I'm another grammar fan as, being a migrant pre-ESL days, i found it so helpful in learning to write English correctly. I think I had a 'sink or swim' education as far as any support for migrant children was concerned.

By the time I got to high school I could speak it fluently and even had the required flattened "a" (after many hours of practice in front of a mirror). But as we know with most of our ESL students, those complex tenses can be a dead give-away. European languages are so pernickety about time!

I must admit that I learned all my grammar through Latin (or else!) and I am grateful that it was drummed into me for 5 solid years at school, though I can't imagine teachers getting away with that pedagogy today. I can appreciate the difficulty people who do not study a second language must have in coming to terms with this fairly abstract discipline, especially when English does not conform to a set of rules in the same way as, say, the romance languages. That is why I like some of the insights gained through functional grammar and whole text analysis as it can be less rigid and can take into account less formal levels of usage.

The difficulties I see in teaching grammar are: teaching it at students' points of need and still managing to develop a grammar program; embedding it into English lessons at points of relevance and at the same time ensuring that students can get a coherent sense of grammar for their writing; finding pedagogies that are engaging and purposeful to make the grammar memorable.

I hope that our webinar course will help people address these issues.