Welcome to a comprehensive guide on Teaching Grammar: Methods and Approaches. Understanding how to effectively teach grammar is crucial for developing students' communicative competence and ensuring precise language use. This article breaks down various strategies, from presenting new grammatical structures to practicing and assessing them, while also exploring common errors and the evolution of teaching methodologies.

The Essential Place of Teaching Grammar

Grammar is fundamental for expressing precise meanings within discourse. Without proper attention to form, accurate language acquisition can be hindered. However, teaching grammar isn't just about explaining rules. It's about offering helpful patterns for how words combine, making learning more efficient, meaningful, and engaging for students.

While formal grammar teaching might not be a primary objective in very young learners' classrooms, grammar can be taught effectively without technical labels initially. As students progress, metalanguage becomes a valuable tool.

Young children can learn terms like word, sentence, and letter.
They can then move on to word classes like nouns and verbs.
A graded introduction to metalanguage across primary years, if done meaningfully, can build a solid foundation for future language study.

Presenting and Explaining Grammar Effectively

Teachers can significantly aid children's grammar understanding by focusing on form within engaging and meaningful contexts. This approach helps students connect grammar to real-world communication.

Creating Interesting Contexts for Grammar Presentation

Meaningful contexts make grammar relatable and easier to grasp. Here are some effective techniques:

Using classroom objects: "Whose pen is this? It's Anna's."
Using students: "Tom is older than Jana."
Demonstration: The teacher performs actions, e.g., "The ceiling's too high to touch." or "What am I doing?"
Pictures: Visual aids can illustrate grammatical points.
Mini-situations: Simple scenarios like "Don't catch the ball/jump/sit down…"
Puppets: Engaging tools for dialogue and role-play.
Dialogues: Practicing natural conversations.
Talking with children: Asking questions like "What are you going to do on the weekend?"
Discovery grammar activities: Guiding students to figure out rules for themselves.

Practicing Grammar: Accuracy and Fluency

Effective grammar practice requires juggling attention to both form and meaning. These activities provide opportunities for learners to integrate new knowledge, leading to restructuring their internal grammar.

Activities for Structuring and Accuracy

These activities aim to help learners make a grammatical pattern part of their internal grammar, demanding accuracy in application.

Questionnaires, surveys, quizzes: "Find someone who…"
Information gap activities: Learners exchange information to complete a task.
Drills and chants: Repetition drills and substitution drills for pattern reinforcement.
Creating posters, artifacts: Applying grammar in a creative context.

For a practice activity to be good for improving accuracy, it should:

Motivate students to want to be accurate and get it right.
Be introduced only after students are familiar with the meaning, as it's difficult to concentrate on form and meaning simultaneously.
Allow sufficient thinking time and include feedback for the learners.

Proceduralizing Activities for Fluency

The goal of proceduralizing activities is to help students automatize their use of a grammatical form, making it quickly and effectively available for communication. While some accuracy is initially required, the focus gradually shifts as the form becomes automatic.

Activities that encourage fluency include:

Conversation: Free-flowing dialogue.
Dictogloss: Reconstructing a text after listening to it.
Role-plays: Such as a receptionist scenario.
"Crazy teacher" activities: "What is she doing? She's sleeping. Excuse me, are you sleeping?"
Activity lists: "'Clap' - freeze - What is she doing?"
Phone list scenarios: Dealing a number, calling, e.g., "Hello. It's Teka here. Can I talk to Šárka?" and asking, "What is she doing?"

An effective fluency practice activity should encourage learners to pay less attention to the form and more to the meaning.

Trends and Approaches in Grammar Teaching

Over the last 50 years, grammar teaching has evolved significantly, moving from grammar-translation methods towards the communicative approach. More recently, there have been calls for a more explicit teaching of grammatical awareness, but with a key difference: the focus is now on language use rather than just language knowledge.

Grammar-Translation Methods: Learning as Building Blocks

In this traditional approach, grammar is considered the most important part of language. Language learning is seen as accumulating mastered grammar rules. Rules are introduced explicitly, one by one, and students are expected to learn and practice using them to construct sentences. This method can be challenging for younger children.

Communicative Approach: Language in Use

The communicative approach emphasizes learning a language by using it to communicate. The strongest form of CLT advocates for learning without explicit grammar teaching. While questionable whether this strong form was ever widely adopted, Total Physical Response (TPR) is a form of CLT based on comprehensible input often used with young learners. However, without some attention to form, problems with basic structures may persist, and focusing solely on meaning does not guarantee continuous language development on all fronts.

Focus on Form: The Revival of Grammar Teaching

This approach recognizes that attention to form is vital. Students need help noticing grammatical patterns in the foreign language before they can internalize them. This leads to a structured sequencing of grammar learning activities.

