When one is reading or writing, various forms of bottom-up knowledge—e.g., grammar, vocabulary, orthography, and the mechanics of written language—interact with the top-down processes at the level of discourse. One of the reasons English language learners encounter a lot of difficulty when they are engaged in academic reading and writing is that they have been taught grammar only at the sentence level and not at the discourse level. In order to illustrate how discourse-based grammar instruction can facilitate the acquisition of academic reading and writing, this paper discusses various ways in which the following four topics can be dealt with at the discourse level: cohesion, the tense and aspect system, comma usage, and existential there. Obviously, discourse-based grammar instruction should be integrated with the teaching of the other top-down and bottom-up skills necessary for academic reading and writing. EFL teachers, however, need to know more about discourse grammar to effectively make their learners aware of it and to offer them learning activities that will contribute to better reading comprehension and written production.