The Effect of a Procedural Way of Teaching Grammar on Students' Writing skill

The I inearity adopted in traditional approaches to teaching grammar results in decontextualization of structures presented 111 text books. Learners are given isolated sentences, which they are expected to internalize through exercises involving repetition, manipulation, and grammatical transformation. These exercises are designed to provide learners with formal, declarative mastery, but they often don't provide opportunities for learners to explore grammatical structures in context; hence, they make the task of developing procedural skill- being able to use the language for communication- more difficult than it needs to be, because learners arc denied the opportunity of seeing the systematic relationships that exist between form, meaning, and use. In this study, a procedural way of teaching grammar has been compared with the traditional method of teaching grammar in terms of their effect on two groups of university students' writing ability. The results showed that students who were taught grammar in accordance with a processing input-based approach gained a considerably higher level of writing ability