Written Discourse

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The issue of the approach to grammar teaching in schools has been in question for many years. The level of academic writing in universities has proven to be far below adequate and the question that arises is who or what is to blame. Are the teachers responsible due to a lack of knowledge and training, or would one rather look at the specific approach implemented at this time? Is it necessary to teach grammar in schools at all? I believe that it is most definitely necessary to teach grammar to achieve a high level of English competence, especially for academic purposes, but that it is must be taught in a specific manner to avoid influencing the affective filters of the learners negatively. In this essay, I will discuss the necessity of teaching …show more content…

“you know”), backchannels (e.g. “Oh really?”) and incomplete sentences (Cutting, 2015: 21). ‘Function’ can be considered to be of greater importance during speech than form (Cutting, 2015, 3) and therefore the communicative approach meets the needs of discourse competence, as the classroom input is satisfactory. This is said despite the possibility of negative input, because spoken discourse always includes some ‘negative’ input because it is fluid, as stated above. The same could be said for strategic competence and socio-linguistic competence that also forms a part of the communicative approach (Van der Walt, 2009: 41-43), because the input creates the environment for the development of these strategies, while the interaction facilitates the socio-linguistic competence. In terms of grammar competence, it is necessary to support and adapt the communicative approach through the intertwining of other complimenting …show more content…

Grammar teaching is of utmost importance in schools and can be done efficiently by adapting the approaches already listed in the CAPS document through creativity and innovation from the teacher’s side. According to Krahnke (cited by Terrell, 1991), “grammar has a newly defined but useful role to play in language teaching” and I fully agree. After the traditional method of grammar teaching proved to be ineffective and now natural acquisition proving the same, we as teachers have the responsibility and the new knowledge to employing grammar in its new role and providing the learners with the ability to be competent in every aspect of

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