Language skills are taught at all levels with varying degrees of attention. The teaching of grammar is, however, contested although one can hardly find an English lesson without grammar at all. However, the grammar explanation efforts as in English as a foreign language classes is an arguable issue that research indicating whether a writing class involving grammar lessons pertaining to the kind of the text students want to produce is worth practising. In this study, an experiment was made with a group of students in the Department of Journalism, Bahir Dar University. The intervention was based on Sysoyev’s (1999) EEE model of grammar items teaching where the grammar items were situated in relevant writing communicative contexts before and during the writing phase in the classroom. The students were taught to write recount texts five times throughout the period of the training. Results from both the quantitative and qualitative data revealed out that students improved their recount writing skills as they were trained relevant grammar points in meaningful contexts. Thus, the approach enabled the students to hone their writing and develop confidence and motivation to face more similar writing tasks. Based on the findings, it was recommended that the grammar teaching in writing classes should be considered, yet at the same time further studies should be carried out.

Keywords: communicative grammar, recount, context, writing development