Goals for teaching grammar Sound instructional practice begins with assessment and planning. Begin building your grammar instruction plan by comparing what students must know with what they already know. Identify the standards.In this standards-driven era, your district or school curricula may dictate grammar skills to be taught at each grade level. If the skills are not labeled as grammar skills, use the proof reading/editing skills that are listed under writing standards. These standards clearly identify what your students must know and what you are responsible to teach. Determine what students know. The next step is to determine what your students already know through an assessment. Be careful with this assessment; it is easy to test surface knowledge of a grammar concept without testing the underlying knowledge. Many students will be able to recognize a sentence fragment as incorrect, but they may not know the concept by its correct name, why it is incorrect, or how to correct it. Design your assessment to reveal true understanding of the grammatical concepts. Plan instruction. Use the results of the pre-assessment to outline three to four grammar skills to focus on each week. The goal of effective grammar instruction is to weave it into the reading and writing that function as the backbone of the English curriculum. So, consider your pacing guide and embed grammar concepts logically into it. This goal has three implications: Students need overt instruction that connects grammar points with larger communication contexts. Students do not need to master every aspect of each grammar point, only those that are relevant to the immediate communication task. Error correction is not always the instructor's first responsibility. Adult students appreciate and benefit from direct instruction that allows them to apply critical thinking skills to language learning. Instructors can take advantage of this by providing explanations that give students a descriptive understanding (declarative knowledge) of each point of grammar. Teach the grammar point in the target language or the students' first language or both. Limit the time you devote to grammar explanations to 10 minutes, especially for lower level students whose ability to sustain attention can be limited. Present grammar points in written and oral ways to address the needs of students with different learning styles. An important part of grammar instruction is providing examples. Teachers need to plan their examples carefully around two basic principles: Be sure the examples are accurate and appropriate. They must present the language appropriately, be culturally appropriate for the setting in which they are used, and be to the point of the lesson. Use the examples as teaching tools. Focus examples on a particular theme or topic so that students have more contact with specific information and vocabulary.