Category: Topics

Grammar: tedious or fun?  –  Arzu Baloglu

Teaching grammar is a subject I’ve been struggling ever since  since I started teaching.When I first started teaching English, I thought the most convenient way to teach the language was to write grammar rules and a few example sentences on the board and make students write them down in their notebooks , later do some drilling, oral repetition and lots of worksheet exercises and finally end the lessons. It was that easy, because I had been taught in this way and other colleagues had been teaching in this very teacher centered way.

In my first years of teaching. it was the easiest way for me because the classes I taught were crowded and there were class management issues I had to handle.  Also, there was no support or mentoring from the experienced colleagues in my school. I was all alone, dependent on the coursebooks and grammar woksheets. That is, teaching only grammar with lots of repetition made me not only feel more secure but also helped me manage the students,because they were already accustomed to this kind of learning.

Yes it was the most manageable way but not the correct way. I wasn’t satisfied at all. This repetition and monotony bored me much more than the students. There must have been other ways of teaching and I had to find them. Besides,I wasn’t sure if the students were really learning.

Having searched for some class activities, attended some seminars, and learned from some great educators, I decided to try some class activities with my students.The result was excellent. Students both enjoyed and were engaged, and I was pleased with the result. Therefore ,in every lesson plan I made I tried including some games, songs, and puzzles so that I could make the lessons more efficient. Although it was more fun and useful to include some engaging activities while teaching grammar and students definitely enjoyed the lessons, some of my colleagues didn’t see the point and thought I was not a very good teacher. because I wasn’t teaching the grammar rules to students properly. According to the majority of teachers here (in Turkey), grammar is the most important aspect of the language and a great deal of attention must be given to it. I can remember once that a colleague of mine complained to the administration that I wasn’t qualified enough to teach grammar because I hadn’t made the students copy the rules in their notebooks. Maybe it’s true that I’m not good at teaching grammar. On the other hand, I know that I am happier now  by not teaching grammar only.

I have been teaching grammar for a long time now. Honestly,I find teaching other language skills such as writing, speaking, and listening easier and more enjoyable. And also I’m still learning to teach grammar more effectively. Even though I haven’t found the effective method yet, I have some class activities, songs and web tools that foster students’ learning, engagement and motivation in classes. I’ve been compiling them from various sources such as other educators’ blog posts, teachers’ book resources, and the seminars , workshops and webinars I’ve attended. Here are some of the activities I use frequently in classes.

The first one is the well-known ‘Find someone who….’activity. You can adapt it into various grammar structures and also it requires students’ participation, which makes them practise what they learn. They simply need to walk around class and ask their classmates some questions and fill in the handout. Here are my handouts. Feel free to use and adapt them.   https://app.box.com/s/sq1kc201rzof6tpyvd57     https://app.box.com/s/ev2t3xedidz7w4vhawzi

The next one works best when practising ‘Relative Clauses’. It’s an activity I first found in one of the teachers resource boks I have. Divide the class into groups of four or five and hand out some cards on which some object, people or place names are written. Students must write three definitions for these names and only one of them must be true. The other groups must find the correct definition. This activity is very competitive and fun. You can also try this activity by giving students a list of words and get them to search their meanings and write their definitions in their own words. If you want to use tech, students can look up  their meanings on their mobile phones or tablets as well .You can check out my handout here.  https://app.box.com/s/ljomu55ujm02kan0qy8r

The other one is a fun activity which I’ve learned from a colleague. You can use it when teaching any language point. Write a sentence in big fonts on a piece of paper and cut all the elements of the sentence. Mix them and give to a student and ask him/her to put them in the  correct order to make a sentence in one minute. While he/she tries to put them  into the correct order, another student always utters something nonsense  (la,la,la or blah,blah,) to distract him/her. You can also make this activity more competitive by dividing the students into teams.

In addition , songs can be one of the most impactful ways to teach vocabulary and grammar . Moreover, they can be used as warmers or fillers .You can use the song ‘Tom’s Diner’  to practise ‘present continuous tense’,’My baby shot me down’ for ‘simple past tense’ and ‘would’ and ‘If I were a boy’  to teach ‘the conditionals’.Here is one of  the song lyrics .  https://app.box.com/s/n8e4v1g2wp3dyub9rjz2

We cannot ignore the fact that grammar is necessary. On the other hand, our aim shouldn’t be to teach grammar rules only .Instead, we can make the lessons more attractive through some meaningful class activities. As you get to know your students you can adapt and blend the activities into their needs and learning processes. Frankly, I haven’t found the most effective way yet and I don’t know if there is one but at least I’m trying to do my best to facilitate learning. You can try to break the boredom of the grammar lessons as well as creating such an engaging and student-centered atmosphere by avoiding repetition and routines .

If you seel some useful ideas, iTDi is one of the perfect places where you can find lots of help and mentoring to develop your teaching skills. It has helped me a lot and I’ve been learning lots of new ideas from colleagues  all over the world. Please don’t hesitate to join in and connect with the great educators here.