The Sequencing of Grammar Learning Activities

Effective grammar learning typically progresses through distinct stages:

Noticing/Re-noticing

This is an active process where students become aware of a structure and notice connections between its form and meaning. It's the initial step where learners consciously identify grammatical patterns.

Structuring/Restructuring

This stage involves integrating the new grammar pattern into the learner's internal grammar, reorganizing it if necessary. It requires controlled practice where students manipulate the language, changing form to express meaning.

Proceduralizing

This final stage focuses on making the new grammar ready for instant and fluent use in communication. Tasks for proceduralization must require attention to grammar as well as effective communication. These tasks should:

Attempt to simulate the psychological conditions of real-life language use (e.g., time constraints, unpredictability).
Have a communicative purpose, creating a need to interact.
Include an element of built-in repetition to ensure learners produce a high volume of the targeted forms.

Testing Grammar

Grammar is typically assessed using discrete-item tests, which evaluate individual components of a learner's knowledge through tasks like gap-fills or multiple-choice questions. These are practical because they are relatively easy to design, set, and mark.

Performance tests, such as role-played situations (e.g., interviewing each other about their last weekend, focusing on past tense questions), can also assess grammar in a communicative context.

Six factors to consider when assessing a test's value:

Practicality: Ease of administration and scoring.
Reliability: Consistency of results.
Validity: Whether the test measures what it claims to measure.
Face Validity: If the test appears to be a good measure on the surface.
Backwash: The effect of the test on teaching and learning.
Spin-off: Other benefits or consequences of the test.

The Internal Grammar

Internal grammar refers to what any individual learner actually acquires about the patterns of a language. It's a dynamic system that develops over time.

Development of the Internal Grammar

Grammar learning can evolve from the acquisition of chunks of language. Teaching methods that help learners notice words within these chunks and how other words can be used in the same place (e.g., "Would you pass me...please?" or "What are you doing/writing?") facilitate this development.

Learning also occurs through hypotheses testing. Children form hypotheses about how the foreign language works based on limited experience. As they receive more input, these hypotheses change. These changes can be steady, continuous, or involve dramatic shifts and reorganizations, known as restructuring.

Errors are not just failures but provide a window into the developing internal grammar, signaling growth. A common type of error is overgeneralization, such as "I like X she like."

The influence of the first language also plays a role. When data is limited, learners are more likely to use their first language to fill gaps, assuming the foreign language grammar works similarly.

Grammatical Errors and Mistakes

Making mistakes is an inherent part of the learning process; they can be seen as learning steps. It's crucial not to correct every mistake immediately, but to balance fluency work with accuracy work. Correction should provide information or feedback when it best supports learning.

Types of Errors/Mistakes

Slips: Students are usually able to correct these themselves.
Errors: A student is unable to self-correct, but other students in the group know the correct form.
Attempts: Students haven't yet learned the specific structure but are trying to convey meaning.

Kinds of Correction

Self-Correction

This is often more memorable for students than if all mistakes are corrected by the teacher. The teacher can signal a mistake through facial expressions or, in writing, by underlining slips without directly correcting them.

Peer Correction

Encourages students to help each other and provide feedback constructively. This is beneficial in pair or group work when the teacher cannot oversee everyone and involves all students in listening, reasoning, and thinking about the language.

Teacher Correction

If self-correction and peer correction are insufficient, the teacher provides more help, though not necessarily by giving the correct form immediately. Strategies include:

Counting fingers: To indicate a missing article, sound, or word.
Repeating the sentence: Stopping at the mistake and inviting someone to continue.
Asking clarifying questions or using gestures: "You want Tom to borrow your pencil? Or you want him to lend a pencil to you?"
Giving the correct form: Sometimes inviting the whole class to repeat the correct form is a good idea.

FAQ: Teaching Grammar

Why is teaching grammar important for communicative competence?

Teaching grammar is crucial because it enables students to express precise meanings and use language accurately in discourse. While communication can happen without perfect grammar, mastering grammatical patterns allows for more nuanced and effective expression, directly contributing to stronger communicative competence.

What are some effective ways to present new grammar?

Effective grammar presentation involves using meaningful and interesting contexts. This can include real-life situations, classroom objects, pictures, demonstrations, dialogues, and discovery activities where students infer rules themselves. The key is to make the grammar relevant and engaging.

How do practice activities differ for accuracy versus fluency?

Practice activities for accuracy aim to help learners internalize grammatical patterns correctly, demanding precision. Examples include drills, surveys, and information gaps. Activities for fluency focus on automatizing the use of grammatical forms for quick and effective communication, encouraging attention to meaning over strict form. Examples include conversations, dictogloss, and role-plays.

What is the "internal grammar" and how does it develop?

The "internal grammar" is an individual learner's subconscious knowledge of a language's patterns. It develops from learning language chunks, testing hypotheses based on input, and undergoing processes of restructuring. Errors are often signs of this ongoing development as learners refine their understanding.

Teaching Grammar: Methods and Approaches