by the way, the marker of like.
(22:29):
Your student is transitioningout of novice high into
intermediate low.
So once they get there, yes,they absolutely need your help
with accuracy, because it'sgoing to help them go further to
their proficiency goals.
So grammar can be helpful.
It's helpful for declarativeknowledge, which is stuff that
helps students have moreaccurate speech, and it should
always be taught in context formeaning to help them produce
(22:51):
something.
Now, what if you're like me andyou love grammar?
I don't love grammar in English.
I use incorrect grammar all thetime because I'm a fan of the
way that I grew up speaking,which is not exactly correct
English.
But if you yourself lovelanguage and you love studying
grammar and understanding howyour language works, which you
(23:13):
have fallen in love with, thenyou know the eternal stroke of
being a language teacher.
We're here because we're nerds.
We love our language, we wantto understand everything about
it, pick it apart and put itback together.
But go back to your days ofbeing a language major and look
around the room in your class.
How many other kids were reallyinto the structure of your
(23:33):
language when you were in thoseearly classes and a student
again in college?
Or if you're a native speaker,like when you were learning your
L1, were you like really intothe idea of like diving deep
into those grammar concepts?
Probably, but looking around atthe other students that were
either in your class, if youwere like me and you were taking
(23:54):
Spanish in the undergraduatelevel, people would always ask
me to be on their team wheneverwe were doing something in
Spanish 202, because they knewthat I liked the language, so I
understood how it worked.
I studied the grammar, but allthe other four kids in my group
did not.
They hated it.
They thought it was reallyboring.
So I would keep that in mind,that A lot of our students are
(24:14):
really not here for it, which,even if you get nothing else
from this episode about the roleof grammar in your class, an
important thing to really noteis that.
Is it possible that, instead ofbeing rigorous, you are pushing
a lot of kids out of yourprogram because they don't
intense grammar features that,if you were honest with yourself
(24:41):
and you actually asked yourstudents to test their abilities
in this in a communicativecontext, without any notes or
help, is what you're doinghelping them produce more or
interact more or understand more?
Is it?
If so, that's great, but is ithelping as much as you think it
is?
We know from the research thatunderstanding a language feature
(25:03):
doesn't help.
You use it in context, andthat's really what we're going
for, and many of your studentsare feeling really overwhelmed
with the amount of grammar thatyou're throwing at them, because
I often see programs that havesuch an intense progression and
they never allow for students todo what I call the free play
(25:24):
days, like the practice days.
If you played a sport or if yougrew up, like me, playing both
sports and music, you know thatthere's only a small amount of
time in the sports realm whereyou're learning a new skill,
like how to throw a ball moreaccurately or how to catch more
accurately, whatever.
Then the most important part is, after you do that mini lesson
of like hey, this is how you putyour hips into it and use your
(25:46):
core, blah, blah, blah.
Or if you play cello, like Idid, like this is how you sit up
straighter and this is how youposition your hands and you do
your scale so that you can playthis piece faster.
All of that, you do thatinstruction part for a little
bit and then the rest.
The most valuable time that youhave with that new skill which
language is a skill, not asubject is that time that you
(26:07):
get to just play, to just play,to just throw the ball, to play
the instrument, to play thesport, to communicate, to
interact in the language.
That's the most valuable part.
So if you are moving from tenseto tense to tense to tense
every six to eight weeks, likemost programs are, you're doing
all instruction and no practicetime, no play time, and that's
(26:29):
not fun and it's not effective.
So if you love grammar, I'm herewith you.
We all love grammar, we alllove those instructional moments
.
But we are the outlier.
We are not the average studentthat we have every day, who
really just needs more time andmore great communicative setups
to figure out the patterns ofsome of these structures on
(26:49):
their own.
So let's summarize where a goodpractical approach to
proficiency and grammar in aproficiency program can be, and
that is your grammar instruction, especially when it's in
context as a concept, willreally help your students to
have access to more accuratelanguage, but it doesn't put
(27:12):
more language in their heads,which means that it will help
students navigate the languagethat's already there.
