How to teach grammar

3. How should grammar be taught?

• 3.1 Accuracy vs. Fluency
• 3.2 Striking a Balance
• 3.3 from Cognitive Approach to Communicative Approach
• 3.4 Important features
• 3.5 Sequencing
• 3.6 Providing Feedback
• 3.7 General Guidelines
• 3.8 Conclusion

3.1 Accuracy vs. Fluency

Form-focused	Meaning-focused
Grammar translation	Direct method
Features of patterns and grammar points	Interactive/group work (comprehension input)
Cognitive-code approach	Communicative approach
Develop explicit knowledge (know what)	Develop implicit knowledge (know how)
accuracy	fluency

3.2 How to strike a balance

• Fluency requires practice in which students use the target language point meaningfully while keeping the declarative knowledge in working memory.
• Meaningful practice of form:
• Students have to receive feedback on the accuracy.
• Concentrate on one or two new forms at a time.

• Repeated noticing and continued awareness
• of the language feature is important.

3.3 From Cognitive Approach to Communicative Practice

• Explicit formal instruction
• Structured-based communicative task
• Practice and production exercises
• Subsequent communicative exposure to the grammar point

3.4 Important features

• consciousness raising
• either through teacher instruction (a deductive method)
• or by their own discovery learning (an inductive method)
• examples of the structure in communicative input
• opportunities to produce correct grammar points

3.5 Sequencing

• A grammar checklist
• Not following a prescribed sequence rigidly
• Many structures would arise naturally in the course working on the tasks and content and would be dealt with then.

3.6 Ways to Provide feedback

• Giving explicit rules
• Recasting
• Self-correcting
• Peer-correcting
• Collecting students’ errors, identifying the prototypical ones, & dealing with them collectively in class as an anonymous fashion.

3.7 General Principles for Grammar Teaching

• little and often (recycle and revisit)
• planned and systematic
• offering learners a range of opportunities
• Involving acceptance of classroom code switching and mother tongue
• text-based, problem-solving grammar activities
• active corrective feedback and elicitation
• supported in meaning-oriented activities and tasks

3.8 Conclusion

• By thinking of grammar as a skill to be mastered, rather than a set of rules to be memorized, we’ll be helping students go a long way toward the goal of being able to accurately convey meaning in an appropriate manner.
• When the psychological conditions of learning and application are matched, what has been learned is more likely to be transfer. Therefore, presenting rules and forms in the context of communicative interaction is necessary.

4. Examples of PPT Slides

• Integrating ppt into grammar teaching
• Visual learners
• Interesting stories
• Examples
• ….require that S V….
• Inversions (倒裝句)
• as…as possible

5. Online resources for self-study

• Oxford University Press online practice
• Natural Grammar
• Oxford Learner’s Grammar
• The Good Grammar Book
• English works: grammar exercises
• Big Dog’s grammar

End of this Session

• References
• Larsen-Freeman, D. (2001). Teaching Grammar. (pp. 251-266). In Celce-Murcia, M. (Ed.) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. (3rd Edition). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
• Fotos, S. (2001). Cognitive Approaches to Grammar Instruction. (pp. 267-284). In Celce-Murcia, M. (Ed.) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. (3rd Edition). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.