Practical Proficiency Podcast
Where world language teachers gather to transition to proficiency oriented instruction through comprehensible input. All through practical, real-life, teacher-friendly ideas that make teaching language more joyful! Hosted by Devon of La Libre Language Learning.
Practical Proficiency Podcast
The Role of Grammar in Your Proficiency-Oriented Classroom
Grammar—the eternal battleground of language education. Is it the foundation of language learning or a distraction from real communication? In this eye-opening exploration, we cut through decades of misinformation to reveal what research actually shows about grammar's role in language acquisition.
Drawing directly from ACTFL's guiding principles, we examine the surprising truth: "explicit teaching of grammar has little effect on people's language acquisition, comprehension or writing abilities." This doesn't mean grammar is irrelevant, but its place in our classrooms demands serious reconsideration.
You'll discover why "linear grammar"—that neat textbook progression from present to past to future tense—completely misaligns with how our brains actually acquire language. Through fascinating examples (like why third-person "-s" in English is mastered so late despite being "basic"), you'll understand why frequency and meaningful context matter more than grammatical simplicity.
For those who love analyzing language (and as teachers, many of us do!), we offer practical guidance on finding balance. Learn when grammar instruction becomes genuinely useful (hint: it's not at the beginning), how to shift from grammar-driven to communication-centered teaching, and why creating "play time" with language might be the most valuable gift you can give your students.
Whether you're struggling to move beyond traditional grammar-focused instruction or seeking validation for a more communicative approach, this episode provides the research-backed perspective needed to make confident instructional decisions. Transform your understanding of what truly drives language acquisition and discover how grammar can support—rather than dominate—the joyful journey toward proficiency.
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What's up? Que lo que Et salut world language teachers. Welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast, where we make the transition to proficiency-oriented instruction in your world language class in a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style, and doesn't sacrifice your well-being along the way. I'm your host, devon Gunning, the teacher author, conference host, curriculum creator and consultant behind La Libre Language Learning. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you who's ready to ditch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition-driven instruction and CI overnight. You're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy instead of adding to your plate. With practical, authentic and down-to-earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel or more training, we'll work together towards the magic of a community-based, target-language-rich classroom, rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go, proficiency Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, devin, and we are here today to settle the debate on what is the role of grammar in a proficiency-oriented classroom. There's a lot of chatter about this. It's very difficult to figure out what's actually going on with this, because there are teachers who are as far to the extreme as never use grammar, and the other extreme which yes, it's an extreme of grammar, is essential and it needs to be an integral part of our programs because it quote unquote ensures accuracy as well as rigor. So there's a lot happening between these two sides of the story, so let's figure it out together and where all of this comes from. What you're going to be listening to today or watching if you're on YouTube, then we're going to be discussing where a lot of this comes from, as well as what is the modern stance as of the recording of this episode, which is in 2025, from the organizations that are doing the recording of this episode, which is in 2025, from the organizations that are doing the research on this and speaking with the most language teachers, as well as writing and guiding the principles that we use in class. So let's start off with this first essential question, and that is what does grammar mean to you? So, grammar, let's get clear on what this concept really is.
Speaker 1:Grammar is. There's two ways that language teachers see it. There is the grammar that is in textbooks, that describes the patterns that language uses in order to create meaning and all of the mechanics of that, including conjugation, spelling, morphology, syntax, blah, blah, blah. And then there's also the second language acquisition definition of grammar, which is going to be really important to us today, which is more complicated. In that definition, we are talking about the all-encompassing way that the language functions, and there's five pieces of it from the SLA perspective. So we're going to take a look at both of those.
Speaker 1:But, most importantly, what we're going to discuss today is about what really should be the role of grammar. If you are a teacher who cares a lot about your students acquiring more language, so let's jump into it. The first thing we're going to discuss is that, well, this doesn't come from nowhere, so there's a lot of misinformation that we need to extract from this conversation. However, we're going to start with the end in mind, and that is we're getting to ACTFL's guiding principles on this. So ACTFL, the American Council of Teaching Foreign Language, is what guides most of the decisions for teachers in the North American sphere, and it's also very much mirroring and related to CEFR if you're out of that sphere. So here are some guiding principles that we have from ACTFL about what really is the role of grammar. So I'm going to put a research link below here where you can see more about this concept here.
