You don'ts needs no grammar

How much grammar do you actually need to know to teach English?

It's a good question. When I taught back in England, every teacher knew a lot about grammar. Some knew it inside out - had linguistics qualifications as well as teaching ones. Others had a purely functional knowledge but enough to be able to answer students questions and teach them adequately.

Everybody knew something about grammar. In my case I have no linguistics qualification but grammar has been a lifelong hobby and I have read literally hundreds of books on the subject. I know quite a lot.

But here in China the short answer to the question is - none!

Our role as foreign teachers is to teach spoken English. We don't, explicitely, get involved in teaching grammar at all. It may be that, from time to time, we teach a bit but it's very much on an "as it comes up" basis rather than formally planned.

The good news is that in the two years I've been teaching here no student has ever asked me a grammar question in class. Not once. I correct the more obvious mistakes in their speaking but no one ever comes up to me and says "what's the right answer to this?"

They will ask about spelling but they never ask about grammar.

Others will though.

I have a couple of private students who arrive every week with pages full of grammar questions ranging from the elementary to the most abstruse. Fortunately they've come to the right place. If anything I know too much. Instead of giving a straightforward (though vastly over-simplified) answer I find myself getting involved in long discussions about register and usage. It's actually rather good fun and the students in question are advanced enough to benefit from it.

Even more common is what happens in the staff room. I am rarely in there for more than five minutes before one of the Chinese teachers will come to me with a grammar question. If anything these can be even more obscurely difficult than the ones from the students. I can usually answer them but I know that this isn't the case for every English teacher working in China.

If you think your grammar is weak then it's best to just come clean and admit you don't know. If you want to learn enough to answer the teachers' questions, I'd recommend getting a  couple of books on grammar and reading them. David Crystal has written some excellent ones ranging from quite straighforward grammar primers to the vast Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

So the answer is that you don't actually need any grammar to teach the lessons but you might need it in the staff room. Whether you choose to learn some is up to you.