Most of the things done in the old style in teaching grammar were perfectly ok and are valid even today. We simply made a mistake by stopping half way through: unfortunately we were pleased with mechanical written exercises and ignored creative tasks and oral practice.

Up to the times of the introduction and first applications of CLT principles in the early 1980s grammar was mostly taught using the deductive method. The all-knowing teacher revealed the secret rules one by one and they were applied right away but only in writing. (Sorry, I am being sarcastic.) The grammar exams were also only in writing.

The good thing about the teaching of grammar was that at its best it was done very systematically. Hunting down my treasures from the 1980s I found the following example on teaching the present tense of the passive voice. Part of the text is in Finnish since mother tongue was often made use of in those days. But I still think you can get my point when you look at the original exercises taken from SIIE series published by an excellent educational publisher WSOY, Finland.

N.B. I’d like to point out that there was or is nothing wrong in teaching the present tense passive voice the way it is presented below. The only problem is that 1) we used to stop too early and 2) were pleased with mechanical exercises and 3) we had no real communicative tasks.

How the present tense in the passive voice was taught in the ‘good old days’

There were three things done before the students were given the exercises below.

1. We made sure the three forms of irregular verbs were mastered. It they are not, the whole thing collapses. It is still the same today.
2. We studied a chapter in the textbook which had plenty of these structures and the word list had a translation of them to make understanding of the chapter easier. This is still often the case in CLT lessons.
3. The teacher explained the rule to be applied and told that in the passive voice we do not know exactly who does the action. These days we start with an oral pre-task and prefer the inductive method to get the students more involved and to enhance memorization of the rule.

ENGLISH	FINNISH
AM IS + 3rd form of verb ARE	-taan, -tään -daan, -dään ostetaan, syödään
2 words	1 word
Negation with the word ‘not’

An example of a well-structured exercise from the 1980s

Exercise 1 above intensifies the memorization of the mother tongue structure and checks if the student recognizes the corresponding structure in the English sentence.

Exercise 2 is excellent in demonstrating the difference in meaning of the corresponding active and passive structure. It will keep the students on their toes with this structure. Once again we are on the level of recognizing the structure.

Exercise 3 is another excellent task. The writer of the task has anticipated one of the main problems weak students are going to face: choice between ‘am, is, are’. It is hard for some students to grasp that ‘tea’ is 3rd person singular, the same as ‘it’ or ‘tins’ is the same as ‘they’.

Exercise 4 is a very typical gap exercise used in testing the knowledge of just about any grammatical structure. If you have read my previous articles, you realize that stopping here is a mistake because we are still at the level of mechanical application of the rule. Why? Because there is no relevat context, the sentences are not logically connected and there is no chance for the students to produce creative sentences of their own with this structure.

Drills seem to be out of fashion but I think they could often be used orally to give another perspective to the new structure. Besides they do not take a lot of time.

One thing that I have barely mentioned in my articles are drills. They used to be very popular in the 1970s and 1980s but somehow they have disappeared. I think textbook writes started to think that they themselves sound oldfashioned if they recommend or include drills in their books and left them out altogether.

I think this was a mistake and anyone who looks at the exercise below where one has to covert an active voice sentence into the passive voice realizes that a learner has to master a lot of things before he/she can apply the rules in a realistic exercise/conversation.

Yes, it is not what we normally do when we talk but it enforces the application of the passive voice rules and can be done orally in pairs in just a few minutes. In brief, an oral drill can be a very effective intermediate task before a real communicative exercise.

This kind of drills were often practised and recorded in language laboratories in 4 stages. Yes, it looks boring and was boring and therefore probably dropped out of fashion.

Teacher: Tom speaks English.

Student: English is spoken by Tom.

Teacher giving the correct answer: English is spoken by Tom.

Student repeats it: English is spoken by Tom.

Still, I think we could use drills more than we actually do today.

• Drills do not take a lot of time if done orally and checked in pairs or in a group.
• What I like about them is that the students can visualize the changes that they have to make.
• If needed the teacher can work on simple drills with the low-achievers while others are doing more demanding exercises.