Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring

TeacherSource Teacher Development

by Diane Larsen-Freeman

A must-read for every language teaching professional, Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring explores the regular, predictable elements of language as well as the potential creativity of its underlying system. By combining a wide range of view points with her own personal experiences and studies, Diane Larsen-Freeman challenges the static descriptive ideas of grammar, based on rules, and promotes the more fluid and dynamic notions of reason-driven grammaring, which she defines as "the ability to use grammar structures accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately." The reader is left not with an encyclopedic set of definitions, but rather with a deeper understanding of the organic nature of language and its acquisition, and a honed set of tools with which to approach language in language teaching.

Genres: Language, Teaching, Linguistics

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Diane Larsen-Freeman is a Professor of Education, Professor of Linguistics, and a Research Scientist at the English Language Institute of Michigan. She is also a Distinguished Senior Faculty Fellow at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. A teacher educator for over 30 years, Professor Larsen-Freeman has published numerous books and articles about second language acquisition research, English grammar, and language teaching methods.

Reviews

[Dominic Neesam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent shoe-in material to a DELTA course

[Paul, · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much better than Second Language Acquisition: A Course Study. It is concise, it takes positions on controversial issues, while acknowledging the controversy, and it actually makes some suggestions for praxis. I especially liked her discussion of the inert knowledge problem (i.e., knowing stuff that you don't use) and CONNECTING it to a global problem, instead of pretending that it is only in language learning that people experience it. I also liked her conceptual connection of language learning with chaos theory. That could be very helpful.

[Jarkko · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We know that teaching does not cause learning, but we must act as if it does." This book is gold. Even if you don't agree with all the theories posited, I think it's a must to a language teacher. The book's full of great ideas such as "[Learning] is chaos with feedback" and "Teaching is learning to follow the students' lead" that every teacher might want to consider when planning classes.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every ESL EFL teacher should understand Larsen-Freeman's concepts of "form, meaning, and use". I very much appreciate her friendly but professional writing style.