http://www.chinapost.com.tw/commentary/letters/2012/01/18/329352/Grammar-is.htm
Grammar is vital, but plays second fiddle to efficient communication
January 18, 2012 11:54 am TWN, By Emilio Venezian
The Father Bauer column of Sunday, Jan. 1, 2012, was very much to the point but I would take it further.
Sometimes a decent grasp of grammar is vital, especially when you vocabulary is small and even more so if you do what I have come to regard as “the Chinese thing”: looking up every word you are not 100 percent familiar with in the dictionary without thinking about grammar. The problem is that if you take the words away from their context the chances that you hit on the right meaning are small. The adage “still waters run deep,” which I often use as an illustration, has four words, but each can be any one of several parts of speech and every part of speech has more than one meaning. You have over 100 different combinations of parts of speech and over 7,000 different combinations of Chinese characters or combinations of characters that might be assigned to those four words. So if you can process any one combination in one second, you still have to work for several days to grasp the meaning without grammar. We just cannot afford that kind of time for four words. Being able to parse the sentence, or at least to recognize which of the four words is functioning as the verb, cuts the possibilities down by a large factor.
However, the function of language is to communicate ideas in my head to other people. Grammar is, of course, also important to some extent as a resolver of ambiguities. Emphasizing grammar too heavily, and penalizing students for mistakes in grammar serves little purpose other than driving students to do the obvious: reduce their ideas to the simplest level and not communicating what is in their heads. Students, even at the graduate level, are so concerned with being penalized or losing face because of mistakes that they act as though saying nothing and making no mistakes is better than trying to express an opinion. That dread is paralyzing and it becomes impossible to evaluate what they really understand or whether they are repeating what they read with no understanding at all.
Many English proverbs are not grammatically correct. “Practice makes perfect” and “All that glitters is not gold” are two simple examples. Renowned authors occasionally use made-up words such as “civilness” (rather than civility), but that does not interfere greatly with communication. If the purpose of teaching a second language is to enable students to communicate, we should grade on the ability to get mature thoughts across, not on whether the grammar correctly expresses an oversimplified thought or a thought that was not what the writer or speaker intended.
My comments: In my opinion, grammar is important, but not the most important. For a beginner, fluency should come before accuracy.
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