[Jack in Tokyo]

Thank you Riverkid for your thoughtful reply.

I agree with everything you write and obviously you have a wealth of experience in teaching - but do you have any comments on the functional grammar approach?
I am only an enthusiastic amateur teacher but I am trying my best - actually I was in agricultural science prior to coming to Japan. I think the problem with the current textbooks is that they were written by scholars coming from the traditional Latin paradigm. This doesn`t seem to work with Japanese students. I was fortunate to learn Russian by this method when doing National Service in the Royal Air Force many many years ago - it seemed to work with Russian because Russian is such an inflected language.
Have you had any experience with functional grammar as I wrote in my first message? It seems an interesting approach but nobody seems to have tried it except in Australian schools.
You wrote that you could go on and on. Please do.

Shitsurei shimasu