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Should I learn grammar?
This is a question a lot of students ask me.
If you’ve asked a lot of people this question, you know that a lot of people say yes. A lot of people say no, and a lot of people are somewhere in the middle? Who’s correct?
The answer is it depends. What does it depend on? It depends on your goal.
Many people, including many students and even teachers unfortunately don’t understand this basic fact: grammar learning depends on what you want to achieve. But if you understand this, you’ll be able to make much better choices & better progress in your learning.
What are your choices?
You have three:
1. Don’t learn grammar
2. Focus on grammar
3. Learn just enough grammar
Let’s go over these options:
Don’t learn grammar
Unfortunately in many classrooms, even in so-called spoken English, communicative, or interactive classrooms, the focus is still on grammar. What happens as result is that people who are trying to become more fluent end up being really good with their nouns, verbs, adjectives, and their tenses, but they’re still not as fluent as they need to be.
If your goal is fluency, i.e. if you want to talk without hesitation, without pausing, without searching for words, then grammar learning is not going to help you. If you want to become more fluent, focus on building your voc, practice repeating common phrases – this will help u mini hesitation, and on practising lots of conversation. If you have extra time, you can spend it on grammar, but the majority of your time should be spent on the things I’ve mentioned.
Focus on grammar
Is that useless? Not quite. In fact it can be very, very useful if you have a certain goal. That goal is to improve your accuracy for a specific purpose. Ex: if you’re a student and you wish to study in an English speaking country, and you need to take an exam like the IELTS or TOEFL. You might have to get a certain score for which you might need more accuracy in your essays because you might be making lots of mistakes there. In that case, you would work very specifically on grammatical accuracy in certain types of topics, and if this is your goal, focused grammar study will really help you.
Another ex: you work for a big company, and you have to deal with clients from English speaking countries, and you need to write them lots of emails. I’ve had a lot of students who wanted to improve their grammatical accuracy in their emails. If this is your goal, then you will need to work very specifically on certain grammar topics that come up often when you write emails – this is where a good teacher can be very helpful because any good teacher will look at the kinds of emails that you write and help you work on those grammar items that you need help with. So like I said, focussed grammar study is only useful if you need to improve accuracy for a specific purpose. And you should work on those areas that you’re having trouble with. And if you remember what I said earlier, if fluency is your goal, then focussing on grammar, is a waste of your time.
Here’s a question: what if you want to improve your overall level of English – that is, you want to communicate more fluently, but you also want to work on not making mistakes or being more accurate. This is what most people aim for when they learn any language, especially English.
That’s where option #3 comes in.
Learn just enough grammar
When I say just enough grammar, I don’t mean a lot of grammar at all. In fact, just enough grammar is very little grammar. If your goal is the overall development of your English language skills, then your focus should mainly be on fluency. But what will commonly happen as a result of this is that you will become more fluent but there will be two problems:
1. You might still be making mistakes
2. You might not be using a good range of grammatical structures.
So, as you are improving your fluency, you should spend some time on the side, analyzing your own language use – this means recording yourself speaking, or writing things and then listening to your recording or reading what you have written. As you do this, u will need to learn to spot mistakes and also try to add variety to the sent structures that you use. Ex: “I’ve got many friends. My friends like to go shopping.” I would rewrite this as “I’ve got many friends that like to go shopping.” That is, correct mistakes, and also make your language more complex and advanced. How can you do that? You can use a learner’s grammar (i.e. a grammar book that has explanations and exercises) like Essential Grammar in Use by Raymond Murphy (CUP) or Oxford Living Grammar (OUP), and then use what you learn in your own speech and writing. This is what it means to learn just enough grammar.
