Toward a reflective grammar teaching in language courses

The aim of this paper is to present the results extracted from a survey circulated during 2012-2013 academic year among high school and undergraduate students. The main outcome of our research was to assess their degree of grammatical reflection and their proficiency of grammatical skills that are considered necessary for comprehension and production of complex texts. Results from the survey show the ineffectiveness of the traditional method of grammar teaching to help students to develop the metalinguistic competence. As a contribution, we propose an alternative model of grammar for language courses that promotes relations between grammatical reflection and language use.