That's the role of grammar.
So if you in different phasesof your program, grammar will
have a different role, but itwill never be the driving force
of a program.
Research has proven that.
Pretty heavy stuff, right, Iknow the linear grammar in
(27:35):
particular is one that's hard toget a grasp on because it is so
outrageously common.
So what's your next step?
Your next step is to figure outwhere grammar has been
monopolizing your program andthe ways that it has been
driving your decisions in class,and see if you can instead look
(27:58):
at all of those decisions thatwe often make, saying things
like oh, I can't wait for mystudents to have a really good
grasp on present tense.
And instead saying things likelet's teach them more present
tense and let's go over what thepresent tense morphology looks
like, even more conjugation.
Let's instead look to how canmy students interact more with
(28:19):
the present tense in a living,breathing, communicative
situation, whether that bereading it, whether that be
producing it when it's time,when they've had a lot of input,
or whether it be interactingwith it with you?
So how much can you help themhave access to the present tense
and see the present tense inaction, rather than teaching
them how it works, which is asmall part an important part,
(28:41):
but it's a small part of whatlanguage really does look like?
That's what we got for today'spretty hefty conversation on
grammar.
I know y'all it's a big one.
So the role of grammar, too, issomething that I would say
unnecessarily divides teachers.
It is okay if your grammar inyour program is taking up too
(29:02):
much space right now and you'renot quite sure how to
troubleshoot it or fix it.
It's okay, and the main reasonis that you need some good,
solid support and you need somecreative and practical
strategies in order to slowlymove away and transition out of
that type of program and alsogive yourself some grace and
(29:23):
understand that a lot ofmaterials are still set up this
way because we're still catchingup.
There's a huge gap between whatresearch teachers have access
to and the materials thatreflect that research.
It's very, very slow, which isunfortunate, so you're working
up against a lot of systems thatare still pretty programmer.
So, with that in mind, I'mhoping that this really helped
you to understand what is therole of grammar in your program
(29:44):
and we can move forward withgrammar in a new place.
As always, if you got any morequestions about grammar in your
program or just anything thathas to do with a
proficiency-oriented classroom,hit me up, because this came
from a question that I got froma listener.
You can, in the show notesbelow or, if you're on YouTube,
look at the comment sectionbelow or whatever that little
(30:05):
box thing is, and I'll have inthere a link for you to submit a
question that can get answeredon the air, just like this one.
So thank you so much for thesemany listener questions that I
put into one idea, which is whatis the role of grammar in your
class and what are some waysthat we can further understand
that, especially if we'reworking with colleagues that
don't have the same view ofgrammar as us.
So until next time, I hope thatyou're having a lot of fun
(30:29):
hanging out with andcommunicating with your students
, and I'll see you on the nextepisode.
Bye for now.
What's up?
Que lo que Et salut worldlanguage teachers.
Welcome to the PracticalProficiency Podcast, where we
make the transition toproficiency-oriented instruction
in your world language class ina way that works for you, your
unique context and teachingstyle, and doesn't sacrifice
(00:21):
your well-being along the way.
I'm your host, devon Gunning,the teacher author, conference
host, curriculum creator andconsultant behind La Libre
Language Learning.
This podcast is for thecreative world language teacher
like you who's ready to ditchthe overwhelming pressure of
switching to acquisition-driveninstruction and CI overnight.
(00:42):
You're ready to discover howusing more target language in
class can actually bring you andyour students more joy instead
of adding to your plate.
With practical, authentic anddown-to-earth strategies that
don't require reinventing thewheel or more training, we'll
work together towards the magicof a community-based,
(01:04):
target-language-rich classroom,rooted in the power of community
and comprehensible input.
Let's go, proficiency Podcast.
(01:27):
Thank you so much for joiningme.
I'm your host, devin, and we arehere today to settle the debate
on what is the role of grammarin a proficiency-oriented
classroom.
There's a lot of chatter aboutthis.