Speaker 1:But number seven of the ACTFL guiding principles is that grammar in context as a concept is how we see grammar instruction and its role in the classroom. And here's a quote from ACTFL. It says grammar is an important element of communication, but research shows that explicit teaching of grammar has little effect on people's language acquisition, comprehension or writing abilities. So since those are the main goals that we have in class increasing acquisition, increasing comprehension I would add interaction to that or writing abilities. We've seen from the research here. It's demonstrated that that has very little effect on the outcomes that we want in our classrooms. So with that in mind, we also need to look at the definition of proficiency, which is focusing on proficiency means you're focusing on what students can do with the language, not what they know about it as well. As this whole idea that we know from second language acquisition research as well is that if your goal is for students to communicate better, the only way that you can increase communicative ability is putting students in communicative contexts. So if anything, grammar instruction, especially explicit grammar instruction, is very much a sidebar to support that goal. But with all of that being said, that does not mean that it's easy to let this go or to move beyond what we know to be a really intense part of what most teachers are experiencing in the classroom every day, which is a grammar-driven program.
Speaker 1:So let's talk a little bit about what actually is grammar. What even is it for the second language acquisition definition? So we're talking about, grammar is what allows us to organize sound into words and words into sentences, which is what makes language complex. So it's the whole kit and caboodle, the whole system. It is much, much more than just simple features. And I know that when you think of grammar, you're probably thinking of features, the ones that are easy to boil down and explain and put into a worksheet, like conjugations, por versus para, things like that. But that's not really what grammar is. It's honestly just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 1:So if you've ever studied second language acquisition or if you're really into it, like I am, then you may have seen before that there are actually five properties of grammar. We want to keep this as concise as possible, so we're not going to get into the five properties today, but just so that you are, if you want to explore this a little bit on your own, there are. These are the five Phonetics, which is sound, phonology, the rules of how those sounds are combined Morphology, which is the rules of word formation. Syntax, which is the rule of sentence formation, and then semantics, so how meaning is expressed by words and sentences. There's also this element of prescriptive versus descriptive grammar. So there's what grammar theoretically looks like in academic settings and in textbooks and things that are handed down by authorities, and then there's what people actually use on a daily basis. So there is a difference between that. So, with that in mind, well, what's actually true about grammar in class? It's actually a surface level definition of a lot of complicated structures and features that we really barely understand ourselves.
Speaker 1:And the important thing to note is that grammar is not linear. It's very messy. However, it's predictable. I like to say it's like a toddler up two hours past nap time. It's a mess and you don't know exactly what you're going to see, in what order, but you know what to expect. You can expect meltdowns, you can expect yelling, you can expect tears for no reason, all of those. So grammar is a lot like that, where it is pretty messy, how it ends up in our heads, but it's predictable. I like to call it the black hole of SLA. If you like anything about astronomy. You might know that black holes you can't actually see them, but we see the results of them all around and black holes are one of the most complex and out there things that physics studies because there's so many unknowns about it. But we can see some finite ripple effects that happen around black holes that allow us to identify them. And that's what grammar is like. Grammar is the result of this really complex linguistic system being played out and really important for what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1:This is a quote from Bill Van Patten, whose books are really helpful to understand this concept. We did this as part of the Practical Proficiency Network, my PD program. We did a summer book study on, while we're on the Topic, which is an AFL-endorsed book and publication by Bill Van Patten that talks a lot about the role of grammar in your class and debunking a lot of the common misconceptions around it. And in that book it's emphasized very often that what we see in guides or in textbooks you know when you're just straight up looking up, like what is the morphology of this word or what is the syntax, which is like the order of how words work in different languages. You know if you're working with a romance language like Spanish or French. You know that that syntax is a little bit flipped to what an L1 language learner coming from English is going to experience. So why is that? Why is that rule there, you know, like why do the adjectives come after the noun instead of before most of the time? Well, these are all results of an intense grammar system, using all of those different features, that has a lot of different parts to it. If you've ever taken linguistics, you know that there's a lot of invisible levers being pulled that create that system that makes sense in a specific language. So, with that in mind, let's talk about linear grammar.
Speaker 1:Linear grammar is something that has been holding our field back for several decades and I would love for this myth to be destroyed. If you remember nothing else, remember this what is linear grammar? Linear grammar is this false idea that we have that grammar moves in a linear fashion, that you start with the quote unquote simplest ideas from grammar such as and we're going to go in again just one tiny piece of the whole grammar SLA picture. But let's go to our classic fave textbooks, where you open up the textbook and you can see from the table of contents that we are moving from present regulars to present tense, irregulars, to then progressive, to then simple past tense, to then complex past tense, and then irregular past tense, and then maybe future, simple future, irregular future, and then we do subjunctive, regular, subjunctive, irregular subjunctive, and it keeps going with more complex stuff, moving in what you could say is an upward progression, linear progression, and that's how many people like to manage what they teach and when, thinking that this is a great way to look at and design a program that moves up in complexity and difficulty.