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Grammar: From Knowing About It To Knowing How To Use It – Rose Bard

I used to think that presenting was the most difficult part of the lesson and I strived to make it as clear and interesting as possible when it came to grammar points. Then, once students had a lot of controlled practice, I thought they would naturally be able to use it on their own. But once they encountered the grammar point in a new situation, or context was not made clear enough for them, they wouldn’t know what they would need to use. So as you can see, focus mostly used to be on grammar and getting it right. At some point I started wondering why I couldn’t give my students more freedom to say what THEY wanted to say and help them reshape what they knew or thought they knew about how the words were put together to form sentences, paragraphs and texts.

As I learned English living in London and Arabic while living in Egypt, it was hard for me to follow that line of teaching as the way I learned languages while living abroad was different from the way I was trained to teach. Not because I had never received any formal instructions. I had. One of the first things I did was to buy a dictionary and a grammar book when I got to England. I used to wake up, have coffee and work on my grammar book on my own. I would translate word by word and fill the gaps of the exercise, then check the answer key. I would also ask people around me to teach me how to pronounce  words and sentences. I wanted to communicate to others, so I’d take any chance for that. Later on, I joined a language school. The same happened in Egypt. I had books and I counted on people around me to help me communicate.

EFL Context of Learning

In the classroom most of the interaction between teacher/students and students/students can be artificial and dull if it exists around grammar points only. Even if we make students spend a lot of time practicing grammar, and it is disconnected from what they would rather be learning to attend their needs of communication in the outside world, it would have little effect on their outcomes. By talking to my teens, I have discovered that they do a number of things outside the classroom related to English. Some of them like playing video games, chatting with other players, watching TV series, online surfing and listening to music. Some totally avoid doing it in English because they can’t deal with authentic language. And it is not uncommon for those who actually are in contact with English outside the class on a regular basis to bring their own doubts about the language and topics from outside the class , but most of the time we are so busy with our lesson plan to listen to them and use their knowledge of the world outside as a resource/material in our classes. Those moments could be great moments for learning how language works through conversation, by allowing them to bring their own subjects related to English usage.

Who has never heard about a phrase or word they heard from the movie, game or song which they were eager to talk about?

Instead of planning grammar lessons nowadays, what I do is create opportunities, or take every opportunity for language to emerge naturally and work from there. I also know that every learner is in a different point of the journey and they are the only ones able to make sense of the grammar they are learning. If you want to have a bit more control of what students produce and work from there, I would suggest using digital devices to record oral interactions and notebooks to record anything they write.

The purpose of audio recording is registering language that can be used in different tasks and for different purposes. Here is one example of how I use it with mixed-levels groups.

Once, I invited a student to have a conversation with me about the trip to an amusement park (they had been to one in the week before – it was a school trip) while the rest of the group just watched us talking. The most confident student accepted the invitation and took the hot seat. I informed the student that our conversation was going to be recorded and would be used later in a task. I tried really hard not to let the grammar police take over me and carried out the conversation as natural as possible. After the conversation, I asked the students to recall what their classmate had said about the trip. I didn’t ask them any questions. They recalled information and I wrote on the board. I wrote everyone’s contribution and then they discussed in pairs what they could notice about the sentences on the board. Back to the board we focused on form (simple past), quickly reviewed regular/irregular forms and answered any doubts they had about language and they took notes in their notebooks. The next step was to erase the sentences off the board and request them to write down the questions this time. Once they were finished, I elicited the questions and wrote again on the board making the modifications needed to make them correct. All contributions were accepted. They were not allowed to correct the sentences in their notebooks at that point. Just to listen to everyone’s contribution. Then, the next stage was for them to compare the corrected version on the board with their own, make corrections and add the contributions from others in their notebooks. Then it was time to listen to the recording and check the questions that were really asked during the interview.

Notebooks: Keeping a Record

Nowadays notebooks are an essential part of my classes. Whenever there is a speaking activity where students have to discuss a topic, add their opinions, tell an anecdote, I ask them to write it down in their notebooks first. When they write down they use more language and make more mistakes, but it is also the moment when I will walk around or they will come to my desk and we will discuss language and how it works. There are times, depending on the activity, when I will ask students to use my feedback rubric to guide them in self-discovering. I’ll try to make them think of what they already know to help them rewrite their sentences or discuss a word/phrase that they want to use but which might not be the best choice for that context. Using the notebook means to personalize learning for each student.

I really believe that language learning has to be also a personal journey even when they are studying in a group. There should be enough space in the class for each one of them to be seen as individuals with their own needs and knowledge. Students should also know that they can contribute to each other’s learning by creating the right atmosphere to become better users of the language.

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Grammar: Essential for Reading Development and Comprehension   – Miguel Mendoza

“Although a more precise role for syntactic abilities, free of other factors, remains to be worked out, its role [in reading comprehension] may be genuine” (Perfetti, C., Landi, N. & Oakhill, J., 2005:238).

