Resumen de On teaching grammar
There are two major arguments for including grammar in the university Spanish curriculum: 1) that grammar identifies productive patterns that can serve as organizing principles for learning, and 2) that the structure of Spanish constitutes part of the knowledge that a humanities-based education is designed to impart. Recent research in the focus on form model has superseded the dichotomous debate on acquisition versus learning and provided a research-based justification for using grammar to focus student attention on productive patterns. Grammar should also play a role beyond the basic language sequence; because one of the defining characteristics of a language is its grammar, it is a natural component of cultural studies (a view supported by the ACTFL standards). Restricting the debate about teaching grammar to the realm of applied linguistics produces unrealistic expectations for the language classes and a lost opportunity for engagement with language data in the culture classes.
