Grammar

Can you remember the definition of grammar from the TKT Course book?

It is vital that you know the nine different parts of speech in English, including their examples and functions. It is also useful to know further subcategories of each part e.g. Nouns: Countable, uncountable, proper, common, abstract and collective.

Unit 1 also introduces the idea of form. Can you remember what we compared grammar form to?

It is also important to remember that the meaning of grammatical structures can vary according to the context. How many uses can you think of for the present simple? Aim for five.
For some revision on key grammar areas and also for some excellent examples on presenting grammatical form, check out the Grammar Aquarium.

We discussed how these concepts affect our teaching. How many points relating the the language teaching classroom can you remember?

There is a lot of discussion on the best way to 'teach' grammar. One of the most popular ESL writers is Jim Scrivener. He has over 25 years experience as a teacher and teacher trainer. Even he admits that he does not know what is the best way to deal with grammar and the classroom:

Here’s an example of what I mean. I’ve been working with a pre-intermediate class for the last few weeks, teaching all the usual pre-intermediate early-on-in-the-syllabus stuff. So we’ve had present simple, countable and uncountable nouns, verb + preposition patterns (want to do / enjoy doing), will vs. “going to” etc - I’m sure you know the list as well as I do!

From here

And I do my best teaching, using the coursebook in as lively a way as I can think of, adding in my own board presentations, sparking things up with a quiz or a game at various points, jollying up exercises by running them as races or competitions, slipping in personal touches and personalization where I can link topics to things I know the students are interested in – and so on and so on. In class I get what I usually get – some sense that under these laboratory conditions, with a lot of help and guidance and hints and correction, students can get answers right to exercises, can explain salient parts of the rules, can say almost-intelligible sentences in response to drills and can muddle their way through in pair work dialogues. But does all this mean that they have learnt the grammar? When they return after one day for their next lesson, will they be able to use any of the features I have worked on with them? Fat chance!

This links back to the final key concept and the language teaching classroom idea on page 7 of our coursebook.

Just learning grammatical rules and structures doesn't give learners enough help with learning how to communicate, which is the main purpose of language. So, much language teaching has moved away from teaching only grammar and now teaches, e.g. functions, language skills and fluency as well as grammar.

Of course Jim is being very modest regarding his abilities to 'teach' grammar. He goes on to suggest how he is attempting to do it.

I’d guess that the real learning of grammar goes on very slowly over a long period of time. It requires, I think:

1. Exposure – a lot of exposure to spoken and written language.
2. Noticing – an enquiring mind to notice and pick out things that are going on within this language.
3. Help – of various kinds – to draw attention to features, errors and interesting attempts, as well as summarizing, explaining and clarifying.
4. Memory – a good memory to store (and later recall) what has been noticed.
5. Practice – lots of practice – trying again and again – with all the chaos and mistakes and muddles that this involves.
6. Owning – after this long process, slowly a new item becomes integrated with all the other language that the learner knows and becomes something that the learner can use fluently and freely at will to express meanings they want to convey.

You may have noticed that I've put 'teach' in inverted commas (''). Why do you think I've done that? Do you consider the six steps that Jim mentions as traditional teaching or is it something else? How does the learner training workshop from this morning fit in to this?