The Emergence of Grammar

While wary at first of even reading about grammer (much less doing it myself!), I liked how this reading talked about "grammar emerging" through different activities, like prewriting and art and literature. I don't know why it hasn't been taught this way before--all I remember in learning about grammer is opening up a book and trying to diagram a sentence, and once I got to Structure of the English Language last semester, everything that I had (maybe) once learned had been long ago depleted from my memory. I remember being in that class and thinking, I'm going to be an english teacher and I hardly know anything about grammar! If, as teachers, we are going to be effective in teaching grammar, we are going to have to be creative and slip it into lessons and activities we are already doing with out students--not so that they won't notice it, but so that they will notice it but it an engaging way, in a way that makes sense of it and puts it into real-life context. If it is taught as something that can be used in writing and as something that makes the writing better, I think that students will be more likely to see the use of it and to remember it not as something that is counterproductive, but as something that can be a valuable tool.