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grammar?
Jim Scrivener has twenty-five years' teaching experience and if he's still unsure of how to
teach grammar, is it possible at all?
make any substantial difference? Do they really learn the grammar being taught or is
the learning mostly illusory? Do both learners and teacher leave the room thinking
weve had a grammar lesson? whereas the truth is that they have mostly just been
passing the time? Does the grammar lesson genuinely teach grammar or is it a
construction that has grown up over the years that gives the pleasant illusion that it is
doing that whereas the real learning of grammar comes slowly and in much more
uncertain ways over months and years?
I think that what I do now when I teach Grammar is move through a number of
procedural steps that seem, from past experience, to lead to doable lessons. By
doable I mean that, from the teachers point of view, they are relatively plannable and
teachable while, from the learners perspective, they make some (but not excessive)
demands on their attention, energy and brainpower and are a reasonably pleasant way of
spending the hour or so (if one has to be in a classroom in the first place). But is this
teaching grammar or just entertainment?
Heres an example of what I mean. Ive 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 weve had present simple, countable and uncountable nouns, verb + preposition
patterns (want to do / enjoy doing), will vs. going to etc - Im sure you know the list as
well as I do!
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!
Im half-ashamed to admit that I have this problem even within a single lesson. Just
yesterday I was teaching comparatives. I stepped out of the coursebook and did a series
of careful focussed presentation and practice tasks. I kept the aims limited, just wanting
to get the basic idea of -er versus more comparatives sorted. Students did a lot of
active work through the lesson. They drilled. They did written exercises and did pair
work and got corrected and helped and, by the end, I was thinking This is about as much
as I could ever bear to do on one discrete item of grammar! With two minutes to go at
the end of the class I thought I would give myself and my students a sense of
achievement by writing three sentences on the board and asking students to correct the
errors (something that they should have been more than capable of doing after a whole
lesson!) sentences like Potatoes are more cheap than mushrooms. Not a single student
in the room could find any of the errors. A few minutes later I was sinking into my
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.
All of this takes time and it doesnt seem possible to speed it up very much. I think
students learn the items they need to learn when they are ready to learn them and that
outside interventions make relatively little difference to this process if they dont come
at appropriate moments.
Yet, somewhere in the middle of my students long-term learning process, I stroll in and
give a 50 minute presentation on used to. What are the chances that this will be the
piece of grammar that my students need right then? If they have been studying a
coursebook which (like so many) rigorously excludes grammatical items from listening
and reading texts until they have been presented - what are the chances that my
students will be able to learn a language item in one meeting? Can I possibly squash that
whole exposure, noticing, help, memory, practice, owning process down to 50 minutes?
Clearly hopeless!
At pre-intermediate level wouldnt I do better offering lots of work on reading and
listening (and I mean far more than we currently do) and largely ignoring the explicit
grammar teaching until students have started to ask specific questions about things? In
other words, teach the grammar when students are ready for it, after they have heard it
and read it many times, when they are starting to think or ask What is this bit of
language? Why is it like this? etc. And even then, I suspect, the teacher would do best
not to spend ages presenting and explaining and drilling and whatever, but maybe
giving only the smallest, most useful answers or help that are just enough for the
students current questions, giving only exercises or tasks that deal directly with the issue
at hand avoiding the urge to rush in with everything that could be done with the item.
So fellow onestop reader. There you have it - one persons opinionated, lopsided
and probably entirely wrong view! But what do you think? I invite you to join in
the debate over in the Forum.