Our Cambridge IGCSE™ English (as an Additional Language) coursebook and teacher’s resource are coming in 2022. In the meantime, we’ve been working with our authors to create a series of blogs to support you from first teach.
In this blog, author Annie Altamirano explores some strategies that you can use to teach grammar.
Why grammar?
Grammar isn’t always the favourite part of language that students want to learn, or you want to teach. However, students need to learn it. Language is communication, and in order to communicate we need to combine words in specific ways, and we learn how to do it by learning the grammar of the language. A sound knowledge of grammar helps us to make sentences that are clear enough to be understood by those who are listening to us.
There are a few things I have learned after many years of teaching English and being a language learner myself:
- Teaching grammar in isolation has very limited benefits
- Studying grammar in isolation does not prevent students from making grammar mistakes
- Learning to identify parts of speech does not improve a learner’s level of writing or speaking
So, the question is how do we teach grammar in ways that are useful, interesting and memorable?
Contextualise grammar
Quite often students know the grammar, or rather, they know the rules, but they fail to apply them in communication. Learning grammar in context will allow students to see how rules are used in sentences. This gives them an opportunity to understand how language works and helps them to improve their communication skills.
Before introducing the grammar rules, e.g. reported speech, you can ask students to read a text where the grammar you intend to teach is present, e.g. a report of a conversation that includes bits of dialogue. You can then answer some comprehension questions.
After that, explain the use of reported speech and ask students to find examples in the text they have just read. This will help them learn how to form structures correctly, how and why alternative forms exist to express different communicative meanings and how to use them correctly.1 (Nunan, 1998, p.103)
The use of dialogues in grammar teaching is useful because it generally matches learners’ expectations of how language is used in the real world. Make sure to choose texts with a high frequency of instances of the target grammar item. This will help learners notice the new item and may lead them to work out the rules by themselves.
Use self-talk
This is a strategy that can prove useful in many areas, e.g. learning grammar, doing a reading or writing task, organising a project, etc. In order to help students understand how it works, model self-talk on the board.
Write a couple of sentences on the board, e.g. ‘My brother goes to the library once a month. He always borrows historical novels.’
Next, talk out the steps: “First, I check that I understand the sentence. Is this sentence describing a habit or an action happening now? I see that it is a habit, something the subject always does. The pronoun is ‘he’ which is third person singular, so we need to add an ‘s’ to the verb” (borrow).
Students can do this at the board and then as they are doing an exercise. They have to internalise these steps so by speaking them out loud, they have another chance to remember them.
Introduce concept attainment learning
Concept attainment is a form of discovery learning, originally developed by Jerome Bruner.
Select ‘good’ examples of the target language and some that require improvement, preferably taken from students’ work. Present the examples in two columns on the board, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Tell the class that good answers go under ‘Yes’ and the answers that require improvement go under ‘No’. Start with a ‘Yes’ example, and explain to the class that you are going to give several examples and they have to identify why some are under ‘Yes’ and others are under ‘No.’
After you have given the first ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ examples, ask students to think and discuss with a partner why they think one is a ‘Yes’ and another is a ‘No.’
If no one can identify the reason, continue giving one example at a time and asking students to do the think-pair-share process until they identify the reasons. Think-pair-share requires learners to first work on their own, then, they discuss their ideas with a partner, before pairs discuss their answers as a class.
Finally, ask students to correct the ‘No’ examples and write their own ‘Yes’ examples.
Collect errors
This is another discovery learning strategy. Collect errors students frequently make. These can be unique to the cultural group you work with. For example, Chinese students might have trouble with articles because their languages doesn’t need them, while Spanish speakers could sometimes forget to add -s to the 3rd person singular of verbs in the present simple, because there is no such thing in their language.
After the students have practised a language structure independently, collect a sample of errors and ask them to correct them. Error-correction helps some students understand structures better.
When students find a lesson relevant, they become interested in what they are learning, which aids their comprehension. These tips can help you teach grammar by making it relevant to your students. Remember them when planning your lessons and use them as a starting point to come up with activities that will be both engaging and interesting.
Annie Altamirano is an ELT & ESL writer, teacher and trainer. She is also the author of our Cambridge IGCSE™ English (as an Additional Language) teacher’s resource and a mentor in Cambridge Teacher support service.
Read more from Annie and discover more Cambridge IGCSE English (as an Additional Language) lesson ideas today.
References
1Nunan, D. (1998). Teaching Grammar in Context. ELT Journal 52(2): 101-109.
