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Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
You left out literacy and the value of teaching language arts. Without these, how can we expect students to communicate with any effectiveness? Language arts have an impact on the other disciplines in this regard. What do we do in language arts? We teach reading and writing. What do we have them read? Grammar textbooks? Maybe we should.
So how do we teach them? With creative works such as stories and novels.
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Grammar is an after-the-fact summarisation of linguistic practice. Linguistic form structures the message, but there is still a message. To write an essay, a student has to go outside the grammar book for knowledge and opinion.
In ancient times, they had kids memorise Homer or Confucius & the other 4 books & 5 classics. "There. Do it like that." You'd pick up the proper form and the content in the process of reproduction. Anglo-American pedagogy seems to be stuck in a reaction against that sort of classicism.