It's very difficult to figureout what's actually going on
with this, because there areteachers who are as far to the
extreme as never use grammar,and the other extreme which yes,
(01:48):
it's an extreme of grammar, isessential and it needs to be an
integral part of our programsbecause it quote unquote ensures
accuracy as well as rigor.
So there's a lot happeningbetween these two sides of the
story, so let's figure it outtogether and where all of this
comes from.
(02:09):
What you're going to belistening to today or watching
if you're on YouTube, then we'regoing to be discussing where a
lot of this comes from, as wellas what is the modern stance as
of the recording of this episode, which is in 2025, from the
organizations that are doing therecording of this episode,
which is in 2025, from theorganizations that are doing the
(02:30):
research on this and speakingwith the most language teachers,
as well as writing and guidingthe principles that we use in
class.
So let's start off with thisfirst essential question, and
that is what does grammar meanto you?
So, grammar, let's get clear onwhat this concept really is.
Grammar is.
There's two ways that languageteachers see it.
There is the grammar that is intextbooks, that describes the
(02:56):
patterns that language uses inorder to create meaning and all
of the mechanics of that,including conjugation, spelling,
morphology, syntax, blah, blah,blah.
And then there's also thesecond language acquisition
definition of grammar, which isgoing to be really important to
us today, which is morecomplicated.
In that definition, we aretalking about the
all-encompassing way that thelanguage functions, and there's
(03:18):
five pieces of it from the SLAperspective.
So we're going to take a lookat both of those.
But, most importantly, whatwe're going to discuss today is
about what really should be therole of grammar.
If you are a teacher who caresa lot about your students
acquiring more language, solet's jump into it.
The first thing we're going todiscuss is that, well, this
(03:39):
doesn't come from nowhere, sothere's a lot of misinformation
that we need to extract fromthis conversation.
However, we're going to startwith the end in mind, and that
is we're getting to ACTFL'sguiding principles on this.
So ACTFL, the American Councilof Teaching Foreign Language, is
what guides most of thedecisions for teachers in the
(04:01):
North American sphere, and it'salso very much mirroring and
related to CEFR if you're out ofthat sphere.
So here are some guidingprinciples that we have from
ACTFL about what really is therole of grammar.
So I'm going to put a researchlink below here where you can
see more about this concept here.
But number seven of the ACTFLguiding principles is that
(04:23):
grammar in context as a conceptis how we see grammar
instruction and its role in theclassroom.
And here's a quote from ACTFL.
It says grammar is an importantelement of communication, but
research shows that explicitteaching of grammar has little
effect on people's languageacquisition, comprehension or
(04:48):
writing abilities.
So since those are the maingoals that we have in class
increasing acquisition,increasing comprehension I would
add interaction to that orwriting abilities.
We've seen from the researchhere.
It's demonstrated that that hasvery little effect on the
outcomes that we want in ourclassrooms.
So with that in mind, we alsoneed to look at the definition
(05:11):
of proficiency, which isfocusing on proficiency means
you're focusing on what studentscan do with the language, not
what they know about it as well.
As this whole idea that we knowfrom second language
acquisition research as well isthat if your goal is for
students to communicate better,the only way that you can
increase communicative abilityis putting students in
(05:32):
communicative contexts.
So if anything, grammarinstruction, especially explicit
grammar instruction, is verymuch a sidebar to support that
goal.
But with all of that being said, that does not mean that it's
easy to let this go or to movebeyond what we know to be a
(05:52):
really intense part of what mostteachers are experiencing in
the classroom every day, whichis a grammar-driven program.
So let's talk a little bit aboutwhat actually is grammar.
What even is it for the secondlanguage acquisition definition?
So we're talking about, grammaris what allows us to organize
sound into words and words intosentences, which is what makes
(06:14):
language complex.
So it's the whole kit andcaboodle, the whole system.
It is much, much more than justsimple features.
And I know that when you thinkof grammar, you're probably
thinking of features, the onesthat are easy to boil down and
explain and put into a worksheet, like conjugations, por versus
para, things like that.
But that's not really whatgrammar is.
(06:34):
It's honestly just the tip ofthe iceberg.