Speaker 1:However, linear grammar literally does not exist outside of textbooks. The brain doesn't even acquire language this way. There's a lot of research behind at least Spanish and English, and there's more to be done with other languages, but for Spanish and English, we know that the brain acquires things in a specific order. If you've ever heard the term late acquired, that's what we're talking about. It happens by order of frequency in used speech, not by what's neat or what's easy, medium, difficult or what is a linear progression into more simple, into more complicated timeframes, moods and tenses. So that is not how language works. It's not neat, it's actually quite messy.
Speaker 1:So here are some examples for you to think about. Is that in English when an L1 learner no-transcript, all of those learners for English acquire the present tense pretty well in every other subject pronoun except for third person, because in English all of those are the same. Like I jump, you jump, we jump, they jump. Those are all the same, right. But we found that people in their both their L1 and their L2 will acquire past tense and future, and more than that, before they start to really master and finalize the she jumps adding of an S, and the reason why is because it's not actually that frequent in spoken speech and it doesn't follow the same pattern, so it's difficult to pick up on. So there's an example of where the brain acquires all this present tense information and then we'll move on to what we might think of as more complicated stuff, but like past tense used a lot, by the way, or other irregular present tense used even more than regular right, the reason it's regular is because it's used a lot, so it gets tweaked and moved and warped around over the centuries. And then we have this regular, neat, cute little rule which is that you add an S for the third person in English and kids don't even acquire that for a long time, like into their toddler years and L2 learners of English. It will take them a long time to get that. So that's just one of many, many examples of where the way that our brain acquires language is. I shouldn't say completely nothing in science is completely, but that is very much based off of orders of frequency and how well you can distinguish it from other features, which is called saliency.
Speaker 1:So it's important for us, when we're thinking about what is the role of grammar, that it should be supporting these goals. This is a huge mission for me when working with world language teachers and if I was looking at your curriculum, I would say hey, you beautiful teacher. The key component to any second language acquisition environment is really this high quality, compelling, understandable, crystal clear input, structured to follow your target language's natural order of acquisition and frequency of use, with appropriate opportunities for output and self-reflection. Those are all really important pieces of your program. So we should instead be thinking about how can grammar support these goals instead of grammar is the goal. Now you might be thinking that's all well and good, but like this is a very pervasive theme. It's in a lot of programs that we are very grammar first and that we decide what units to teach in order to support grammar goals, because that's really how it is in most classrooms that I'm working with.
Speaker 1:It's not the other way around. The other way around is our eventual goal, which is that you have your units of learning and your focus of study and the chunks and the ideas and the communicative context that you want your students to be able to function in and thrive, and then grammar supports those goals. Usually, people are doing it the other way. Where it's we want students to thrive with this grammar and we're going to set up communicative goals to help them with that. But it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1:So where does this come from? Why is it so common? Well, it comes from a legacy of 19th century language education. So when we were comes from a legacy of 19th century language education, so when we were really into this idea of you have to be a very smart conversationalist, we were doing Greek and Latin ancient Greek and ancient Latin for literacy, not for acquisition. So students in those 19th century classrooms and in those classical educations that were based off of the university system at the time, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, those students were learning Greek so that they could participate in conversations and understand root words in English and all of that. It was really to make better readers who could be good conversational partners at the dinner table in their L1. It was not at all related to having functional acquisition of another language Like that idea existed very much so in that time frame and has for a long time, because it used to be a lot more important to Americans that we could speak another language, because we did a lot of commerce with a lot of other nations and people so well and we do that, of course, now too, we're in a globalized society.
Speaker 1:But what I mean is that there wasn't any tool to help you with that unless you had a translator, and those weren't always available. So it was far more important for people to get functional communicative ability rather than have that like good and fancy literacy ability. So, since our school system functions based off of the examples that we have from a lot of this 19th century educational policy, which is, as you can guess, pretty outdated that we're working with an outdated paradigm of how students acquire another language, so you can certainly teach for literacy in your program and make sure that your students are well and good able to read more higher level Spanish if you teach them a lot of explicit grammar, but will they be able to access that in communicative situations? The research says probably not. So we're going to move with what the research says, which is that the more that you have access to communicative situations at your level, where you are given the tools and the skills you need to interact, it's much more higher level, by the way, it's not just memorization, and it ensures that those centers of your brain which are separate from recall and memory and accuracy, that they grow instead of just the recall memory accuracy part. However, all that being said, that's the recall memory accuracy part.
