One of the chief goals of chapter one is to explore with students the various meanings of grammar and grammatical rule. Many students begin the class with the notion that grammatical rules are solely concerned with matters of correctness and incorrectness and that these prescriptive rules must be memorized. One way of pointing out to students the limits of memorization is to contrast the rules of English described by formal linguists, those known to applied linguists, those known to the best teachers, and those taught to students. Using an overhead projector, we like to talk about the following diagram adapted from Steven Krashen, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982), pp. 92-93.
