grammar grammar grammar

Three out three people i have asked, so far, agree on what helped them most in their learning in class was that they learn best when doing grammar classes dealing with one grammar area: ie present perfect and past simple. Pure grammar, comparing, talking, correcting, translating, contrasting... They need to understand and contrast. They want to understand the rules. This goes a bit against the sort of teaching some methods encourage: eliciting, integrating grammar in a given situation, etc. According to their feedback, I reckon they think they will be able to integrate this whereever it is needed if they know how to produce the sentece, if they know the equivalent: in Spanish we say xxx whereas in english to communicate this idea we say yyy or xxx. It's important to know when translating word by word can be done and when can not.