As I revisit some old posts from years ago, the one below from 2009, I see that my thinking about basic aspects of our work hasn’t changed much. I interpret that as a good thing:
I think that, in curriculum design, grammar should be taught only after the lower levels of study (levels one and two) of constant and uninterrupted comprehensible input. Whether we like this idea or not, the curricula of the future will be designed in this way. The old two dimensional manipulation of grammar rules and fill in the blank worksheets is over. Stick a fork in it.
Accordingly, I have found a great use for the Amsco Deuxième Livre (R214W – not the other one), which is by far the best grammar book in French that I have ever seen. I think that there is one in Spanish too. Note that it’s name has nothing to do with second year study as the book companies have branded it. It is comprehensive and includes, in my opinion, grammar points addressing ALL French grammar a student would need to know up to and including the AP level. (I used that Amsco book for 24 years from level I to AP before I learned about comprehensible input).
My idea is that we teach our students correct grammar simply by speaking the language correctly in our classrooms for the first two years, thus circumventing the need to deconstruct grammar into a laborious, written form when we are trying to turn the students on, not off, to language study.
Once the students know the language, and have heard it and read it for a few years, the writing can then follow easily at the right time (at the upper levels of study) and the Amsco Deuxième Livre can then find its true usefulness with students. Instead of becoming an instrument of tortuous verb conjugational dark hellish angst for kids, it finds its true elegance in its use at the upper levels, as a reference book for the motivated student, the ones who truly want to know more about the language that they understand so well.
So, for the first two years at least, I see the ideal high school curriculum as being filled with a lot of fun input – reading and listening – with limited writing and then only in the form of free writes without paying much attention to grammatical accuracy. The student would emerge from such a program with much more than they are emerging with now, in terms of both knowledge and confidence, not to mention overall satisfaction with the educational product provided by the school.
Eli Blume, the author of the Deuxième Livre, was a genius in grammar analysis in terms of what to present in what order and in what way, and the book reflects it. It’s just what we need to align the introduction of grammar into our narrative approach – but only after those first few years of pure CI + P, and, then, only for kids who want it, who are drawn to it. Grammar study, as with speaking, should never be forced.