This is the first in a series of seven articles against grammar instruction. Grammar instruction hurts kids. Stop doing it if you still are.
In the past, teachers would take a batch of bricks, called a chapter in a book, and, laboriously, each day, boldly, inflict a kind of analytical pain session on the kids about the nature of those particular bricks and how to arrange them. They were building a grammar house for the kids to base their language study on.
The batches of bricks, the chapters in the book, were presented in a somewhat capricious order, if Krashen’s Natural Order Hypothesis is to be believed. This remarkable hypothesis essentially states that there is a natural pre-determined order in which we can acquire language and it cannot be altered, rendering the order of the chapters in a book somewhat useless. A grammar concept should not be presented to a student if that student is not yet ready to acquire it.
So, when teaching the “relative pronouns” batch of bricks presented in the level 3 book. the teacher would look at “to which” and take the “to” brick and lay it next to the “which” brick on the ground and talk for as much as a class period or more, with worksheets on possible arrangements of the “to” brick and the “which” brick. Angle them this way and that. See how they fit together. (Can you imagine not using or studying “to which or of whom” until three years into your study of a language?)
All the students want to see is the house. Their bored looks state as much. But the teacher, oblivous and stuck in the magical and somewhat infantile thinking that teaching a language in this way actually works, despite no results year after year after year, continues to make the kid stare at those two bricks until the test if over. It’s comically inefficient! Hello! Wake up, people!