Dr. Madhuri Gokhale works as an Assistant Professor, Fergusson College with Pune, India.

One of the essential aspects of the teaching of any language is the teaching of its grammar. Ur (1988) defines grammar as ‘the way a language manipulates and combines words in order to form longer units of meaning’ (p.4). There has been a lot of discussion on whether grammar can really be taught or should it be caught by the students. However, there is a general agreement among teachers that a systematic and deliberate teaching of grammar is essential to master a language. This paper focuses on the teaching of grammar at the undergraduate level in the Indian context. Let us begin by talking about the way grammar is generally taught in the Indian classrooms.

Grammar is taught in India right from the first standard to the last year of undergraduate studies. Thus, every student has to learn grammar for about fifteen long years. However, it is observed that in spite of teaching grammar so extensively, students are unable to communicate in English well. Students suffer from English phobia and join courses to develop their linguistic competence even after completing their graduation. Thus, there seems to be a lot of ‘teaching about the language’ rather than ‘teaching the language’ in the Indian context.

Generally, the teaching of grammar has been regarded as a highly structure based and formal activity in the Indian context. Thus, in most cases,  grammar is exclusively taught for its own sake. The general pattern for the teaching of grammar is to give some rules using a lot of technical terminology, talk about the exceptions to the rules, ask students to solve some exercises that are often mechanical and monotonous and this is the end of the teaching of grammar. Even if the students’ performance in a grammar test is fairly good, there is no guarantee of the fact that he would be able to speak and write in English well. Thus, it can be said that in most cases, grammar is taught as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. Ideally, the teaching of grammar must help our students to produce utterances that exemplify the grammatical rules, but it seems that generally the teacher focuses on teaching the rules of grammar and ignores the communicative aspect of language. (more…)