In the present study, four teachers’ views on grammar instruction for newly arrived adolescentsare explored through semi-structured interviews focusing on the subject Swedish as a secondlanguage, and the varied ways in which the teachers include grammar in their teaching. Thetopics that emerge through the interviews are extracted through ethnographic analysis, in whichthe researchers move from a bottom-up to a top-down approach where themes are continuouslyreorganised and reified in the light of previous research. The views of the teachers are thensummarised in four teacher profiles, using Ivanič’s (2004) discourses of writing in relation to theteaching of grammar. Results indicate that a central question for all teachers is the relationshipbetween explicit grammar instruction, on the one hand, and explicit and implicit knowledgeof grammar, on the other. Three of four teachers are hesitant about whether explicit grammarinstruction can lead to intuitive, automatized knowledge of grammar. In this way, the usefulnessof explicit grammar instruction for this group is questioned, in particular the type referred to as‘contextless grammar instruction’. The aim of grammar instruction then, whether it is implicitor explicit, is that the grammatical knowledge should be readily accessible to the pupils.