In reading about the ineffectiveness of teaching grammar, what I mainly wonder about is how instructors are teaching it. There are many very bad ways to teach grammar, lord knows. In my view, whether or not it makes sense to teach grammar in first-year comp depends, like everything else, on the students in the class and what their needs are. As a TESOL-trained instructor with fifteen years of ESL teaching experience, I can say that students whose first language is not English have different instructional needs when it comes to learning writing than students whose first language is English. Both need to learn grammar, but need different instructional approaches to it.

In first-year composition, I rarely have time to focus much on grammar instruction, but when I do, I use sentence combining exercises. Interestingly enough, these are noted as the one “successful” method of teaching grammar in the article (which really makes me wonder what the other methods were.)

I find students enjoy the  puzzle-solving aspect to sentence combining. It is also a flexible activity that can be done in pairs or as group work or individually. I think it works because it is a more organic approach to solving sentence structure problems, in a context that draws from real-world revision skills rather than what we traditional think of as “grammar drills.”