[Teach-grammar] Welcome to Teach Grammar

[Richard Hudson]

Dear Grammar-teachers,
Thanks for joining this list, which now has 121 subscribers. And thanks 
to all of you who left comments on the webpage at 
http://teach-grammar.com/email-list. And thanks, of course, to the 
Linguist List for hosting this list.

I'll start with the house-keeping stuff:

  * If you simply hit Reply, your reply will only go to the individual
    who sent the message you're replying to. If you want it to go to the
    whole list, just copy the list address and paste it into the To
    field. I can easily change this setting if you collectively want
    replies to go by default to the whole list.
  * All past messages will be archived, and you'll be able to view them
    at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/teach-grammar/.
  * I expect grammar teachers have pretty much the same range of
    emotions as the rest of the population, so do try to be nice, or at
    least polite, even with people you disagree strongly with!
  * I'm writing in English, but if you don't feel comfortable in
    English, and your language is a fairly widely known one, try it. The
    worst that can happen is that no-one will understand it. But please
    try to use English in the Subject field.
  * When you post your first message, please introduce yourself briefly
    (subject, language, country; e.g. 'I teach first-language English in
    the UK').
  * I think you can control your own subscription via the website where
    you subscribed; don't forget that one of your options is the digest,
    which bundles messages into just one message per day.

The first reason for creating this list is that grammar teachers, or 
would-be grammar teachers, can be found in many different places, 
teaching different subjects in different languages, and I have the 
strong impression that  communication across these boundaries hardly 
exists; so please don't assume that everyone on the list teaches grammar 
in the same context as you. If you're an adult EFL teacher, your context 
is very different from that of a school French teacher in the UK, and so 
on. But of course the second reason for creating the list is to 
encourage communication across these boundaries, in the belief that many 
of the issues are the same.

I hope that you'll feel free to post messages to the list. Just to set 
the ball rolling, here's a very brief list of topics you may want to 
discuss:

  * How can you help learners to enjoy grammar (either by making it fun
    or by making it interesting)?
  * How can teachers of foreign-languages and first language support
    each other?
  * Can diagramming play a part?
  * What terminology should you use?
  * Why do you teach grammar?
  * What research is relevant?

But I'm sure there are plenty of other topics that will come up.

Over to you! I hope you'll find the list helpful.

Best wishes, Dick



-- 
Richard Hudson (dickhudson.com)

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