[Tomisimo]

Foreign language teachers really need to study language acquisition theory from a linguistic perspective. What things aid language acquisition/learning and what things don't. When you teach language, you're always teaching grammar, period. The question is, should you teach it explicitly or not? My opinion is that the explicit teaching of grammar rules actually hinders language learning for the majority of people. Why? Most people's knowledge of grammar doesn't go much beyond noun, verb and adjective. If you start throwing around terms like gender, declination, case, accusative, nominative, conjugation-- people's minds actually close off to what you're saying, since you've already alienated them. I've found for example when teaching Spanish I don't even mention the term gender. I say Spanish has four words for the word "the", and which one you use is determined by the word that follows it. La goes with casa, and el goes with perro etc. And after giving out lots of examples, someone will ask if la goes with all words that end in 'a' etc. and it gets a discussion going. But the important thing is to not mention gender, determiner, article, definite article, number, noun and all the "grammar" terms. On the other hand, if someone is comfortable with grammar and grammar terms, then an explicit study of grammar can be used as a shortcut to assimilate language. But it is no replacement for practice.