I can see that the discussion about whether to teach grammar or not is alive and well. It's not surprising, really, since this is one of the key issues for any language teacher. At the last video conference, I introduce the idea of grammatical 'metalanguage'. Grammatical metalanguage is the language you use to talk about grammar. It contains words like 'bisats' and 'conjunction', both being words which are hardly ever used outside of school textbooks.
The first issue this raises is: should you be talking about grammar, or should you just be using it? If you use language comprehensibly, you must be using grammar (that's what the 'I am a hotel' exercise is all about). If you can use grammar correctly, is that enough, or must you be able to talk about it too? Lpo 94 is quite clear on this: it wants your pupils to be able to use the grammar, not to be able to talk about it. So … why is there still so much 'talking about grammar' in textbooks?
The banal answer is: because that's what sells textbooks. However, the usual reason is that teachers think that identifying and talking about nouns and verbs is a good didactic device to help pupils learn better (this is why the categories were invented in the first place). In other words, using grammatical metalanguage is a necessary condition for learning a new language.
Let me just divert into what necessary and sufficient conditions are. These are concepts from philosophy, and they work like this: if X is a necessary condition for Y to happen, then Y won't happen unless X happens. If X is a sufficient condition for Y to happen, then all Y needs is X (whereas, if X were a necessary condition, it might not be the *only* necessary condition).
Think of: "you need a key to open that door, if it's locked" If you don't have a key, you can't open the door, so having a key is a necessary condition. However, it isn't a sufficient condition, because you usually have to have the *right* key to open a particular door.
Now, to get back to grammatical metalanguage. Is full competence with grammatical metalanguage (e.g. 'pågående aspekten') a necessary condition for learning a new language? This would only be true if people were unable to learn new languages if they also learned the grammatical metalanguage … and this clearly isn't the case.
Is it a sufficient condition? (Well, no, if it's not even a necessary condition!) However, there are plenty of school textbooks (particularly at the upper levels) which seem to work on this assumption: the only thing the pupils need is to master the grammatical metalanguage.
So, where does that leave you? I'd hope we end up with a realistic assessment of the place of the abstract study of grammar in the practices of a language teacher. My end point is that *teachers* need much more explicit knowledge of grammatical metalanguage than their pupils. There are, very occasionally, structures which lend themselves to an explanation via grammatical metalanguage, but most structures can be learned, practised and used very successfully without the pupils having a conscious knowledge of how they work.
I'm sure this won't be the last word on the subject, though!
