Grammar as Experimentation

Abstract

The goal of this work is to revisit the past years discussion that has been made in Brazil about the teaching of grammar, arguing that this teaching can especially contribute to a better native (as well as foreign) language understanding, to the extent that it is based on scientific knowledge. We hereby stand for a grammar teaching work supported by two concepts: a) grammar enables to understand why a linguistic expression means what it means (Franchi, 1987); b) learning grammar is to learn how to make explicit rules already known (yet unconsciously) by the speak- er, and also to learn to reflect on these rules (along with Perini (1985), Larson (2010), Pilati et al. (2011), Costa et. al. (2011), Borges Neto (2012a; 2012b), Foltran (2013), Ferreira e Vicente (2015), Perini (2016), Bosque (2016), Pires de Oliveira e Quarezemin (2016), Vieira e Brandão (2016), inter alia.). Within this context, our contribution is to raise some new conceptual and working approaches which we believe to be crucial to clarify the alleged learning-teaching con- ception. Along with the first concept, we argue against the idea that the grammar does not help at all with text reading and writing - a thesis widely defended by some professionals who support the language learning by means of texts only. Although we agree that the central aim of language learning is to contribute to the citizenship formation, in which the reading and comprehension of text genre is the goal, we defend that grammar has an important role in the acquisition of this knowledge. As for the second concept, we demonstrate that the teaching of grammar is a tool to make an internal knowledge explicit, allowing a broader understanding domain in two direc- tions: a) to develop a scientific reflection on a natural fact, the language, via a methodology that can be generalized to any other scientific field; b) to acknowledge the natural languages mecha- nisms. On these grounds, the teaching of grammar can no longer be understood as the teaching of the standard language (as in Faraco, 2008), although no one denies the school's assignment in enabling the mastery of the standard variety. We conclude this work by showing the necessity to drive apart the teaching of grammar from the learning of the standard language. Only this way both works can make sense and produce positive results.