earticle

영어

Although most writing test batteries include grammar as one of scoring criteria, there has been a hot debate concerning the effect of grammar teaching in writing class. Recently, represented by Weaver (1996, 2008), a minor group of researchers emerge and advocate the teaching of grammar for writing. The researchers, including Weaver (1996, 2008), suggest that grammar be taught not in isolation but in context. We note that student writing provides language teachers with a valuable context for teaching grammar. This paper reviews the typical grammar errors made by native college students and examine the corresponding ones made by Korean EFL learners. Korean EFL learners exhibit a remarkable error rate in ‘subject-verb agreement’, ‘article’, ‘subcategorization’, and ‘collocation’. I attribute this to cross-linguistic differences or transfer between the two languages. One of the best ways to narrow such differences might be teaching grammar not in isolation but in context, especially in the context of student writing.