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Grammar is an area of English that strikes fear into the hearts of most English learners. Some learners say “I just want to improve my listening and speaking skills, I don’t need to write anything, do I still need to learn grammar?” The answer is “YES!” But why? As we all know, there are four skills for English language learning-listening, reading, speaking and writing. No matter which skills we learn or apply, we want to express and receive clearly ideas for the effective communication. Thus, grammar, which plays an important role in conveying sentence meaning, is quite important for us to learn. "Grammar is the study of how sentences mean. And that is why it helps. If we want to understand the meaning conveyed by sentences, and to develop our ability to express and respond to this meaning, then the more we know about grammar, the better we will be able to carry out these tasks..." "Grammar is the structural foundation of our ability to express ourselves. The more we are aware of how it works, the more we can monitor the meaning and effectiveness of the way we and others use language. It can help foster precision, detect ambiguity, and exploit the richness of expression available in English. And it can help everyone — not only teachers of English but teachers of anything, for all teaching is ultimately a matter of getting to grips with meaning." (Crystal, David. Making Sense of Grammar, Longman, 2004.) As a teacher, I often hear students say they think grammar is difficult, and usually they refer to two parts-tenses and parts of speech. Each word in a sentence can be further classified according to the purpose and the meaning it adds. This is what we refer to as parts of speech. Let's see the simple example below. e.g. The white cat caught a mouse. In this sentence, “the” is definite article, “white” is adjective, “cat” is noun, “caught” is verb, “a” is indefinite article, and “mouse” is noun. “The white dog” is the subject which means the doer of the action. “caught” is the verb denoting the action. “a mouse” is the thing to what the action was applied, or done. If we don’t know grammar, we can’t clarify who is the doer, what happened and to whom the action is applied to or done. After the explanation with some exercises, students could get a general idea of what it is, when and how to use it. And as long as it becomes a habit, it wouldn’t be a big problem which is quite like our native language-the way we speak probably wasn’t taught at school despite using grammar perfectly in our natural, everyday speech. What makes most student confused is the grammar of different tenses. We often talk about three parts of tenses-The past, the present and the future. Each of these tenses have four aspects, simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous. Different tenses have different forms and usages, if we don’t have a fairly good knowledge of grammar, we won’t be able to express or understand the meaning very well. This is not only a matter of writing, but also related to listening, speaking, and reading. All in all, it’s very important for us to learn grammar if we want our English to be as good as native speakers.
