Grammar teaching in Belgium

The following information comes from Nicolas Mazziotta:

• “Grammatical tradition is strong in Belgium (the country where Maurice Grevisse’s _Bon usage_ 1936 comes from) and scholars from the Université libre de Bruxelles (Wilmet, Van Raemdonck) still try to find new ways to teach grammar to pupils. Their motto is “Later, smarter” (teach grammar to pupils that already have abstraction capabilities and in a more intelligent way). Marc Wilmet claims that the French grammatical tradition is sadly notoriously unique because it developed a dogmatic idiosyncratic description of language.”
• Issues identified by Wilmet and Van Raemdonck include
  • Age of pupils – don’t start too young. Currently pupils start grammar before age 11. In some schools, pupils begin to learn about parts of speech at the age of 7-8.
  • Content – ‘traditional’ grammar should be replaced by linguistics
  • Terminology – terminology was unified in France by edict in 1910, but is it helpful?

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