Why does Larsen-Freeman stress the use of meaningful activities in the teaching of grammar?

Many of us, if not all of us experienced being taught in a de-contextualized manner. Personally, for six years in elementary my teachers focused on form and not on meaning. In fact, even the books we used were form focused. So what happened to me was that I became a dictionary of rules but when time comes that I have to use in context whatever rule I’ve learned, I ran out of communicative strategies because I was not exposed on where to use the or at least introduced when to use them in context .
In connection to Larsen-Freeman’s article, I believe that the primary reason why she stressed the use of meaningful activities in teaching grammar is in order for educators, to formulate meaningful lessons; that is lessons which are familiar and authentic and within those authenticity, students are involved; they are part of what they learn. Thus, they are able to connect the grammar lesson that they have learned and by following – up, they eventually become competent in using the language accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately. Students are able express themselves effectively using the target language and the knowledge of rules becomes secondary.
Therefore another challenge for teachers is to produce and formulate contextualized activities which actually calls for much imagination and creativity in order to provide students the help that they need in learning language; to quote Larsen-Freeman “..as important as it is to develop our understanding of the grammatical facts of the language we are teaching, it is not these facts that we wish our students to learn... If they knew all the rules..but were unable to apply them, we would not be doing our jobs as teachers.”.