Some rules for teaching grammar

 

What conclusions, then, are to be drawn about the teaching of grammar? Here are some rules of thumb:

 

• The Rule of Context:

Teach grammar in context. If you have to take an item out of context in order to draw attention to it, ensure that it is re-contextualized as soon as possible. Similarly, teach grammatical forms in association with their meanings. The choice of one grammatical form over another is always determined by the meaning the speaker or writer wishes to convey.

 

•  The Rule of Use:

Teach grammar in order to facilitate the learners' comprehension and production of real language, rather than as an end in itself. Always provide opportunities for learners to put the grammar to some communicative use.

 

• The Rule of Economy:

To fulfill the rule of use, be economical. This means economising on presentation time in order to provide maximum practice time. With grammar, a little can go a long way.

 

•  The Rule of Relevance:

Teach only the grammar that students have problems with. This means, start off by finding out what they already know. And don't assume that the grammar of English is a wholly different system from the learner's mother tongue. Exploit the common ground.

 

•  The Rule of Nurture:

Teaching doesn't necessarily cause learning - not in any direct way. Instead of teaching grammar, therefore, try to provide the right conditions for grammar learning.

 

•  The Rule of Appropriacy:

Interpret all the above rules according to the level, needs, interests, expectations and learning styles of the students. This may mean giving a lot of prominence to grammar, or it may mean never actually teaching grammar at all - in any up-front way. But either way, it is your responsibility as a teacher to know your grammar inside out.

 

Some conditions

The Rule of Nurture argues for providing the conditions for grammar learning. What are these conditions? If the answer to this much disputed question could be reduced to a handful of essentials, they would probably be these:

•   The input learners get:

will it be presented in such a way that the learners are likely to engage with it, thus ensuring a reasonable chance of it becoming intake?

 

•  Their output:

will it be of sufficient quantity and/or quality to ensure that they have opportunities to develop both accuracy and fluency?

 

•  The feedback they get:

will it be of the type and quantity to ensure that some of their attention is directed at form?

 

•  Their motivation: will the content and design of the lesson be such that learners are motivated to attend to the input, produce optimal output, and take account of the feedback?

Here are six teacher “confessions”. Which rule did the teacher break, in each case?

 

  1. I explained it and drilled it - and still they made mistakes. So I explained it and drilled it again.

  2. I taught my business class the present perfect continuous using a fairy tale.

  3. I presented the rules of adverb order, and then we did some exercises in the book. Tomorrow I'm going to do the second conditional.

  4. They don't have any problems with the past tense, but I'm going to teach it again because it's in the book.

  5. I gave them five sentences in different tenses and asked them to work out the difference. Then we did some sentence gap-fill exercises.

  6. The presentation took about 40 minutes. That left me ten minutes for the role play.

 

1.     

               1. The rule of Nurture

2.            2. The rule of Appropriacy

3.            3.The rule of Use

4.            4.The rule of relevance

5.            5. The rule of Context

6.            6. The rule of Economy

 

What’s wrong with the following example?

 

Lesson: How not to teach the past perfect

 

Step 1

The teacher introduces the lesson by telling the class that they are going to have a grammar lesson. He writes on the board 'past perfect'. He then explains the rules of formation and use of the past perfect (as in he had worked...), including how the past perfect is used to refer to a time anterior to an established past reference, and how the past perfect is also used in reported speech to transform direct speech instances of the past simple and the present perfect. He also points out that the past perfect functions in conditional clauses to refer to hypothetical past time (as in If I had known you were coming...).

 

Step 2

He asks if the class understands, and then distributes an exercise, which involves converting past simple and present perfect structures into the past perfect, as:

 

I went to the beach  → I had gone to the beach.

She has seen the movie → She had seen the movie.

 

The students work on this individually and then take turns to read their answers out aloud. The teacher corrects any errors.

 

Step 3

In the remaining ten minutes of the lesson, the teacher sets up a game of “Hangman”, the vocabulary game in which the class are allowed several guesses at the gapped-out letters.