This review will analyze the effects that grammar teaching has on writing

This review will analyze the effects that grammar teaching has on writing. It will critically analyze the language transfer theory and give the necessary conclusion on whether grammar teaching contributes to good writing skills to learners. Scholars have put forward several theories to explain the process of language acquisition. The accuracy of spoken language contributes heavily to the accuracy of the written language.
The teaching of grammar for the purposes of improving the written language has generated heated debate in the recent past on whether it contributes to the development of good writing skills. Many scholars argue that expressive grammar, if well taught, may contribute to good writing skills for the learners. However, whether grammar teaching helps in improving the writing skills of an individual depends on the first language of the involved person.
In the year 1998 the document of the curricular guidelines of the area of ​​language was published and in the year 2003, the document of the language standards proposed and promoted by the Ministry of National Education was delivered to the public. Both documents emphasize language as signification and the close relationship between language and communication. From this point of view, grammar appears as a tool to support the processes of production and comprehension of texts. For example, in the language standards document, which are organized around five axes (text comprehension, textual production, other symbolic systems, literature and ethics of communication), grammatical notions appear on the axis of textual production as inputs for textual elaboration. Taking this institutional framework into account, we ask ourselves: what has happened in the classroom since then? Have the official prescriptions affected teaching practices? To answer these questions, the grammatical contents, the theoretical model used and the methodological process that could be glimpsed were taken into account in the analysis of the notebooks.
It should be noted that the bibliographic review did not identify any work that had the teaching of grammar at school as its object of study. We identified two investigations on the subject', one of which analyzes the grammatical component in school textbooks and another², inquires about what school notebooks show in relation to the development of writing. Below are some brief theoretical considerations and the results obtained from this research followed by a discussion, recommendations and conclusions.
Theoretical considerations. The main function of language is communication between human beings. Language is an instrument of social interaction, used with the primary objective of establishing communication relationships between speakers and recipients. Therefore, pragmatic requirements of verbal interaction guide the description of languages ​​and this, as Velasco points out, without renouncing formalization. According to this principle, the grammatical component must be integrated into a theory of verbal interaction, since the rules that govern linguistic expressions are instruments for the development of communicative competence.
Grammar, seen from this perspective, has a close relationship with coherence and, above all, with the cohesion of texts. In relation to writing, grammar appears to understand how a matter is best said, what is needed, what is left over, and all of this is guided by the type of text that is being written (scientific, literary, everyday, pedagogical, didactic, etc. ). For example, when producing argumentative texts, many students manifest problems in relation to connectors; It is necessary that students and teachers study this category in terms of the presuppositions and implications that they have: if a but appears, it must be understood that the antecedent has a partial validity (Juan is a millionaire but...) and that it is the consequent that the sender wants to leave in the mind of the receiver (John is a millionaire but is unhappy). The sender must then choose if he uses this connector or if it is preferable to use another. In comprehension, grammar is used to understand the relationships between words (agreement), the relationships between phrases (prepositions and conjunctions), the relationships between sentences (coordination and subordination).
When a text is understood, the process developed means making the content of the text present in a clear way, that is, understanding the interconnections in the text, making clear the structure of the relationships present in it. These relationships and interconnections are given by the elements of the language: the pronouns, the verb, the syntactic functions, etc. In this context, then, the reflection on grammar gains value; questions like what is referred to by the word they? What is replacing the pronoun? What function do these words have? They guide the comprehension process. Many inferential processes are also mediated by grammatical units. From this point of view, grammar appears as a tool to support the processes of production and comprehension of texts and not as knowledge to be developed in itself. Not working it in this way prevents the development of communicative competence. Grammar thus conceived is related to the change in linguistic paradigms: research has changed its emphasis throughout the last century. From a work eminently focused on forms and phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic components, linguistics has focused its attention on the significant and communicative levels of the sign. Linguistics "has shifted its axis from the more sensory-perceptual and episodic to the essentially cognitive, intersubjective and social." From the phoneme, as the unit of analysis, the linguist moved on to the word, to the sentence, and then to the text. Likewise, he has ventured more and more into applied and clearly interdisciplinary work. The performance, the communicative micro-episodes and finally, the discursive practices of various speech communities are the main reason for research by various linguists.
The absence of bibliography on the relationship between grammar and communicative competence, the scant training of teachers on this relationship, the negative assessment that advisors and pedagogical trainers have promoted in relation to grammar and the mistaken consideration that comprehension processes can be developed and production outside the text structures, can explain the results obtained. It is important to point out that the development of grammar in the student not only contributes to the processes of comprehension and production of texts, but also develops complex processes of rational thought, such as abstraction and generalization, and in this way consolidates the ways of thinking; It also serves as an instrument to reflect on the language and learn a new one (Colombia bilingual), since the knowledge and skills acquired in one language are transferred to the acquisition of another, based on a conceptual restructuring. Finally, teaching the formal aspects of the language is a political strategy to defend the language, it is a measure of linguistic protectionism.