Chapter 3: Grammar and Writing in Spoken Language Study
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My personal experience
I had the great advantage of growing up in a home in which grammatically correct English was spoken. As I progressed through primary school and on into secondary school, my language ability matured as a result of my home and school environments.
In retrospect I believe that, for the most part, I used proper sentence structure and pronunciation because that is what I heard in my home. However, when I went to school, I needed to learn grammar. I — like probably most of my classmates — did not learn to speak because I studied grammar. Rather, I was able to learn how to do grammar exercises because I already knew how to speak.
Certainly, I learned many important things about English through grammar study. But it was of importance to me only because I had already achieved basic English fluency. I did not learn to speak English as a result of English grammar lessons.
I also took two years of Spanish in secondary school. We started with basic grammar. We wrote exercises every day. But we almost never heard spoken Spanish, much less spoke it ourselves. After secondary school graduation, I could neither speak Spanish nor understand Spanish grammar.
Within 10 years of my secondary school graduation, I spent a year in Paris studying French. I had the great fortune of enrolling in a French language school that emphasized spoken French to the complete exclusion of written exercises. Not only did I learn French grammar — meaning that I learned to use sentences that communicated what I intended to say to a French listener — but because French and Spanish verb construction is similar, I also began to understand the Spanish grammar which made no sense to me in secondary school. Because I could read and write in English, I had no difficulty reading French. It was a simple transfer of knowledge from reading in English to reading in French.
Later, I studied an African language. Because school-based language courses were almost non-existent in that country, all of my language training was done by way of recorded language drills that I adapted from local radio broadcasts. I also had a university student as my language helper. Yet, I learned how to structure a sentence (which is applied grammar) and write in that language much more quickly than had I been studying grammar and writing independently of the spoken language.