So if you've ever studied secondlanguage acquisition or if
you're really into it, like I am, then you may have seen before
that there are actually fiveproperties of grammar.
We want to keep this as conciseas possible, so we're not going
to get into the five propertiestoday, but just so that you are
, if you want to explore this alittle bit on your own, there
(06:54):
are.
These are the five Phonetics,which is sound, phonology, the
rules of how those sounds arecombined Morphology, which is
the rules of word formation.
Syntax, which is the rule ofsentence formation, and then
semantics, so how meaning isexpressed by words and sentences
.
There's also this element ofprescriptive versus descriptive
(07:16):
grammar.
So there's what grammartheoretically looks like in
academic settings and intextbooks and things that are
handed down by authorities, andthen there's what people
actually use on a daily basis.
So there is a differencebetween that.
So, with that in mind, well,what's actually true about
grammar in class?
It's actually a surface leveldefinition of a lot of
(07:37):
complicated structures andfeatures that we really barely
understand ourselves.
And the important thing to noteis that grammar is not linear.
It's very messy.
However, it's predictable.
I like to say it's like atoddler up two hours past nap
time.
It's a mess and you don't knowexactly what you're going to see
, in what order, but you knowwhat to expect.
(07:58):
You can expect meltdowns, youcan expect yelling, you can
expect tears for no reason, allof those.
So grammar is a lot like that,where it is pretty messy, how it
ends up in our heads, but it'spredictable.
I like to call it the blackhole of SLA.
If you like anything aboutastronomy.
You might know that black holesyou can't actually see them,
(08:19):
but we see the results of themall around and black holes are
one of the most complex and outthere things that physics
studies because there's so manyunknowns about it.
But we can see some finiteripple effects that happen
around black holes that allow usto identify them.
And that's what grammar is like.
Grammar is the result of thisreally complex linguistic system
(08:40):
being played out and reallyimportant for what we're talking
about today.
This is a quote from Bill VanPatten, whose books are really
helpful to understand thisconcept.
We did this as part of thePractical Proficiency Network,
my PD program.
We did a summer book study on,while we're on the Topic, which
is an AFL-endorsed book andpublication by Bill Van Patten
(09:00):
that talks a lot about the roleof grammar in your class and
debunking a lot of the commonmisconceptions around it.
And in that book it'semphasized very often that what
we see in guides or in textbooksyou know when you're just
straight up looking up, likewhat is the morphology of this
word or what is the syntax,which is like the order of how
words work in differentlanguages.
(09:21):
You know if you're working witha romance language like Spanish
or French.
You know that that syntax is alittle bit flipped to what an L1
language learner coming fromEnglish is going to experience.
So why is that?
Why is that rule there, youknow, like why do the adjectives
come after the noun instead ofbefore most of the time?
(09:41):
Well, these are all results ofan intense grammar system, using
all of those different features, that has a lot of different
parts to it.
If you've ever takenlinguistics, you know that
there's a lot of invisiblelevers being pulled that create
that system that makes sense ina specific language.
So, with that in mind, let'stalk about linear grammar.
(10:04):
Linear grammar is something thathas been holding our field back
for several decades and I wouldlove for this myth to be
destroyed.
If you remember nothing else,remember this what is linear
grammar?
Linear grammar is this falseidea that we have that grammar
moves in a linear fashion, thatyou start with the quote unquote
simplest ideas from grammarsuch as and we're going to go in
(10:29):
again just one tiny piece ofthe whole grammar SLA picture.
But let's go to our classicfave textbooks, where you open
up the textbook and you can seefrom the table of contents that
we are moving from presentregulars to present tense,
irregulars, to then progressive,to then simple past tense, to
then complex past tense, andthen irregular past tense, and
(10:52):
then maybe future, simple future, irregular future, and then we
do subjunctive, regular,subjunctive, irregular
subjunctive, and it keeps goingwith more complex stuff, moving
in what you could say is anupward progression, linear
progression, and that's how manypeople like to manage what they
teach and when, thinking thatthis is a great way to look at
(11:12):
and design a program that movesup in complexity and difficulty.
