The grammar part of high school French is being drop, along with the written French in my province, I have no idea if the same changes will be occurring in other provinces. Will be concentrating on speaking French. My youngest was always good in the written portion, from day one, because the grammar and the mechanics was part of it, and they expected to speak French properly. My youngest problem was nailing down the accent in speaking French.

I also found the grammar in the French curriculum was not a strong point, especially in verbs and how-tos regarding regular and irregular verbs, I found some old French text books on the web, and I downloaded them for free. I copy and paste the grammar portions, because it was display in English to explain, and the French instructions was underneath, and than a chart for the various verbs or other parts of grammar. My youngest became a star in conjugating verbs. She loves doing it, compare to many who detest conjugating verbs.

Nancy, would you mind posting the site?  I’d love to see it…
Very glad to hear that SQE will be doing the above mentioned

It took me a little while to find the actual download sites. I remembered acquiring them all in one day, on a single site. But alas, I cannot find the site.

The first one is the one I used a lot. It is called Basic French for Canadian Schools, 1937. Oldie, but even a parent without French, can help their kids.
http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-a-m.html

On the above link, there is older Canadian textbooks of interest. One is called Composition and Grammar for Public Schools, 1920. It would not surprise me if it is the same grammar text I used in grade school, except it was a new edition in the late 1930s.  One thing about grammar, the rules do not change, even when language use changes.

“Liberté, by Gretchen Angelo, is a first-year college French textbook with a true communicative approach. It has been adopted by instructors at California State University, Los Angeles; Mount San Antonio College; Santiago Canyon College; Mendocino College; Northeastern State University of Oklahoma; Lower Canada College; Marlborough School; McCallie School; Lausanne Collegiate School; and other secondary institutions”
http://www.lightandmatter.com/french/

I do like this one because it is under public domain. Helpful for grammar and speaking. I suppose this does lead to writing French as well.

The next link is a series of 3 books called Basic French, by the Foreign Service Institute Department of State. I could not locate the PDF files, but after a quick look, it does have it on-line. With more searching, there is probably a PDF link to download the lessons. As well, the below link, also offer lesson on other European language. It too also has the English translation side by side with the French. My favourite is still the old 1937 book,
http://www.200words-a-day.com/foreign-service-institute-fsi-french.html

and the second link -
http://www.ielanguages.com/fsi/fsiproject.html

It appears to be more or less what I have sitting in PDF format.

Some on-line links that I have used are:

http://zut.languageskills.co.uk/index.html

http://www.languageguide.org/fr/

http://www.frenchlanguageguide.com/

http://www.uni.edu/becker/french31.html#grammar

http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/rgshiwyc/school/curric/HotPotatoes/index.htm

The last link I found useful for vocab, for many different languages.
http://www.wordlearner.com/

Very interesting article. It would be good if grammar would start being taught again.

But .. be careful what you wish for!

I’ve searched very long for a good English grammar textbook for a student 9 to 14 years old.

Such textbooks simply don’t exist. The materials that are passed for grammar textbooks try so hard to make everything simple and fun that they end up being a loose collection of examples and patterns. They have no explanations, the examples don’t even cover all the possibilities, there is no sequencing from simpler to complex concepts. Essentially they are written the same way the current math textbooks are.
Add to that that younger people have not been taught grammar and therefore don’t know grammar and what we’ll see would probably be something similar to the math disaster.

The only grammar book that I was able to find that made sense to me was another book written by Arthur Whimbey. Unfortunately some of the terminology he uses in his book is not standard and that can get very confusing for a child that does some grammar at school from a such a textbook as the ones described above.

thanks for the posting, Nancy.