Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, November 1970, in Los Angeles, California. (DS)

To provide some perspective on current issues and challenges concerning the role of grammar in language teaching, methodological trends of the past 25 years are reviewed. A proposal for a decision-making strategy is provided for resolving the controversy regarding how much grammar one should teach to language learners. (VWL)

Suggests that for improving syntactic fluency and the overall quality of compositions, exercises should be based on generative rhetoric. These exercises in which students supply the content of the sentence from a list of suggested structures are superior to sentence-combining exercises that provide the student with all the information. (PMJ)

Argues that there are very good reasons for developing discourse grammars for second-language (L2) teaching. Exemplifies the criteria for moving from sentence-based grammar to the discourse level. The criteria are based on pedagogical and descriptive problems in grammar that sentence-based approaches cannot adequately deal with. (Author/VWL)

Investigates to what extent ESL learners' syntactic errors in written communication cause comprehension breakdown. The variables considered are the omission, insertion, and wrong choice of articles and connectors. Results indicated that errors concerning connectors cause communication breakdown more often than do errors in article usage. (PMJ)