However, linear grammarliterally does not exist outside
of textbooks.
The brain doesn't even acquirelanguage this way.
There's a lot of researchbehind at least Spanish and
English, and there's more to bedone with other languages, but
(11:33):
for Spanish and English, we knowthat the brain acquires things
in a specific order.
If you've ever heard the termlate acquired, that's what we're
talking about.
It happens by order offrequency in used speech, not by
what's neat or what's easy,medium, difficult or what is a
(11:54):
linear progression into moresimple, into more complicated
timeframes, moods and tenses.
So that is not how languageworks.
It's not neat, it's actuallyquite messy.
So here are some examples foryou to think about.
Is that in English when an L1learner no-transcript, all of
(12:20):
those learners for Englishacquire the present tense pretty
well in every other subjectpronoun except for third person,
because in English all of thoseare the same.
Like I jump, you jump, we jump,they jump.
Those are all the same, right.
But we found that people intheir both their L1 and their L2
(12:43):
will acquire past tense andfuture, and more than that,
before they start to reallymaster and finalize the she
jumps adding of an S, and thereason why is because it's not
actually that frequent in spokenspeech and it doesn't follow
the same pattern, so it'sdifficult to pick up on.
(13:04):
So there's an example of wherethe brain acquires all this
present tense information andthen we'll move on to what we
might think of as morecomplicated stuff, but like past
tense used a lot, by the way,or other irregular present tense
used even more than regularright, the reason it's regular
is because it's used a lot, soit gets tweaked and moved and
(13:25):
warped around over the centuries.
And then we have this regular,neat, cute little rule which is
that you add an S for the thirdperson in English and kids don't
even acquire that for a longtime, like into their toddler
years and L2 learners of English.
It will take them a long timeto get that.
So that's just one of many,many examples of where the way
(13:48):
that our brain acquires languageis.
I shouldn't say completelynothing in science is completely
, but that is very much basedoff of orders of frequency and
how well you can distinguish itfrom other features, which is
called saliency.
So it's important for us, whenwe're thinking about what is the
role of grammar, that it shouldbe supporting these goals.
(14:09):
This is a huge mission for mewhen working with world language
teachers and if I was lookingat your curriculum, I would say
hey, you beautiful teacher.
The key component to any secondlanguage acquisition
environment is really this highquality, compelling,
understandable, crystal clearinput, structured to follow your
(14:32):
target language's natural orderof acquisition and frequency of
use, with appropriateopportunities for output and
self-reflection.
Those are all really importantpieces of your program.
So we should instead bethinking about how can grammar
support these goals instead ofgrammar is the goal.
(14:54):
Now you might be thinkingthat's all well and good, but
like this is a very pervasivetheme.
It's in a lot of programs thatwe are very grammar first and
that we decide what units toteach in order to support
grammar goals, because that'sreally how it is in most
classrooms that I'm working with.
It's not the other way around.
The other way around is oureventual goal, which is that you
(15:14):
have your units of learning andyour focus of study and the
chunks and the ideas and thecommunicative context that you
want your students to be able tofunction in and thrive, and
then grammar supports thosegoals.
Usually, people are doing itthe other way.
Where it's we want students tothrive with this grammar and
(15:35):
we're going to set upcommunicative goals to help them
with that.
But it doesn't work that way.
So where does this come from?
Why is it so common?
Well, it comes from a legacy of19th century language education
.
So when we were comes from alegacy of 19th century language
education, so when we werereally into this idea of you
have to be a very smartconversationalist, we were doing
Greek and Latin ancient Greekand ancient Latin for literacy,
(15:57):
not for acquisition.
So students in those 19thcentury classrooms and in those
classical educations that werebased off of the university
system at the time, in the 17th,18th and 19th centuries, those
students were learning Greek sothat they could participate in
conversations and understandroot words in English and all of
that.
It was really to make betterreaders who could be good
(16:21):
conversational partners at thedinner table in their L1.
