Language teaching differs dramatically from teaching other school subjects. In language instruction, all we have to do is speak to our students in ways that they understand.
That’s all that is needed. Everything else is taken care of by the powerful unconscious mind, which we give so little credit to when we design language curriculums, thinking that it’s all about something other than the research and the Communication Standard.
If we think that our students need to know the grammar, then we are mistaken. They don’t need to know the grammar. They need to hear and read the language (comprehensible input) and THEN they can learn about the grammar later, if they want to.
Learning about the grammar when first starting in with a language is just foolish. How do we know that? It’s because we’ve tried that approach for at least a hundred years with terrible results.
The study of grammar throws a blanket over the problems of inequities and exclusion in language education in our country. By making kids study grammar much earlier than is required and proper, we pave the road for the privileged kids. I can defend that statement with massive amounts of information, but that is a topic for another time.