The CATESOL Journal

Discourse-based research has provided grammar teachers with a great many new and interesting insights into the meaning and use of target structures, thus presenting new challenges regarding how to include this information in a grammar syllabus. Based on an analysis of discourse patterns and recurrent themes from research in the areas of discourse-based grammar instruction, corpus linguistics, and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), this paper proposes guidelines in the form of 10 questions for helping teachers systematically incorporate discourse information into the teaching of all structures in a grammar syllabus. The paper demonstrates how to use the guidelines for providing concrete examples of how and where grammatical structures are used in discourse, and it concludes with a discussion of implications for teaching writing at advanced levels of grammar instruction, with suggestions for using the guidelines at beginner and intermediate levels as well.