It was not at all related tohaving functional acquisition of
another language Like that ideaexisted very much so in that
time frame and has for a longtime, because it used to be a
lot more important to Americansthat we could speak another
language, because we did a lotof commerce with a lot of other
(16:42):
nations and people so well andwe do that, of course, now too,
we're in a globalized society.
But what I mean is that therewasn't any tool to help you with
that unless you had atranslator, and those weren't
always available.
So it was far more importantfor people to get functional
communicative ability ratherthan have that like good and
fancy literacy ability.
So, since our school systemfunctions based off of the
(17:06):
examples that we have from a lotof this 19th century
educational policy, which is, asyou can guess, pretty outdated
that we're working with anoutdated paradigm of how
students acquire anotherlanguage, so you can certainly
teach for literacy in yourprogram and make sure that your
students are well and good ableto read more higher level
(17:27):
Spanish if you teach them a lotof explicit grammar, but will
they be able to access that incommunicative situations?
The research says probably not.
So we're going to move withwhat the research says, which is
that the more that you haveaccess to communicative
situations at your level, whereyou are given the tools and the
skills you need to interact,it's much more higher level, by
(17:48):
the way, it's not justmemorization, and it ensures
that those centers of your brainwhich are separate from recall
and memory and accuracy, thatthey grow instead of just the
recall memory accuracy part.
However, all that being said,that's the recall memory
accuracy part.
However, all that being said,grammar is not the enemy.
(18:09):
You can check out the otherepisode that is coming out well,
that came out before this.
Talking about here are somepractical ways that grammar can
support your proficiency goals,not be the enemy of it.
I would also say, too, thatwith this outdated surface level
linear model of grammarstructure, that a big thing
that's going on here, too, isthat we think that it has to be
that way so that we have morerigorous instruction, like the
(18:30):
more complex your tenses get,the more complex your class is.
But what you're asking studentsto do when you present a
difficult, intense structurethat is difficult for students
to really wrap their mindsaround.
What you're asking them to dois much more like a science
class, where you're asking themto wrap their heads around an
(18:51):
academic concept, but askingthem to use that tense in real
communicative situations, likewhen you ask them a question and
then they have to respond toyou without notes, using
spontaneous prior languagethat's already in their heads.
That's actually much higher onBloom's level of taxonomy.
On Bloom's taxonomy levels, Imean for classroom efficacy, and
(19:13):
it also is not just recall,memorization and concept
understanding.
It is that super fast,subconscious process of
processing input and responding,which is extremely difficult,
and your students need a lot ofsupport to do that.
So we've had this lingering fora while, driving a lot of the
(19:38):
train in grammar, and so we needto make sure that we dispel
this notion that well, isgrammar bad?
Well, at the end of the day,think of it this way what I see
in many classrooms and teachersand programs and districts that
I work with is that it's stillvery common to have perhaps a
multiple choice test thatcorrects the spelling of things
that we often teach in level one, like masculine and feminine,
(19:59):
which is actually a lateacquired idea.
Students can understand theconcept in level one, but they
can't really produce accuratelymost of the time until they've
had quite a lot of exposure tothis new binary form of language
that they're not used to ifthey're coming from an English
background.
With this whole idea, being ableto accurately identify
(20:19):
masculine and feminine doesn'treally add more words, it
doesn't add more fluency intoyour student's language system
and it doesn't really help themunderstand what those words
actually mean.
It just helps them understandwhy they're spelled with an E or
not in French, or an O or an Aor some of those typical
masculine feminine rules which,by the way, those rules break
themselves all the time.
(20:40):
So it's confusing for studentsas well, because there's a lot
of exceptions to each grammarrule.
Because, again, even somethingas simple as masculine and
feminine, if you teach a romancelanguage, is directed by all
these invisible pulley leverslike the black hole of grammar
that we don't even fullyunderstand.
And in second languageacquisition, linguists are
(21:01):
spending lots of time decodingand understanding.
So what does that mean for usin class?
Well, if you go deep intomasculine and feminine in your
level one Spanish class, it willhelp them spell better Sure,
and that's helpful.
