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13. TEACHING GRAMMAR
Grammar teaching sometimes happens as a result of other work the students are doing. It may grow directly from the tasks students are performing or have just performed as part of a focus-on form approach. At other times, we rely on the coursebooks, or we plan in advance what grammar we with our student to be studying. In the previous chapter, we discussed the need for effective activities to be both efficient and appropriate. The range of activities which we will look at above all satisfy these two requirements in different ways.
A. Introducing grammar
The following activities represent a range of possibilities for introducing new grammar. In this grammar presentation students learn how to make sentences using the present simple in the third person singular. They have already learnt how to say affirmative and negative sentences in the first and second person. The teacher holds up a number of flashcards and elicits the words dogs, get up, doorbell, car, uniform, a lot of money. The students say them chorally and individually before doing a quick cur- response drill using the different pictures as prompts. Students now see the picture of Sarah. The teacher asks the students what they think Sarah’s job is but does not confirm or deny any suggestions. The teacher explains that she is going to tell them what Sarah does every day. She says the following sentences and the students have to choose which flashcard or picture is being talked about: She doesn’t like dogs; She gets up early; She doesn’t drive a car , etc. When the students have guessed that Sarah is a postwoman, the teacher hold up the cards individually and tries to elicit the sentences about each one. She models the sentences and probably get choral and individual repetition before moving on, in the accurate reproduction stage, to conduct a cue-response drill by holding up, say, card C so that the students have to say She rings doorbells. Once students are reasonably confident with these sentences, the teacher asks them to think of a real person and what their job is. They are asked to come up with three affirmative and three negative sentences about what that person does or doesn’t do every day. While they are doing this, the teacher goes round monitoring their work. The pairs now read out their sentences and the rest of the class have to guess what profession is being described. In this example, the language to be studied is presented to the students in a text. The sequence starts when the teacher asks the students whether girls in their country often go out together and where they go. Students can discuss this in pairs or small groups before reporting back to the class. The students now look at two texts and try to decide if they are about a night out in Rio de Janeiro, Beijin or Moscow. When they have done this, the teacher checks they all have the same answer. The students now match questions, such as Did you have a good time? How did you go home? with the women’s answers in the texts. Then they fill in a chart with ticks for Sabina or Sharon, depending on whether they wore a dress, went to a bar, talked about men, went home by taxi, etc. Their attention is drawn to the irregular verbs by an exercise which asks them to find the past tense forms of certain verbs. The phonemic forms of these past verb forms are given as a back-up for those
students who are comfortable reading at least some phonemic symbols. When students have identified the past tense verb forms, the teacher gets them to say them just to check that they are pronouncing them correctly. They now look at a grammar chart before doing exercises where they fill in a short text with the correct form of the verbs be, buy, go, wear, look, have, see, etc. Students now listen to the third girl talking about her night out. They can then ask and tell each other about their own experiences of going out with friends, using the verbs they have been learning. This sequence teaches students the differences between reporting speech as it happens and how this changes when we report things that were said in the past. We show students a picture of two young men walking down the street. One of them has a mobile phone clamped to his ear and looks really happy. The other is listening to him with a look of resignation on his face. If we can’t get hold of a picture, we simply draw two faces on the board and mime what follows. We give the young man on the phone a name (Jack). We ask the students who Jack is talking to and we elicit the fact that he’s talking to a young woman he met in the school canteen. That’s why he’s looking so happy. We ask the students what the young man is saying to Jack and elicit sentences like You’re really nice, I’ll see you this evening , etc. We now ask the students what Jack tells his friend as the conversation goes on, and we elicit and model sentences like She say’s I’m really nice, She says she’ll see me this evening , etc. We make sure the students understand that Jack uses the present because he’s reporting the conversation as it happens. We make sure they understand how you changes to I. We can get some students to suggest more of the girl’s sentences and have their classmates pretend to
When the students have read the text and shown that they have understood it by answering comprehension questions, we can ask them to say what they think happens next. We then ask them to list things that people did that were ‘bad’ or ‘not sensible’ and write them on the board, e.g. Rosie was rude to Cathy. We then ask again if they can make a sentence about one thing they wrote using should not to elicit the sentence Rosie shouldn’t have been rude to Cathy. We then encourage students to make sentences about the other ‘silly’ actions, using the same construction. Students are now in a position to tell stories of things in the past which they should/shouldn’t have done ( I should have done my homework on time, I shouldn’t have left the car unlocked ).
