[bianca]

I once led a converstional course in English for adults who wanted to learn and dare speak English freely, for practical reasons. It was pointless to teach them to say "what are you going to do?" because what actually came out of their mouths was "watcha gonna do?" (which is grammatically incorrect). And this is also true of younger people, who will lose their enthusiasm and interest for language learning before they even started to learn it, if we teachers begin feeding them grammar before they are a little more confident about their word-knowledge. In the real world, native speakers don't pay so much attention to grammar. And look at how little children learn to speak, they will make their grammar mistakes but get better at it as they acquire a varied vocabulary by listening. Only when they go to school and learn to read will they realise that there are six words in the question above, and not three. They become more and more articulate (grammatically) with an expanding word-knowledge, and not vice versa.

I have seldom - if ever- heard of extracurricular courses in writing skills, most are about oral communication. Rarely do adults say that they need writing skills more than speaking, and yet we teachers put so much emphasis on grammar and the written word. We often treat language learning as a purely academic exercise.

What is your experience of teaching (grammar vesus vocabulary)?