How to teach grammar
Usage and use
A lot of our time as lang teachers is spent getting our students to produce correct sentences.
The language learner has to know how to use sentences to achieve communicative effect. Although
the early stages of practice may focus on fairly mechanical exercises, we need to move quickly
towards meaningful practice activities and then on to fluency practice.
An ability to produce ‘grammatically correct’ sentences is an indication of our knowledge of
language system; we can say that such knowledge about the language demonstrates our level of
competence with respect to usage: we may know a lot about the language system without being able
to use the language in order to achieve some kind of linguistic purpose.
Having an awareness of language as use requires two kinds of ability: being able to select an
appropriate form for particular linguistic context, being able to recognise which function is being
fulfilled by a sentence in a particular communicative situation.
Presentation >> Practice >> Production:
New grammar: introduced at the ‘Presentation’ stage, either inductively or deductively, then controlled
practice of the grammatical item follows at the ‘Practice’ stage. Practising in a gradually less mechanical
and more meaningful manner should go on until learners are able to use structures freely for
communicative purposes at the ‘Production’ stage.
Presentation of grammatical structures includes:
• building up an appropriate context in which the meaning of the item is clear
• eliciting/ providing target structure in a marker sentence
• drill target structure chorally, then individually
• focusing on form, explain/ demonstrate how structure is formed
• focusing on meaning, check understanding of meaning through concept checking questions
• providing written model on board
Stages Aims
Setting context Create interest, make conveying of meaning
easier
Elicitation/ Providing structure in marker Keep students involved
sentence
Drilling Help with pronunciation
Focus on form Clarify elements and their order making up
structure
Focus on meaning Clarify meaning and check if students have
understood
Providing written record Reinforcement
This is one possible way, but far from the only one. Variations numerous, both in order and weight of
individual stages. The order and which we leave out depends heavily in context-specific factors, such as age,
level, needs, styles of students, teaching style of T.
Practice
Aim of practice stage: give students thorough practice of target items, both in speaking and writing,
so that they will be able to use them correctly and fluently, in a variety of contexts, on their own.
For this to occur, we need to provide activities ranging from fully teacher-controlled, mechanical
ones to less controlled, more meaningful, then to (relatively) free, communicative activities.
Fully and partly controlled (semi controlled) activities = ‘restricted use’ activities, since they provide
limited options for realistic language use or for communication, and they focus primarily on accuracy.
The activities which are designed to make students speak and listen to each other, that is, to use the language
to communicate information or ideas, are communicative ones. When participating in these, students are
expected to incorporate the smaller bit of language intensively practised previously into the whole of their
language repertoire. With these activities focus is on fluency, on fluent use of the language, not accuracy,
thus they are called ‘authentic use’ activities. It is important for us to see that authentic use/communicative
activities may be virtually the same as skills work. Activities built around a specific grammar item, but with
a focus on fluent use of the language are communicative grammar practice activities.
Our job as teachers is to provide sufficient practice of all kinds, until our students are able to produce correct
samples of a structure freely in speech and writing. If they are only able to do so for tests or with conscious
monitoring of their production, that is, use of the items has not become automatic, it is a clear sign that we
will need to provide more practice activities. Not necessarily in an order that proceeds from fully controlled
to free. But the balance of form focused, accuracy work and meaning focused, fluency work is essential to
create.
Controlled practice
Drills: based on the behaviourist belief that through repetition and restricted response to stimuli language
items become automatic. That is, if students produce the same utterance to the same stimulus ten times in
class, there is a fairly good chance that they will be able to produce that utterance outside the class. A legacy
from audio-lingual classes, ‘survived’ to be used with a far less prominent role in the communicative era.
Language practised through drills is very restricted, opportunities for individual contribution of students’
own ideas are limited. Drills provide mechanical, tightly controlled language practice.
The easiest of all are choral and individual repetition drills. As students are expected to do almost
nothing, this type of drill can only be useful as the very first step. Emphasis should be on enabling students
to have a feel for the pronunciation of the structure, first – perhaps – in the security provided by the chorus,
then individually. Far too mechanical and easy. SS can do them without understanding meaning. However,
if restricted to the minimum, they may be useful for younger learners, who do not mind sounding a bit like
parrots, and for beginners of any age, for whom saying anything in English is often a pain.
