Since the 1960s, many scholars and linguists have questioned the usefulness of teaching formal grammar to students of English as a foreign or second language. Late in the twentieth century, formal grammar instruction disappeared from the high school English curriculum in the United Kingdom and the United States. Check out TOIEC Grammar Tutoring (ติว แก รม ม่า toeic, which is the term in Thai) for grammar learning.
They thought it was pretentious or unnecessary to teach grammar. Chomsky developed his theory of generative grammar, which held that children’s brains were all wired to understand grammar by intuition. On the other hand, Chomskyian linguistics was thought (and not without cause) to be beyond the understanding of teenage students and many of its teachers. In light of this, many linguists have concluded that it is better not to teach grammar, rejecting the prior restrictive and conventional approaches to grammar. Since only the brightest high schoolers or EFL/ESL students could keep up with generative grammar, its instruction was deemed elitist.
When the role of grammar in language acquisition is dissected, it becomes clear that it is not the instruction of grammar that is elitist but rather the belief that all learners can get by without even any explicit teaching of grammar. Grammar does not inherently have a great degree of complexity; it can be stated very simply or intricately.
After years of debate over the UK’s dismal literacy rate and language knowledge, “grammar” is once again a part of required classroom instruction despite widespread disagreement over its relevance and methodology. Check TOIEC Grammar Tutoring for more information.
Fortunately, when English has been taught in other nations where instructors have a different tradition, the debates about the grammar teaching inside the education system throughout the UK and the USA have spilled over into the realm of EFL and ESL, albeit to a lesser extent. “It has been fantastic, in the professional development sessions I have conducted in different countries, to concentrate on teaching how grammar may provide insight into how language works and to find that the instructors are all so comfortable with the fundamental grammar.
Thus, there appears to be a widespread agreement that grammar is crucial in the modern day (albeit some universities oddly reject this tendency in the name of anti-elitism). When teaching English, it doesn’t matter if pupils are studying it as their primary language or as a second, followed by an increase; the distinction between the two is essentially artificial. TOIEC Grammar Tutoring can provide you with more information.
