Should we teach this at all?

Another interesting opinion from Neil McMahon on the celta e-mail list:

My personal opinion is that a pre-Celta grammar course probably does more harm than good.  First of all, without having started to get the classroom experience that doing Celta brings, the trainees won't have much idea of what they're learning the grammar for and may well find the course daunting and demotivating and what they do learn will probably still be contradicted in other sources or be too much for them to convey to students.

My main concern, however, is that surely such courses continue to perpetuate the unnecessary over-emphasis on grammar in the world of ELT in general, perpetuated by many Celta courses and particularly by many course books and school syllabi and assessment systems.  Where is the pre-Celta vocab course? Or functions course or phonology course?  Our trainees have as many if not more problems with these aspects of language than they do with grammar and we certainly don't expect them to have a good grip of any of them before the Celta starts or even during their first years teaching, so why should grammar be any different?  

Please let your Celta candidates discover all the beautiful intricacies of the English language system and how they can clarify them for their students in their own good time and in their own good (or bad) ways.  The Celta itself is a perfectly adequate way to begin this process.