Other types are based on the principle of substitution. Gradually more difficult, → more useful. The
teacher gives prompts – sentence, word or picture prompts – which get the students to produce the
structure. Though students need to be thinking more actively, these activities still focus on manipulation of
form. Mechanical repetition and substitution drills, when used mainly to help students ‘get their tongue
round’ a new structure and for purposes of mastering form, may create a valuable part of grammar practice.
However, they should gradually give way to ones in which learners are encouraged to think, which they
cannot complete without understanding and expressing meaning.
More meaningful, less/ semi controlled grammar practice:
Ways of making practice more meaningful:
1. One way of moving away from controlled, mechanical practice is making SS say true, real things
about themselves. Most SS like talking about themselves and are interested in others. Linking
structures to SS’ everyday reality makes language practice sound more natural and more attractive.
→Personalisation is important.
2. Exercises that suggest structures instead of prescribing ones, or allow scope for SS own ideas
are also a way.
3. Instead of very real things appeal to SS imagination.
Intensive, semi-controlled language practice activities in speaking: picture dictation, miming actions,
chain story building, class surveys or interviews and games with a strong grammatical focus.
Written activities: Gap-filling exercises, sentence transformations, writing elicited dialogues, matching
split sentence halves, story writing, picture descriptions.
PRESENTING GRAMMAR: APPROACHES
The deductive approach – rule driven learning
• A deductive approach starts with the presentation of a rule and is followed by examples in which the
rule is applied.
• The grammar rule is presented and the learner engages with it through the study and manipulation of
examples.
• Advantages of a deductive approach:
o It gets straight to the point and can therefore be time-saving. Many rules — especially rules of form
— can be more simply and quickly explained than elicited from examples. This will allow more
time for practice and application.
o It respects the intelligence and maturity of many - especially adult -students and acknowledges the
role of cognitive processes in language acquisition.
o It confirms many students' expectations about classroom learning, particularly for those learners
who have an analytical learning style.
o It allows the teacher to deal with language points as they come up, rather than having to anticipate
them and prepare for them in advance.
• Disadvantages of a deductive approach:
o Starting the lesson with a grammar presentation may be off-putting for some students, especially
younger ones. They may not have sufficient metalanguage (i.e. language used to talk about
language such as grammar terminology). Or they may not be able to understand the concepts
involved.
o Grammar explanation encourages a teacher-fronted, transmission-style classroom; teacher
explanation is often at the expense of student involvement and interaction.
o Explanation is seldom as memorable as other forms of presentation, such as demonstration.
o Such an approach encourages the belief that learning a language is simply a case of knowing the
rules.
The inductive approach – the rule-discovery path
What are the advantages of encouraging learners to work rules out for themselves?
• Rules learners discover for themselves are more likely to fit their existing mental structures than
rules they have been presented with. This in turn will make the rules more meaningful, memorable,
and serviceable.
• The mental effort involved ensures a greater degree of cognitive depth which, again, ensures greater
memorability.
• Students are more actively involved in the learning process, rather than being simply passive
recipients: they are therefore likely to be more attentive and more motivated.
• It is an approach which favours pattern-recognition and problem-solving abilities which suggests that
it is particularly suitable for learners who like this kind of challenge.
• If the problem-solving is done collaboratively, and in the target language, learners get the
opportunity for extra language practice.
• Working things out for themselves prepares students for greater self-reliance and is therefore
conducive to learner autonomy.
The disadvantages of an inductive approach include:
The time and energy spent in working out rules may mislead students into believing that rules are the
objective of language learning, rather than a means.
The time taken to work out a rule may be at the expense of time spent in putting the rule to some sort
of productive practice.
Students may hypothesise the wrong rule, or their version of the rule may be either too broad or too
narrow in its application: this is especially a danger where there is no overt testing of their
hypotheses, either through practice examples, or by eliciting an explicit statement of the rule.
It can place heavy demands on teachers in planning a lesson. They need to select and organise the
data carefully so as to guide learners to an accurate formulation of the rule, while also ensuring the
data is intelligible.
However carefully organised the data is, many language areas such as aspect and modality resist easy
rule formulation.
An inductive approach frustrates students who, by dint of their personal learning style or their past
learning experience (or both), would prefer simply to be told the rule.