Speaker 1:However, all that being said, grammar is not the enemy. You can check out the other episode that is coming out well, that came out before this. Talking about here are some practical ways that grammar can support your proficiency goals, not be the enemy of it. I would also say, too, that with this outdated surface level linear model of grammar structure, that a big thing that's going on here, too, is that we think that it has to be that way so that we have more rigorous instruction, like the more complex your tenses get, the more complex your class is. But what you're asking students to do when you present a difficult, intense structure that is difficult for students to really wrap their minds around. What you're asking them to do is much more like a science class, where you're asking them to wrap their heads around an academic concept, but asking them to use that tense in real communicative situations, like when you ask them a question and then they have to respond to you without notes, using spontaneous prior language that's already in their heads. That's actually much higher on Bloom's level of taxonomy.
Speaker 1:On Bloom's taxonomy levels, I mean for classroom efficacy, and it also is not just recall, memorization and concept understanding. It is that super fast, subconscious process of processing input and responding, which is extremely difficult, and your students need a lot of support to do that. So we've had this lingering for a while, driving a lot of the train in grammar, and so we need to make sure that we dispel this notion that well, is grammar bad? Well, at the end of the day, think of it this way what I see in many classrooms and teachers and programs and districts that I work with is that it's still very common to have perhaps a multiple choice test that corrects the spelling of things that we often teach in level one, like masculine and feminine, which is actually a late acquired idea. Students can understand the concept in level one, but they can't really produce accurately most of the time until they've had quite a lot of exposure to this new binary form of language that they're not used to if they're coming from an English background.
Speaker 1:With this whole idea, being able to accurately identify masculine and feminine doesn't really add more words, it doesn't add more fluency into your student's language system and it doesn't really help them understand what those words actually mean. It just helps them understand why they're spelled with an E or not in French, or an O or an A or some of those typical masculine feminine rules which, by the way, those rules break themselves all the time. So it's confusing for students as well, because there's a lot of exceptions to each grammar rule. Because, again, even something as simple as masculine and feminine, if you teach a romance language, is directed by all these invisible pulley levers like the black hole of grammar that we don't even fully understand. And in second language acquisition, linguists are spending lots of time decoding and understanding. So what does that mean for us in class? Well, if you go deep into masculine and feminine in your level one Spanish class, it will help them spell better Sure, and that's helpful.
Speaker 1:They may know that A usually means feminine, but how is that really going to help them when it comes time to speak with a native speaker or when it comes time to sign? If you teach ASL Like knowing the grammar rules isn't going to help their hands be more dexterous and fluid when they're speaking or interacting. So is it really getting you towards the goals that you have of more fluency, more communication as well as more language in their heads? Not really. However, teaching grammar in context is very helpful to students, especially at certain stages in their journey. Not really. However, teaching grammar in context is very helpful to students, especially at certain stages in their journey. So it's not like grammar doesn't have a role.
Speaker 1:The easiest and simplest way to think of it is this is that if your students don't have a lot of language in their heads, if they're at the very, very bottom of the ACFL cone of proficiency in that novice low and novice mid they don't even have enough words to apply those rules yet. Proficiency in that novice low and novice mid they don't even have enough words to apply those rules yet. But if they've started to fill their cone a little bit and they're. In some it's all approximate, right. But if it's somewhere between like levels three and five, or they've had five years or so of language and so they've got words to work with and they've got structures to work with, a lot of memorized phrases, and they might not understand how can I recombine these phrases that I know in my own way, using creative language. I'm ready to do that, which is, by the way, the marker of like. Your student is transitioning out of novice high into intermediate low. So once they get there, yes, they absolutely need your help with accuracy, because it's going to help them go further to their proficiency goals. So grammar can be helpful. It's helpful for declarative knowledge, which is stuff that helps students have more accurate speech, and it should always be taught in context for meaning to help them produce something.
Speaker 1:Now, what if you're like me and you love grammar? I don't love grammar in English. I use incorrect grammar all the time because I'm a fan of the way that I grew up speaking, which is not exactly correct English. But if you yourself love language and you love studying grammar and understanding how your language works, which you have fallen in love with, then you know the eternal stroke of being a language teacher. We're here because we're nerds. We love our language, we want to understand everything about it, pick it apart and put it back together.
Speaker 1:But go back to your days of being a language major and look around the room in your class. How many other kids were really into the structure of your language when you were in those early classes and a student again in college? Or if you're a native speaker, like when you were learning your L1, were you like really into the idea of like diving deep into those grammar concepts? Probably, but looking around at the other students that were either in your class, if you were like me and you were taking Spanish in the undergraduate level, people would always ask me to be on their team whenever we were doing something in Spanish 202, because they knew that I liked the language, so I understood how it worked. I studied the grammar, but all the other four kids in my group did not. They hated it. They thought it was really boring.
