Grammar Workshop November/December 2018

Workshop Title:  How to Teach Grammar

The point of grammar:

• Grammar communicates meanings - very precise meanings.
• Rule of thumb: the more context, the less grammar is needed. Grammar is a process for making a speaker’s or writer’s meaning clear when contextual information is lacking.

How to teach grammar:

• The deductive approach: a deductive approach starts with the presentation of a rule and is followed by examples in which the rule is applied.
• The inductive approach:  an inductive approach starts with some examples from which a rule is inferred.

The deductive approach:

• Introduce the grammar point.
• Do controlled practice (exercise in the textbook).
• Get the student to use the grammar point in real-life situations. Give feedback on their use of the grammar point (Is it natural? Is it being used in the right context?).
• The advantage of a deductive approach:
  • Gets straight to the point and therefore, is time-saving.

The deductive approach is all about rules. Rules and explanations:

• What makes a rule a good rule?
  • Rules should clearly show what limits are on the use of the given form. For example, to say simply that we use will to talk about the future is of little use to the learner since it doesn’t show how will is different from other ways of talking about the future (e.g. going to).
  • Rules should be simple. Lack of simplicity is caused by overburdening the rule with sub-categories and all possible exceptions.
  • A rule should answer those questions that the students need answered (relevancy). These questions may vary according to the mother tongue of the learner. For example, Arabic speakers, who do not have an equivalent to the present perfect, may need a different treatment of this form than say, Spanish speakers who have a similar structure.
• Discussion question: What do you think Japanese students should pay special attention to in particular?

Discussion of the rules:

• It is often easier to establish a language rule in students’ minds by contrasting two forms that are different in only one respect; minimal grammar pairs.
  • Use minimal grammar pairs to help students realize the difference between two or more grammar points:
    • “I am cooking” vs. “I was cooking” (get the student to notice the difference in meaning).

The inductive approach:

• Give the student a few examples sentences without explaining the grammar point.
• Get the student to try to come up with their own “theory” about the grammar point.
• Have student test out their “theory” by trying an exercise. Tell the student if they answered each one correctly or incorrectly.
• Based on the student, this process may have to be repeated a few times for the student to “discover” the grammar rule.
• Get the student to use the grammar point in real-life situations. Give feedback on their use of the grammar point (Is it natural? Is it being used in the right context?).
• The advantages of the inductive approach:
  • 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 required to discover the rules ensures a greater degree of cognitive depth, which ensures memorability.
  • Students are more actively involved in the learning process.
  • It’s conductive to learner autonomy as students learn how to work out things for themselves.
• The disadvantages of the inductive approach:
  • Takes much more time.
  • It can’t be done with all rules.
  • Students may hypothesise the wrong rule.
  • Some students just want to simply be told the rule.

✭ One problem with both the deductive and inductive approaches is that they often depend on decontextualised and very contrived examples of language. This can be remedied by using larger chunks of language (a text instead of just a sentence).

Teaching grammar through texts (written and spoken):

• Teachers need to understand the contexts in which they use the grammar in order to ask students questions and get them to use the grammar naturally in class.

The way we speak with friends at the pizza parlor, where we use the current slang and jargon of the group, is not the same as our conversation at a formal banquet or a faculty reception. “Is it correct?” is probably the wrong question to ask about a particular word or phrase. A more accurate question would be “Is it correct for this situation?” or “Is it appropriate? (Understanding English Grammar p. 10)

• Language is context sensitive. In the absence of context, it is very difficult to recover the intended meaning of a single word or phrase. For example, “word” is used in different ways here:
  • “What does this word mean?”
  • “Can I have a word with you?”
  • “I give you my word.”
  • “Word has it that they are getting married.”
  • If you want help, just say the word.”
  • “How should I word this letter?”
• Grammar books often only give a few sentences without much context. Therefore, it is important to set the context. In texts (written and spoken), we can look at the surrounding text and situation.
  • There are three layers of context:
    • The co-text (the surrounding text)
    • The context of situation (the situation in which the text is used)
    • The context of culture (the culturally significant features of the situation)
• The problem is that just as it is easier to examine a fish out of water than in its natural habitat, so in order to look at grammar it is often easier to use examples taken out of context. This is particularly the case with beginner or elementary learners, for whom a natural context might be difficult to understand. But, taking words and sentences out of context threatens their intelligibility. You might think you know that “He’s playing tennis” means he is doing it now as I speak. However, the present continuous is used in other contexts as well:
  • “Where’s Tony?” “He’s playing tennis.”
  • “He never wears his glasses when he’s playing tennis.”
  • “Tomorrow morning he’ll be in the office but in the afternoon he’s playing tennis.”
  • “He’s playing tennis a lot these days. Do you think he’s lost his job?”
  • “There’s this friend of mine, Tony. He’s playing tennis one day. Suddenly he gets this shooting pain in his chest...”

• Discussion question: How can you set a more concrete context in your grammar lessons?

• Discussion question: What are the pros and cons of using texts from coursebooks? Authentic texts?

The actual English grammar rules!

• TEF’s breakdown of the basic parts of speech
• List of verb tenses
• Cambridge Grammar pages

• The order of elements on the horizontal axis is fairly fixed in English. Switching the first two columns has a major effect on meaning (“Are we not at home?”).
• Different languages have different constraints on the way chains are ordered and slots are filled. Many second language learner errors result from overgeneralising rules from their own language.
• Discussion question: What are some common mistakes you hear our students make?

What grammar needs to be learned to speak fluently?

• Grammar of speech is not identical to the grammar of written texts.
  • The following list summarizes facts about the distribution and frequency of verb forms in spoken language:
    • Present tense forms outnumber past tense forms by 2:1.
    • Simple forms outnumber progressive/continuous and perfect forms by over 10:1.
    • The past perfect and present perfect continuous are rare.
    • Passive verbs account for only 2% of all finite verb forms in speech.
    • Will, would, and can are extremely common in speech.
  • Until recently, the grammar presented to learners of English has been based entirely on written grammar.

Correcting grammar errors:

• Not all errors are caused by L1 interference. Making mistakes is something all language learners do.
• Not all errors matter equally, nor do they all respond to the same kind of treatment.
  • For systematic errors (rather than random ones), correction can provide the feedback the learner needs to help confirm or reject a hypothesis, or to tighten the application of a rule that is being applied fairly loosely.
• Can the student self-correct?
  • If you tell the student that “speaked” is wrong, can the student come up with “spoke?” If the student can, this suggests that the rule is both systematic and correctly formulated in the learner’s mind, but that it hasn’t yet become automatic.
• Discussion question: How do you correct grammar mistakes in class?

Sources:

How to Teach Grammar by Scott Thornbury

How to Teach Speaking by Scott Thornbury

Understanding English Grammar by Martha Kolln and Robert Funk