Zipped versions available in Word Perfect or Postscript and unzipped in .rtf (readable in Word or WordPerfect).
To appear in Rebecca S. Wheeler (ed.) Language Alive in the Classroom. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Final version submitted May 1998.
Grammar teaching has almost died out in state schools in the English-speaking world but it is on its way back in the UK and Australia, and to a lesser extent in the USA. The paper reviews the history of these recent changes and makes concrete proposals for the future. The weakness of old-fashioned grammar teaching was not that it was systematic, but that it was decontextualised - it was taught for its own sake, rather than for any immediate benefit it might bring. One widespread reaction to this weakness is to insist that grammar teaching must always be `contextualised', where the only relevant `context' is a discussion of the student's writing. The problem is that this precludes systematic teaching. The solution is to recognise all the other possible benefits of grammar teaching, which can provide a `context' for more systematic teaching. The paper reports on a number of recent developments in the UK, Australia and USA, and lists ten topics for systematic grammar-teaching, all of which provide a context for systematic teaching.