20 English Journal 100.4 (2011): 20–26 What is it about teaching language that makes it so problematic? Is it because language is connected to who and what we are and everything we do? That has to be part of it. I know that I’ve been through my share of discussions about language and how to teach it, with those involved holding a variety of perspec- tives. I’ve watched those discussions shift over the years of my teaching as something new comes up and perspectives shift again. Today, when I read articles or hear discussions about teaching grammar, I fnd interesting dichotomies in perspectives. Some people see language issues as right or wrong: That’s it. No fexibility. This perspective is evident when people look at issues of language in stark contrasts instead of in relation to context. Even if teachers don’t think of grammar that way, the use of worksheets or testing often suggests the right/wrong dichotomy. After all, we “correct” the worksheets; students ask us for “the right answer.” Even the idea of people’s usage being “corrected” by English teachers suggests this per- spective: right or wrong. Another dichotomy is evident when I hear teachers speak of grammar as opposed to content. This is apparent when teachers say they have to de- cide between helping students write about some- thing interesting and substantive or helping them learn punctuation and usage. This dichotomy sug- gests a separation between what we say and how we say it; perhaps it even represents the confict be- tween the writing process movement and tradi- tional instruction. Although most of what I read and hear in these discussions comes from teachers and parents, students hold some of those same per- spectives about language. Right/Wrong. Either/Or. One way or another. Shifting these perspectives is one of the frst challenges to seeing language instruction from a more effective position. Shifting perspectives has been the story of my teaching life. Past Tense When I frst started teaching, my district required traditional grammar instruction: parts of speech, dia- gramming, etc. I was comfortable with that perspec- tive because that was the idea of grammar I had been taught: grammar as terminology unrelated to writ- ing; grammar as right and wrong. Because it had been a few years since I’d pored over Warriner’s as a student, I depended in those early years of my teach- ing on the textbook I had been given to help me de- liver the expected instruction. I studied the appropriate chapter and then reviewed it with my students before assigning them the questions at the end of the section. Even though sometimes the ten questions at the end of the chapter had a ringer among them that required knowledge above what the chapter had addressed (infnitives among the prepositional phrases, for example), we carried on. When our school got a computer lab, I fgured out how to use the lab to make grammar instruction more interesting. I loaded ten sentences from our textbook onto a document students could open in the lab. Then they would highlight or change the font in some way to identify parts of speech: italicize the nouns, underline the verbs, make adjectives Ga- ramond bold, and so on. We were still doing the same old stuff—but now we were using technology! My practice was the classic example of right and wrong: language as answers in the textbook, Deborah Dean Brigham Young University Provo, Utah deborah_dean@byu.edu Shifting Perspectives about Grammar: Changing What and How We Teach EJ in Focus