Methods for Teaching Grammar
Demythisizing the Role of Grammar in Today's ESL/EFL Classrooms
Teaching grammar in today's ESL/EFL classroom poses quite a few myths. How should grammar be taught? While there is no one way, there are certainly many helpful methods.
I have come to the conclusion that the role of grammar needs to be demythisized in today's ESL/EFL classroom. There is too much speculation that pupils will gain a new grammatical structure simply by noticing it and writing down its rules. Learning to understand its complexity is part of the problem. The other part is how to go about teaching it.
First ask yourself, What is the purpose of teaching grammar for my students?
Depending on the level of the class, teaching grammar can either be an inductive or deductive experience. Sometimes I elicit the rules and forms and uses for those classes I think can handle it, or give the example sentence with a few basic explanations for the weaker classes.
How Should it be Done?
Strong grammarians don’t necessarily make better teachers. Personally, I don’t make a big thing out of grammar lessons in terms of teaching it as a set of rules. However for ESL/EFL students, the neat order of rules and forms gives students something to hold unto to and they feel that they are actually learning a language. But, learning a bunch of grammatical rules is not learning English. The approach is communicative: working to be effectively understood. Memorizing rules will not necessarily help us with that.
Lately, I worked on the past simple as it was introduced in the chapter on Violence of their book Spotlight for my ninth graders. Right before the lesson, there was actually a fight. It was helpful in writing their news reports. The pupils knew already lexis such as: to threaten, to attack, to hit, to hurt. We had actually a constructive discussion of what happened and tried to sensationalize it into news report:
- What? Two boys got into a fight
- When? Before English class
- Who? Two ninth grade boys
Since it was a topic right off the fire, I decide to work with the class and deal with the regular and irregular forms deductively. When they made a mistake, I directed them to the rule. They then learned where to look if the ending was not regular.
I took then their news reports, graded them (after two drafts) and turned them into a jigsaw activity. They had to complete the other student’s news report. It was communicative, they had to practice using the forms, and refer to pages in the book to help them.
This experience reveals that that teaching discrete grammatical items may not necessarily be a complete waste of time providing that there is: enough language ability and a balance between fluency and accuracy oriented activities. The goal in my opinion, should be on meaningful communication!
It is always easy for us teachers to teach students to learn a nice neat set of rules however it is much more difficult to encourage them to use forms to communciate. Many suddenly have ‘cold feet’ or simply get lazy. They suddenly find themselves unable to produce a meaningful sentence either about themselves or something that interests them.
Final Words
The grammar debate is an ongoing one that only facing ESL/EFL classrooms today. But it is a particular one that needs rethinking and restructuring as the globalization of English continues.
Further Reading
Take a look at another well written and informative article by suite101 writer Marc Robert that deals with the concept of aiming for a balance between accuracy and fluency when teaching grammar.