They may know that A usuallymeans feminine, but how is that
really going to help them whenit comes time to speak with a
native speaker or when it comestime to sign?
(21:23):
If you teach ASL Like knowingthe grammar rules isn't going to
help their hands be moredexterous and fluid when they're
speaking or interacting.
So is it really getting youtowards the goals that you have
of more fluency, morecommunication as well as more
language in their heads?
Not really.
However, teaching grammar incontext is very helpful to
(21:45):
students, especially at certainstages in their journey.
Not really.
However, teaching grammar incontext is very helpful to
students, especially at certainstages in their journey.
So it's not like grammardoesn't have a role.
The easiest and simplest way tothink of it is this is that if
your students don't have a lotof language in their heads, if
they're at the very, very bottomof the ACFL cone of proficiency
in that novice low and novicemid they don't even have enough
words to apply those rules yet.
Proficiency in that novice lowand novice mid they don't even
(22:06):
have enough words to apply thoserules yet.
But if they've started to filltheir cone a little bit and
they're.
In some it's all approximate,right.
But if it's somewhere betweenlike levels three and five, or
they've had five years or so oflanguage and so they've got
words to work with and they'vegot structures to work with, a
lot of memorized phrases, andthey might not understand how
can I recombine these phrasesthat I know in my own way, using
creative language.
I'm ready to do that, which is,by the way, the marker of like.
(22:29):
Your student is transitioningout of novice high into
intermediate low.
So once they get there, yes,they absolutely need your help
with accuracy, because it'sgoing to help them go further to
their proficiency goals.
So grammar can be helpful.
It's helpful for declarativeknowledge, which is stuff that
helps students have moreaccurate speech, and it should
always be taught in context formeaning to help them produce
(22:51):
something.
Now, what if you're like me andyou love grammar?
I don't love grammar in English.
I use incorrect grammar all thetime because I'm a fan of the
way that I grew up speaking,which is not exactly correct
English.
But if you yourself lovelanguage and you love studying
grammar and understanding howyour language works, which you
(23:13):
have fallen in love with, thenyou know the eternal stroke of
being a language teacher.
We're here because we're nerds.
We love our language, we wantto understand everything about
it, pick it apart and put itback together.
But go back to your days ofbeing a language major and look
around the room in your class.
How many other kids were reallyinto the structure of your
(23:33):
language when you were in thoseearly classes and a student
again in college?
Or if you're a native speaker,like when you were learning your
L1, were you like really intothe idea of like diving deep
into those grammar concepts?
Probably, but looking around atthe other students that were
either in your class, if youwere like me and you were taking
(23:54):
Spanish in the undergraduatelevel, people would always ask
me to be on their team wheneverwe were doing something in
Spanish 202, because they knewthat I liked the language, so I
understood how it worked.
I studied the grammar, but allthe other four kids in my group
did not.
They hated it.
They thought it was reallyboring.
So I would keep that in mind,that A lot of our students are
(24:14):
really not here for it, which,even if you get nothing else
from this episode about the roleof grammar in your class, an
important thing to really noteis that.
Is it possible that, instead ofbeing rigorous, you are pushing
a lot of kids out of yourprogram because they don't
intense grammar features that,if you were honest with yourself
(24:41):
and you actually asked yourstudents to test their abilities
in this in a communicativecontext, without any notes or
help, is what you're doinghelping them produce more or
interact more or understand more?
Is it?
If so, that's great, but is ithelping as much as you think it
is?
We know from the research thatunderstanding a language feature
(25:03):
doesn't help.
You use it in context, andthat's really what we're going
for, and many of your studentsare feeling really overwhelmed
with the amount of grammar thatyou're throwing at them, because
I often see programs that havesuch an intense progression and
they never allow for students todo what I call the free play
(25:24):
days, like the practice days.
If you played a sport or if yougrew up, like me, playing both
sports and music, you know thatthere's only a small amount of
time in the sports realm whereyou're learning a new skill,
like how to throw a ball moreaccurately or how to catch more
accurately, whatever.
Then the most important part is, after you do that mini lesson
of like hey, this is how you putyour hips into it and use your
(25:46):
core, blah, blah, blah.
