Alternative (?) principles for teaching grammar
There’s still no more divisive word in ELT (especially for novice teachers) than the “G” word. “How much”, “how often”, “how discretely”… or just plain “how” are questions for which there are plenty of answers from academia… but are still being answered in a million different ways at the chalkface.
So, in the spirit of debate, I’d like to put forward my own principles of grammar teaching - with which I invite you to disagree (after all, you almost certainly will anyway).
- Always teach in context. By that, I don’t mean “put the grammar into sentences”. I mean a big, deep context. For me, this means finding or creating a text - written or spoken, though the latter would require a transcript - which uses the target form in as natural a way as possible. This is because, for me, it is discourse types which create the need for different grammar. So a simple film review might be useful for showing the past and present tense in an unusual light. A biography can illiuminate the past simple and the present perfect. So, when considering grammar… first consider discourse.
- Make it short and sharp. Very short. Don’t get bogged down with questions, further examples,etc. Limit the usefulness of what you’re trying to say to the context you’re using to say it. Don’t try to cover all uses of a tense when you’re only illustrating one - and don’t try to teach more than one use at a time. Show how the tense creates meaning in that context: and then get out, do something else - have a chat, ask the students how they feel about the text etc. In general, don’t spend more than about ten minutes on a grammar point.
- Don’t try to mix receptive and productive practice. Don’t try to get the students using a form, PPP style, straight after they’ve been introduced to it. Their poor brains can only take so much. You have to allow the form to work its way, very slowly, into their cognitive system. Respect the slowness of the way the brain works when learning languages. Five ten minute exposures to a new form - at first receptive, later productive - are far more useful than a single fifty minute grammar-fest.
- Having said that… I think it can be a good idea to do very relaxed mumble drills with grammar, even at the first exposure. This is not in the hope that students will then immediately begin using the form in free speech; it’s more that I feel that giving the students the chance to actually form the words with their lips, get them out of their mouths, even if so quietly that noone can hear them, helps the brain to focus on them, thus helping the cognitive gears to get working. So I’m not talking full-blown whole class drilling - just ask the students to say a few sentences from your text quietly to themselves.
- Later, try to add some cognitive depth by creating matching activities (of the sort that Michael Lewis demonstrates in “Practical Techniques”. Ask students to make decisions about the order things happen in; rank sentences from the most to the least likely, etc, etc. Again, the purpose is not to get the students to use a form immediately - it’s has the much more modest aim of simply letting the students’ brains - their cognitive systems, again - come to the fore in the classroom.
- Don’t bother with “controlled practice”. It’s a waste of time. What this type of practice is trying to do is simply substitute for all that cognitive development I’ve been going on about by forcing the learners into a situation whereby they have no choice BUT to use the form you’re teaching. But in the end there is no shortcut for all that brainwork. Let the students do that work in peace, give it chances to blossom (as in the above points) - and don’t burden your learners with false expectation (as in PPP). For grammar practice - simply have a chat. Get the students talking about what they had for breakfast, in groups, and then go round and do some error correction. Don’t try to force them to use the grammar of the day. If you feel they need to process things a bit more deeply, focusing on accuracy a bit more - ask them to write the very same conversation on paper. They can change partners later and repeat the conversation (unscripted) out loud.
And that’s your lot.
A colleague recently said to me, on the subject of grammar teaching, “I think that basically everything works”. If you take him to mean that the determined student will get there in the end, regardless of the techniques used by the teacher, then yes, I think I agree. But we don’t have to saddle our students with confusions and false hopes while we’re doing it. Take a low-key, (s)low expectations view of grammar learning, and you’ll find the whole thing a lot less painful.