B. Discovering grammar
In the following examples, students are encouraged to work out for themselves how language forms are constructed and used. They then go on do exercises using the language they have uncovered. It is highly possible that they have seen the language before, but this may be the first time they have studied it properly. In this example, students have to listen to a dialogue in which people have been comparing things. Before moving on to make their own sentences, the teacher wants to draw their attention to the way that we make adjectives comparative. She could have done this by giving rules, or perhaps just by ignoring such technical information and hoping that students would ‘notice’ the various possibilities. Instead, she chooses to put them in pairs and give them an exercise → When they have finished, she checks through the answers, making sure they understand that one- syllable words which end with a vowel and a consonant double the letter, that - y becomes - I and that longer words are precede by more but otherwise stay the same. She now moves on to a practice exercise. For example, she can put a group of words on the board. One student draws an arrow between any two of the words and the other students have to come up with sentences, such as An elephant is bigger than a spider, A cat is cleverer than a dog. There are two potential problems with the way the start of this sequence asked students to discover facts about comparative adjective forms. Firstly, it is not always easy to
give a complete grammatical picture. The exercise above does not give all the necessary information about comparative forms: there are no irregular ones here (like good – better ), nor are there examples of words that are made comparative by either taking - er or being preceded by more (e.g. clever in many spoken varieties of the language). Secondly, it is not necessarily the case that all students enjoy this kind of detective work. In this example the students are going to look at obligation language, some of which they may have already come across separately. The teaching sequence starts when students discuss what rules they would expect to find in places such as airports, bars and pubs, beaches, hospitals, libraries, etc. They then look at a number of different signs in the figures and say where they would expect to see them and what they mean. Now that students are properly warmed up and engaged with the topic, they are asked to look again at signs. They have to say which signs sentences - e apply to – and cross out those that are not true. Finally, as a result of all the preparation work, they have done, they have to put the words the exercise 3 in the correct category. Once the teacher has checked that the students have been able to complete the analysis chart, she can get them to do a fill-in exercise where they have to discriminate between have to, don’t have to, should, shouldn’t and are/aren’t allowed. They then make their own sentences about what the rules are in places from the first exercise (airport, bars and pubs, etc.) and read them out to their colleagues who have to guess where they are talking about.
