Just to continue on the topic of course book grammar: my main problem with

course book grammar is less to do with whether they teach will before going
to, or the future passive as an entirely novel (i.,e. non-derived) entity,
but that they teach grammar AT ALL - in this kind of “structure of the
day” approach - the delivery model of learning. This does not mean I am
anti-grammar - teachers need to know their grammar fairly well so as to be
able to respond to the linguistic challenges thrown up by texts and
students. But (as I said in a piece in the EL Gazette in January that was
wrongly attributed to Deborah Cameron):

“More important, it seems to me, is that teachers have a sound knowledge

of their students’ grammar - I don’t mean their students’ mother tongue
grammar (although that wouldn’t be a bad thing) - but a knowledge of their
students’ developing interlanguage grammar - because this surely is what
we should be teaching to, not to specifications laid down in some
course book or syllabus. Having a sound knowledge of your students’ grammar
means being sensitive to their current level of development, what they can
do and what they can’t do, so as to be able to lead them through one zone
of proximal development, and into the next.”

When I wrote this I thought it was a fairly original thought, but now I
find that Dave Willis said more or less the same thing in 1994:

“In helping learners manage their insights into the target language we
should be conscious that our starting point is the learner’s grammar of
the language. It is the learner who has to make sense of the insights
derived from input, and learners can only do this by considering new
evidence about the language in the light of their current model of the
language. This argues against presenting them with pre-packaged structures
and implies that they should be encouraged to process text for themselves
so as to reach conclusions which make sense in terms of their own systems”
(A Lexical Approach, in Bygate el al: Grammar and the Language Teacher)”

“Willis’s thrust is on text-driven discovery and analysis, i.e. a

receptive grammar. But I am interested in developing this along more
productive lines - i.e. using the learner’s production to “draw out” the
learner’s grammar - kind of grammar plus one. That’s why I like Vygotsky’s
notion of “the zone of proximal development” - the idea that we should be
teaching not to the ripe but the ripening intellect - and not imposing a
user’s grammar on the learner, but extending the learner’s grammar by
working on what the learner can do (with assistance) not what the learner
ought to know. This suggests a more task-driven pedagogy: as I said
somewhere else - a presentation methodology is a deficit one, in that it
assumes there is something the learner doesn’t know and attempts to plug
the gap. A task-based methodology, on the other hand, is based on the
assumption that there is something that the learner CAN DO, and the
teacher works at helping him or her to do it better. It is therefore a
pedagogy of possibility, grounded in the learner’s needs - what Candlin
called “empowering learners to make meanings for themselves”.

What does this in fact mean in practice? It means

a) the teacher mediates
directly in the learning process (rather than simply engineering contact
between learners and materials)
b) the teacher works on shaping the learner’s output, and their
developing awareness of how the language system can serve their needs,
by, for example, recasting their output so that it in turn becomes new input
for the learner - a cycle that is nicely captured in this description
by Earl Stevick of his “favourite” learning activity:
Another of my favourite techniques is to tell something to a speaker of
the language and have that person tell the same thing back to me in
correct, natural form. I then tell the same thing again, bearing in mind
the way in which I have just heard it. This cycle can repeat itself two or
three times... An essential feature of this technique is that the text we
are swapping back and forth originates with me, so that I control the
content and do not have to worry about generating nonverbal images to
match what is in someone else’s mind. (Stevick 1989: 148)”