TEACHING GRAMMAR

There are two main approaches to grammar instruction: deductive and inductive.

DEDUCTIVE APPROACH: there is a explicit presentation of a rule, then some examples are give, and the students practice. 

• The advantages of this approach are that it’s time saving since it gets straight to the point, it’s useful for analytical learners who need need to know every rule, and the teacher is able to lead with language points as they come up.
• The disadvantages, however, would be that it’s not appropriate for young learners (since there needs to be a development of metalanguage tu understand the explanations, and they lack of it), and that it’s heavily teacher-centered.

INDUCTIVE APPROACH: based on the idea of emergent grammar, the learners are presented with examples and they induce the rules from them.

• The greater cognitive effort this approach demands makes the rules more meaningful and memorable (according to Bjork & Bjork, 2001, making the access to information a bit difficult enhances learning). Furthermore, it’s a student-centered approach that fosters autonomy.
• The disadvantages include the great demand of time, energy and effort from the teacher to plan the lessons. In addition, some students might hypothesise the wrong rules and must be re-taught, and analytical learners might feel frustration.

Example of an inductive approach activity to do after reading a text with several conditional sentences:

GRAMMAR IN SITUATIONAL CONTEXTS

Grammar teaching is more meaningful if the structures are taught within a context. This will show them the real use of the language, how they can use it to comprehend and produce real communication. The examples of texts provide students with input to induce the rules (inductive approach), hence more meaningfulness. Examples:

The disadvantages of this method are the same as the inductive approach, plus the great demand of resources.

TEACHING GRAMMAR THROUGH TEXTS

As said in the previous paragraph, grammar is best taught and practised in context. If the students themselves prepare the students, it will further motivate them. The use of texts allows to interpret meaning from co-textual information, promote real communication, get not only grammar but also vocabulary, knowledge about the text typology and reading skills.

Like in any method, there are some disadvantages. In this case it would be the difficulty some real text have, the dangers of simplifying texts (wrong ideas about language) and finding a text of interest for the students.

All this methods foster the use of language and the social nature of learning, which are the ways grammar and its features EMERGE. The more students participate in social experiences, the more their repertoire of communicative contexts expands. 

Overall, when teaching grammar it is key to remember… 

• The contextualised activities where students can use the language (more meaningful, real use).
• Limit the presentation time to achieve maximum practice time (economy)
• Teach only the grammar students have a problem with (relevance)
• Exploit the similarities with the first language
• Adapt the rules and activities to the level, needs, interests and learning style of students.

Let’s see a real activity to teach grammar through the inductive approach…

THIRD PERSON PRESENT SIMPLE: TOM’S DAY

This activity is designed for Second Grade (7-8 years old). It would be done in class after an introduction to the present simple.

BACKGROUND: the students already know some sentences in present simple, all in first person - “I read”, “I run”, “I eat”… they know the present simple is used to explain routines and it’s the same form of the infinitive. They have done activities about telling their own daily routines.

After learning about the basics of present simple, the main aim of the activity is introducing the -s in the third person. The students will be presented with this text:

Text from ESL Lounge

And the teacher explains: “We are going to read about a boy named Tom’s routine for Sundays. You can read the text as many times as you want, and you will highlight the actions (verbs) that he does. Please, choose one colour for the things he does alone, and another for the ones he does with someone else”.

The students have 15 minutes to go through the text and highlight the verbs. This will focus their attention on the desired topic. Then, the teacher asks them to write the actions Tom does alone in one column, and the ones he does with people in another. This attempts to prompt reflection and realise the -s or -es at the end of the verbs. “Is there any difference between them?”

The teacher asks: “let’s see, how would you say the first sentence about yourself?” The expected answer is “I get up at 10 o’clock”. “And this one? [they talk and listen to music]”, the expected answer is “I talk and listen to music”. The teacher asks about the differences between the sentences, as it is now obvious that in the former pair one says “gets” and the other says “get”, but in the latter both say “talk and listen”. This will help them see that only the actions that “he” or “she” does have an -s.

Finally, the teacher asks “So, how would we complete this rule?”, and she writes “WHEN HE OR SHE DOES AN ACTION, THE ACTION ENDS…” on the blackboard. They copy the sentence in their notebooks and complete it “with an -s”. This text could further be used to appreciate the difference between the verbs that end in a vowel (which only add an -s) and n a consonant (which add -es).

REFLECTION

I have only ever experienced the deductive approach when learning grammar. While I believe a balance between the two would be great, focusing on just one may lead to an incomplete or not optimum teaching of grammar. In my case, the exercises were always reduced to "fill in the gaps" and sentence translation. It felt like something was missing, a dynamism, and maybe realism to the aspects we learnt. An mentioned above, maybe combining explicit instruction with grammar in situational contexts or texts would have completed our formation and made it more visible for people who struggled with grammatical structures.

As an example, I particularly remember the second and third conditional forms were very challenging for many students, because they could not make out the meaning, even if they used it in Spanish. It is probably one of the situations that could have been prevented if they had seen the forms in real contexts. I am not saying it would be instantly easier, but in their minds, it would probably had made more sense.

That is why this unit was helpful in terms of providing ways to widen my ideas of teaching grammar, especially when it comes to the active role students can play, identifying structures in the text. I will definitely implement activities where students have to extract structures from a text from the context. It is what I attempted to do in the proposed activity, and hopefully I will be able to admininstrate it during my internship.