Or if you play cello, like Idid, like this is how you sit up
straighter and this is how youposition your hands and you do
your scale so that you can playthis piece faster.
All of that, you do thatinstruction part for a little
bit and then the rest.
The most valuable time that youhave with that new skill which
language is a skill, not asubject is that time that you
(26:07):
get to just play, to just play,to just throw the ball, to play
the instrument, to play thesport, to communicate, to
interact in the language.
That's the most valuable part.
So if you are moving from tenseto tense to tense to tense
every six to eight weeks, likemost programs are, you're doing
all instruction and no practicetime, no play time, and that's
(26:29):
not fun and it's not effective.
So if you love grammar, I'm herewith you.
We all love grammar, we alllove those instructional moments
.
But we are the outlier.
We are not the average studentthat we have every day, who
really just needs more time andmore great communicative setups
to figure out the patterns ofsome of these structures on
(26:49):
their own.
So let's summarize where a goodpractical approach to
proficiency and grammar in aproficiency program can be, and
that is your grammar instruction, especially when it's in
context as a concept, willreally help your students to
have access to more accuratelanguage, but it doesn't put
(27:12):
more language in their heads,which means that it will help
students navigate the languagethat's already there.
That's the role of grammar.
So if you in different phasesof your program, grammar will
have a different role, but itwill never be the driving force
of a program.
Research has proven that.
Pretty heavy stuff, right, Iknow the linear grammar in
(27:35):
particular is one that's hard toget a grasp on because it is so
outrageously common.
So what's your next step?
Your next step is to figure outwhere grammar has been
monopolizing your program andthe ways that it has been
driving your decisions in class,and see if you can instead look
(27:58):
at all of those decisions thatwe often make, saying things
like oh, I can't wait for mystudents to have a really good
grasp on present tense.
And instead saying things likelet's teach them more present
tense and let's go over what thepresent tense morphology looks
like, even more conjugation.
Let's instead look to how canmy students interact more with
(28:19):
the present tense in a living,breathing, communicative
situation, whether that bereading it, whether that be
producing it when it's time,when they've had a lot of input,
or whether it be interactingwith it with you?
So how much can you help themhave access to the present tense
and see the present tense inaction, rather than teaching
them how it works, which is asmall part an important part,
(28:41):
but it's a small part of whatlanguage really does look like?
That's what we got for today'spretty hefty conversation on
grammar.
I know y'all it's a big one.
So the role of grammar, too, issomething that I would say
unnecessarily divides teachers.
It is okay if your grammar inyour program is taking up too
(29:02):
much space right now and you'renot quite sure how to
troubleshoot it or fix it.
It's okay, and the main reasonis that you need some good,
solid support and you need somecreative and practical
strategies in order to slowlymove away and transition out of
that type of program and alsogive yourself some grace and
(29:23):
understand that a lot ofmaterials are still set up this
way because we're still catchingup.
There's a huge gap between whatresearch teachers have access
to and the materials thatreflect that research.
It's very, very slow, which isunfortunate, so you're working
up against a lot of systems thatare still pretty programmer.
So, with that in mind, I'mhoping that this really helped
you to understand what is therole of grammar in your program
(29:44):
and we can move forward withgrammar in a new place.
As always, if you got any morequestions about grammar in your
program or just anything thathas to do with a
proficiency-oriented classroom,hit me up, because this came
from a question that I got froma listener.
You can, in the show notesbelow or, if you're on YouTube,
look at the comment sectionbelow or whatever that little
(30:05):
box thing is, and I'll have inthere a link for you to submit a
question that can get answeredon the air, just like this one.
So thank you so much for thesemany listener questions that I
put into one idea, which is whatis the role of grammar in your
class and what are some waysthat we can further understand
that, especially if we'reworking with colleagues that
don't have the same view ofgrammar as us.
So until next time, I hope thatyou're having a lot of fun
(30:29):
hanging out with andcommunicating with your students
, and I'll see you on the nextepisode.
Bye for now.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.