Ron,



What you describe in the ESL context in Quebec and Bangalore is the heart of what motivated the founders of ATEG, the theoretical claims in the fifties and sixties that the teaching of grammar not only did not help student writers improve their writing but actually detracted from it.  Composition writers argued that the teaching of grammar was harmful to the teaching of writing.  NCTE adopted this finding and the training of teachers in grammar, the place of grammar in K12 language arts curricula, and, of course, the place of grammar in the writing class all diminished sharply.



Herb





Bruce raises an interesting issue which all teachers have to confront from 

time to time.   That is the implementation of an innovation which they are 

not necessarily equipped to handle and which they find implicitly entails 

their rejecting their own teaching prinicples.  This happened in ESL in 

Quebec and Bangalore, India in the 80s where teachers were forbidden to 

teach grammar when an extreme form of communicative language teaching was 

introduced which, by the way, ultimately failed.



I wonder whether any members have had experience of this in teaching English 

as a first language.



Interestingly, in the cases mentioned in the first pargraph, as teachers 

increasingly lost faith in the innovation, they returned surreptitiously to 

their own teaching principles.



Ron Sheen 



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