C. Practising grammar
the students if they know any similar stories of lucky escapes. They can talk about this in small groups and then tell the rest of the class what the most interesting story in their group was. One of the best ways of making students think of sentence construction and sentence meaning is to get them to match sentence halves. We can do this by giving them two lists that they have to match up. This can be done in pairs or by students working on their own. However, the activity becomes more enjoyable and interactive if we put the sentence halves on cards. Each student then gets one card and has to walk around the room until they find their pair. They have to do this without showing their cards to other people, so they have to read them aloud and then discuss which pairings are or are not possible. Find someone who… is the name given to an ever-popular mini-survey activity. Students get a chart which asks them to find the names of various people by going around the class and asking questions. If they ask a classmate Do you like chocolate? and the classmate says no , they do not write down a name, but if the classmate says yes , they write down the name and then move on to the next question. The game can be adapted to suit any structure. For example, we could make a chart asking students to find someone who has never been to India, has always liked music, etc. We can also get students to write questions themselves to make it more interesting for them or we can find out one interesting fact about each individual student and put these facts into the chart. The activity thus becomes an excellent way for them to get to know each other. There are many mini-surveys that we can use for grammar practice in this way. For example, we can construct any number of lifestyle questions asking such things as What time do you normally get up? What do you have for breakfast? Or, if we want students to practise past tenses, they can design a questionnaire in order to ask When did you last go to the cinema? Who did you go with? In this activity, students practise the past perfect continuous tense by making sentences in response to prompts from the teacher. They are required to use their imaginations and/or sense of humour and the exercise is given added enjoyment by being designed as a team game. The teacher divides the class into small teams of two to four students. She tells them that she will be reading sentences
for which they have to find appropriate responses, using the past perfect continuous. She starts by giving them a sentence such as When I got home last night, my flatmate was asleep in the car. She asks the class what reasons they can think of to explain this, and hopes to elicit sentences like She had been listening to a programme on the radio and fallen asleep , or She had been talking to a hypnotist on her mobile phone , etc. Now that the students understand the idea of the exercise, she reads out the following sentences → The teams are given a short time to come up with a good explanation for each sentence. If they are correct and/or appropriate, the teacher awards a point, but no team can offer a sentence that has been used previously. This game-like practice forces students to make sentences using a particular verb tense. Yet by adding the element of surreal humour, it can provoke great enjoyment.
D. Grammar games
Many games from television and radio can be adapted for classroom use. The following examples show how we can design them for learners. Students sit in two teams. There is a pile of cards between them. On each card there is a word or phrase. The cards are face down. A member of team A picks up the first card and then has to ask the other team members questions until they give exactly the answer that is written on the card. The game, which is suitable for all levels, forces students to think carefully about the construction of the questions they are asking. A common way of practising and testing syntax is to give students sentences with the words in the wrong order. But such word-ordering activities can be used in a more game-like way, too. The teacher provides two sets of envelopes, each numbered 1- 12. In each envelope there are the words that make up a sentence. Both envelopes marked 1 will have the same word cards, and there will be two envelopes for sentence number 2 and number 3, etc. The teacher then writes the numbers 1 - 12 on the board twice, once for each team. The two piles of envelopes are put at the front of the class. A student from each team comes up and selects and envelope and takes it back to the team. When the team have rearranged the sentence and written down on a piece of paper what they think it should be, they cross off the relevant number of the envelope on the board. The first team to finish gets two bonus points. The teacher then looks at the sentences they have written down and each team gets a point for each correct sentence.
In contrast, Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy , in their grammar for advanced users, offer a more complex account of how these two words are used. Carter and McCarthy’s descriptions are clearly more ‘truthful’, partly because they recognize that strong and weak forms represent different grammatical behaviours, but mostly because they explain everything in far more detail than lower-level grammars do. E. 1. Using grammar books Both students and teachers may consult grammar books for a number of reasons. For example, students may be drafting a piece of written work and may want to check that they are using some aspect of grammar correctly. Alternatively, a teacher, having noticed that a student is making a lot of mistakes in one particular area, might tell that student to loop up the language in a grammar book in order to understand it better. Students can also work through the explanations and
exercises in self-study grammars, either on their own or because a teacher sets exercises for homework or as classwork. Finally, teachers often use grammar books to check grammar concepts, especially where students ask difficult questions which they cannot answer on the spot, or where an area is so complex that they need to re-visit it from time to time to remind themselves of the full picture. Grammar books are also vital for the preparation of materials. A student has got a corrected piece of homework back from the teacher. The teacher has underlined the sentence He was tired of people saying him what to do. In the margin he has written There is a problem here with the verb ‘say’. Look at ‘Practical English Usage’, pages 509 and 510, and re-write the sentence before the next class. When the student looks at the book, she read that both verbs can be used with direct and indirect speech and that say refers to any kind of speech whereas tell is only used to mean instruct or inform. Crucially, she reads that say is most often used without a personal object. Now she can re-write the homework with the right sentence. Research has offered a powerful alternative to teacher explanation.
