2. Myth of Effectiveness of Grammar Instruction

Feeding the "myth of transience" is the "myth of grammar instruction." Zamel reminds us that although many institutions create courses that focus on language and essay conventions, with a focus on decontextualized rules, such courses are ineffective:

"Those of us who have tried to accommodate institutional demands have… found this to be a troubling and tension-filled undertaking, since even when we focus on standards of language use or conventions of academic discourse, students, especially those who are still acquiring English, are not necessarily more successful in meeting the expectations of other faculty" (516). Research shows that there is little or no transfer from grammar and rule-focused instruction to writing: "There seems to be little carry-over from such instructional efforts to subsequent work since it is the very nature of such narrowly conceptualized instruction that undercuts genuine learning" (Zamel 516).

Leki reminds us of Krashen's research on language acquisition which reveals
that much of the English language is either not governed by rules because it
is idiomatic, and also that linguists are able to describe only a limited number of such rules: "[Krashen] makes the point that linguists claim to know and be able to describe only a small portion of the rules of any natural language. Language teachers know only a small portion of what the linguists know. In their classes, language teachers teach only a small portion of what they know. Of that small portion taught, students learn an even smaller portion. In other words, it is impossible to "learn" a language" (Leki 15).

So much of the English language is idiomatic, ungoverned by rules. While learning the rules that govern the English language is essential, those rules will not take a student very far in learning English. According to Leki, Krashen's research also shows "that the rules that a learner does learn contribute very little to the learner's language ability…In other words, rules learned through error correction and direct instruction in grammar may have a positive, albeit small, effect on language production" (16).