I have always wondered why some colleagues cringe at the sound of the word “grammar”. I know it sort of became the Ugly Duck of anything related to language learning after the now infamous grammar-translation method. Some would even say learners will “naturally” pick up anything related to grammar just by listening and reading. Are they? Which learners are we talking about? Children? Teenagers? Adults? As an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teacher, my main interest is reading and, fortunately, there’s been a lot of research supporting the essential role of grammar in reading development and comprehension (Nation & Snowling,2000, Grabe, 2009, Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005 among others). Briefly, but not overlooked, Richard Day (2013) refers to grammar as a part of the reading developmental process as well.

Now why grammar is an essential aspect in reading development? Grabe (2009), the main researcher I will refer to all along this post, talks about “syntactic parsing” in reading. This is part of a group of lower level skills (eg. word recognition, meaning encoding) necessary for reading fluency. Also, he says, for beginner readers, syntactic processing can help them understand paragraphs, news, articles since it is a sort of “glue that holds together sentences and texts specifies how the content is to be understood”. As I wrote before, I teach EAP and our courses are offered during the first four semesters of the career (freshman courses). That is, our students are beginner readers and also some of them have got serious low linguistic levels (below A1!). Very few students are independent or proficient users of english.

Now, according to Grabe (2009), syntactic parsing involves:

Note: all sentence examples are taken from Grabe, 2009.

Taking all this into account, our EAP reading courses has got an explicit grammar component in each of our lessons at least until English 2. We teach four (4) EAP courses during the first-semester courses. By the explicit teaching of grammar I mean: identifying and practicing grammar points before students get to the reading text (verb, nouns, adjectives, articles, adverbs, conjunctions). All grammar points are introduced and practiced through a consciousness-raising approach (Thornbury, 2006). That is, students guess the rules from language data. In English 3 and 4,  we focus on any grammar aspects emerging from the text. In our courses, grammar is part of the syllabus. It is worth pointing out it is not a course in itself. We transition from identifying grammar points separate from the text (English 1 and 2) to grammar being noticed in the texts themselves (English 3 and 4). Also, we start in English 3 our extensive reading program to expose them to basic grammar aspects (review) and more advanced complex structures.

If I had to represent how we go about with grammar in our EAP courses, it will be like this:

Furthermore, teaching grammar in our EAP courses also helps facilitate the introduction and practice of reading strategies: identifying topic, main idea, reference and nominal groups. It also helps participants know when a writer is making contrasts, describing routine, describing facts, narrating. It also helps participants know where the most meaningful parts of a sentence are (nouns -heads of nominal groups- and main verbs).

As an EAP teacher, we know grammar is one of many aspects we have to take into account to help our students understand a text written in English. We also know syntactic parsing is one of several lover level skills needed for reading fluently and together with higher level skills to explain how reading works.

According to Grabe (2009), we can sum up the implications of teaching grammar in reading as follows:

1. Textual information is expressed through grammatical information, so grammar especially for beginning readers is necessary.
2. Grammar should be seen as a discourse signaling system guiding the reader to identify cues that will help him/her understand a text.
3. It is advisable to focus on salient grammar aspects emerging from the text. Advanced or complex grammar can be learnt from reading exposure (extensive reading)

As a novice EAP teacher, for some time, I was afraid to say I was teaching grammar in my courses. But experience and research reading have taught me otherwise. Grammar for my Venezuelan EAP students (South of America) is one of the linguistic aspects we do consider to help them in their reading developmental process.  We are currently updating the content and activities of our course to provide our students with new learning experiences. Grammar will remain as a much needed aspect to guarantee they will become confident readers in the academic and professional world.

References:

Day, R. (2013). Teaching reading. English language teacher development series. TESOL International Association

Banville, S. (2013).  Mount Fuji to be World Heritage site. Retrieved from: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1305/130504-mount_fuji.html

Grabe, W. (2009). Reading in a Second language. Moving  from theory to practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, S. (2006). An A-Z to ELT. A dictionary of terms and concepts. Macmillan

Perfetti, C., Landi, N. & Oakhill, J. (2005). The acquisition of reading comprehension skills. In M. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of  reading (p.227-47). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Nation, K., & Snowling, M. (2000). Factors influencing syntactic awareness skills in normal readers and poor comprehenders. Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 229-41

Image and charts:

Miguel Mendoza by Miguel Mendoza is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

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Grammar! How do we teach it? Can it be learned? In the Grammar Issue we present six different perspectives with posts by Rose Bard in Brazil, Adam Simpson and Arzu Baloglu in Turkey, Alexandra Chistyakova and Ann Loseva in Russia, and Miguel Mendoza in Venezuela.

Ann Loseva	Adam Simpson
Arzu Baloglu	Alexandra Chistyakova
Rose Bard	Miguel Mendoza

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