A grammar for teaching: characteristics and objectives

Abstract

Learning language at school means learning grammar as a conscious and explicit knowledge about language, as a means to reflect on language use aiming at using language more consciously and in accordance with the different situations of discursive interplay, either from the perspective of the agent (speaker or a writer) or from the perspective of the interlocutor (a reader or a conversation partner). This article deals with the term pedagogical grammar (PG) explicitly referring to this goal, but also considering other aspects that a PG should be addressing: as a framework of reference to the social norms concerning language use, rejecting the idea of becoming a bunch of fixed and imposed norms; as a framework of reference to build the syntactic structures that the language system allows; as a tool helping to select among these structures to match the user’s discursive perspective; and as a means to progressively build and systematize reliable knowledge of grammatical concepts. In this respect, procedural and methodological aspects become unavoidable issues to conceive grammatical knowledge as a tool to think reflectively in learning situations at school.