My own road to master the English grammar was different.
In the early years of CLT many linguists and some teachers started to feel teaching grammar was not important and even ignored it. Fortunately, this attitude turned out to be impossible in practice and we kept on teaching grammar – but not exactly like we had done before.
There were three drastic and permanent changes in practising new grammatical structures thanks to comminicative language teaching:
- Firstly, CLT teachers realized that we must make use of 3 kinds/levels of exercises in practising grammar: 1) mechanical, 2) semi-communicative and 3) communicative exercises and tasks. Up to that point exercises had nearly always been mechanical.
- Secondly, having learnt the rules and having done a couple of written mechanical exercises, we moved on doing ‘authentic’ oral activities in pairs and groups. In brief, the focus was in doing oral grammatical exercises at 3 levels, instead of written ones. I will explain ‘how’ in the next articles.
- Thirdly, CLT teachers realized that differentiation was needed in mixed-ability classes since some students did mainly only mechanical exercises while the best ones were able to move straight on to using the new structures in free speech or activities.
Three methods in teaching grammatical rules
Grammatical structures and rules can be taught using ‘the inductive or deductive method’ or they can be learnt without any rules just by being exposed to the new language a lot; pretty much the way mother tongues are learnt.
- Most teachers know the term ‘inductive method’ of teaching grammar, which means the formulation of the rules on the basis on examples.
- It is contrasted with the ‘deductive method’ which means the teacher explains the rules in detail and then lets the students practise and apply the rules. This is the easy way out in teaching grammar. The teacher thinks ‘I taught you the rules and it is up to you to learn them. Practise and we need to move on.’
- The third ‘method’ is the lexical approach to teaching grammar which means learning grammatical structures as ‘chunks’ ; i.e. word combinations, words, set phrases or set structures. With minimum reference to any rules it is very similar to the learning of mother tongue. The Dodson method is based on chunks as well but it makes heavy use of the mother tongue.
I will deal with the communicative teaching of grammar, the inductive and deductive methods as well as the lexical approach and the Dodson method in much more detail in separate articles.
Few people like grammar. Grammar is just a tool, not the aim of language teaching. And it is not always a must. Like me, the English grammar can be learnt from games, songs or any other source without official teaching, without the learner realizing it!
My own history on learning and teaching the English grammar
Now I am going to have a look at my own experiences as the learner and teacher of grammar. My road to the English grammar was different.
A lot of input in a foreign language can lead to subconscious learning of grammar without knowledge of the rules.
I used to have an ambivalent attitude to grammar. When I went to the university in the early 1970s and had been accepted to study English, I knew very few rules of the English language. Still, even if I only wrote one essay in all my school years, I mastered the written language rather well. How come? It was at that time it dawned on me that I must have learnt the rules subconsciously while singing in English and spending a lot of my time listening to songs and writing down the lyrics. So I am a living example that one does not need to study any rules of a foreign language to learn it, provided we are exposed to the language for a long time, usually thanks to our hobby that involves the use of the foreign language.
So, I must have learnt the grammatical elements as chunks, lexical units of various length, and then generalized the models to cover different situations as well.
A teacher has to know the grammatical rules to be able to justify his/her marking of essays, exams and oral presentations.
Consequently, I was in deep trouble when I started teaching English before I had taken my official grammar tests at the university. For instance, I was amazed about the difficulty of making questions in English just three hours before I had to teach the rules to my evening class. When to use ‘do, does, did’ and when to leave them out and under what circumstances! What are auxuliaries and what is their roles in questions? It was all Hebrew to me! I was sweating like a little pig before the lesson. Luckily I did not know most of the adult students were teachers themselves and six of them were heads of their school.
Of course, I had to learn all the rules of English rather quickly and I actually enjoyed explaining the students why particular structures were considered wrong or inappropriate. Even more so, I enjoyed presenting grammar rules so that minimum number of grammatical terms needed to be used and the learning was logical, proceeded step by step and included a lot of oral practising.
However, I realized my road to mastering the English grammar is not a common one and therefore I have always used the inductive method in introducing most of the new grammatical points.
In some rare cases I have been applying the deductive method or the lexical approach to teaching grammar. They all work well but the success in using them depends on the proficiency level of the class. In other words, what kind of learners they are and how good their English is.
Let’s face it. If you go to the city centre and shout out ‘I know the English grammar in and out!’ no-one will be impressed.
But if you speak beautiful English with correct grammar in your utterances, some people might be impressed.
The following matters will be discussed in my next articles.
| Grammar | Communicative grammar, tasks and differentiation |
| The inductive and deductive method in teaching grammar | |
| Grammar in the ‘good old days’ | |
| Teaching grammar the old style and CLT style, comparison | |
| Teaching young beginners grammar, the lexical approach | |
| The Dodson bilingual method |