Speaker 1:So I would keep that in mind, that A lot of our students are really not here for it, which, even if you get nothing else from this episode about the role of grammar in your class, an important thing to really note is that. Is it possible that, instead of being rigorous, you are pushing a lot of kids out of your program because they don't intense grammar features that, if you were honest with yourself and you actually asked your students to test their abilities in this in a communicative context, without any notes or help, is what you're doing helping them produce more or interact more or understand more? Is it? If so, that's great, but is it helping as much as you think it is? We know from the research that understanding a language feature doesn't help. You use it in context, and that's really what we're going for, and many of your students are feeling really overwhelmed with the amount of grammar that you're throwing at them, because I often see programs that have such an intense progression and they never allow for students to do what I call the free play days, like the practice days.
Speaker 1:If you played a sport or if you grew up, like me, playing both sports and music, you know that there's only a small amount of time in the sports realm where you're learning a new skill, like how to throw a ball more accurately or how to catch more accurately, whatever. Then the most important part is, after you do that mini lesson of like hey, this is how you put your hips into it and use your core, blah, blah, blah. Or if you play cello, like I did, like this is how you sit up straighter and this is how you position your hands and you do your scale so that you can play this piece faster. All of that, you do that instruction part for a little bit and then the rest. The most valuable time that you have with that new skill which language is a skill, not a subject is that time that you get to just play, to just play, to just throw the ball, to play the instrument, to play the sport, to communicate, to interact in the language. That's the most valuable part. So if you are moving from tense to tense to tense to tense every six to eight weeks, like most programs are, you're doing all instruction and no practice time, no play time, and that's not fun and it's not effective.
Speaker 1:So if you love grammar, I'm here with you. We all love grammar, we all love those instructional moments. But we are the outlier. We are not the average student that we have every day, who really just needs more time and more great communicative setups to figure out the patterns of some of these structures on their own. So let's summarize where a good practical approach to proficiency and grammar in a proficiency program can be, and that is your grammar instruction, especially when it's in context as a concept, will really help your students to have access to more accurate language, but it doesn't put more language in their heads, which means that it will help students navigate the language that's already there. That's the role of grammar. So if you in different phases of your program, grammar will have a different role, but it will never be the driving force of a program. Research has proven that. Pretty heavy stuff, right, I know the linear grammar in particular is one that's hard to get a grasp on because it is so outrageously common.
Speaker 1:So what's your next step? Your next step is to figure out where grammar has been monopolizing your program and the ways that it has been driving your decisions in class, and see if you can instead look at all of those decisions that we often make, saying things like oh, I can't wait for my students to have a really good grasp on present tense. And instead saying things like let's teach them more present tense and let's go over what the present tense morphology looks like, even more conjugation. Let's instead look to how can my students interact more with the present tense in a living, breathing, communicative situation, whether that be reading it, whether that be producing it when it's time, when they've had a lot of input, or whether it be interacting with it with you? So how much can you help them have access to the present tense and see the present tense in action, rather than teaching them how it works, which is a small part an important part, but it's a small part of what language really does look like? That's what we got for today's pretty hefty conversation on grammar. I know y'all it's a big one.
Speaker 1:So the role of grammar, too, is something that I would say unnecessarily divides teachers. It is okay if your grammar in your program is taking up too much space right now and you're not quite sure how to troubleshoot it or fix it. It's okay, and the main reason is that you need some good, solid support and you need some creative and practical strategies in order to slowly move away and transition out of that type of program and also give yourself some grace and understand that a lot of materials are still set up this way because we're still catching up. There's a huge gap between what research teachers have access to and the materials that reflect that research. It's very, very slow, which is unfortunate, so you're working up against a lot of systems that are still pretty programmer. So, with that in mind, I'm hoping that this really helped you to understand what is the role of grammar in your program and we can move forward with grammar in a new place.
Speaker 1:As always, if you got any more questions about grammar in your program or just anything that has to do with a proficiency-oriented classroom, hit me up, because this came from a question that I got from a listener. You can, in the show notes below or, if you're on YouTube, look at the comment section below or whatever that little box thing is, and I'll have in there a link for you to submit a question that can get answered on the air, just like this one. So thank you so much for these many listener questions that I put into one idea, which is what is the role of grammar in your class and what are some ways that we can further understand that, especially if we're working with colleagues that don't have the same view of grammar as us. So until next time, I hope that you're having a lot of fun hanging out with and communicating with your students, and I'll see you on the next episode. Bye for now.