A question of grammar

The study of grammar is interesting for me as I teach English as a second language. When I did my OU practicum at Hispanic Outreach in Pontiac, I was taken aback by the interest my students displayed in learning grammar. They wanted the rules. What they really wanted was a matrix or chart; "when you are in this situation, write it like this." They approached learning English as if it were a science. I told them that unfortunately it is not as easy as that with English. Fortunately, I was teaching a group of students who were trying to pass the GED and I was furnished with an exam prep textbook to draw my lessons from. This was indeed handy as I had not had an English grammar lesson in more years than some of my students were alive. Like the author of the article, I also remember "conjunction junction" and all the rest. I also remember grammar lessons ending sometime in my early teens. 9th grade, I think. From them on, I've been on my own. As a teacher, I had to re-learn many of the rules for things I have done unconsciously for years. I don't pretend to know much about Spanish grammar, but I have been led to believe it is more straightforward than English. I wouldn't be surprised if that is so. Spelling in Spanish, I am told, is also straightforward. There are no Spanish "spelling B's". Each vowel, I am told, is pronounced in only two ways, the short or relative sound, and the long or “alphabet” sound. No mysterious “ough” nonsense to deal with.

Yes, as we grow and learn we innately discover how to communicate with our fellow English-speaking humans reasonably well. The problem is writing. If most people, even educated "professionals" wrote the way they spoke, it would be laughable. Over the years I would become really offended when I read something at work written by one of my "superiors" that had glaring grammatical and spelling errors. I would wonder how they got to where they were, why they made so much more money than I when they sounded like idiots, and why was I still schlepping...whatever it was I was schlepping at the time earning a peasant’s wage. It wasn't until I went back to school to finish a bachelor degree that I realized you can very easily muddle your way through school, even perhaps achieve an advanced degree in the sciences or business, and still not know how to write an email without sounding like a moron.
I can accept that strict lessons in grammar are probably unpalatable to most American students. Now we have "Grammar in Context" textbooks and the like, which are supposed to teach grammar in "useful" scenarios instead of boring drills. The problem is, they still teach by giving example sentences with fill-in-the-blank exercises. They don't answer the fundamental question of why. As a teacher, I hate not being able to answer that and I refuse to say "it's just they way we say it". I'm not a linguist, nor do I want to be. I don't think breaking language down into its atomic particles is necessary to be able to teach someone how to write. I think the reason we don’t teach grammar anymore is because we don’t know how to. What I mean is that we don’t know what really works to make the ideas stick in the student’s heads. Over the years more and more studies are done, more PhDs are granted, and we seem none the wiser. In the short time I have been teaching ESL, I have learned that how you teach depends on who you are teaching. Mexican speakers of Spanish seem to want the rules and the “dry, boring” grammar. Speakers of Chinese and Korean don’t. They already learned English grammar ad nauseam in primary school. What they need is practical experience creating English, both written and spoken. I haven’t yet taught English to native speakers, but that is my goal. I hope that by taking classes like this, I will be better prepared to teach others how to construct English sentences effectively. Whether I teach grammar directly or try the osmosis approach, remains to be seen.