How to teach

Grammar
Maia Teliashvili
Teaching grammar is an essential part of

school education or adult learning. Without

good grammar, spoken or written words lose

much of their meaning and most of their

value.
 English grammar is very complex,
and all its intricacies cannot truly
be learned by rote, they must be
really understood – and
understanding is most easily
achieved when students are
engaged, interested and having fun
during a lesson.
Two important approaches
of teaching grammar

A An
deductive inductive
approach approach
DEDUCTIVE
APPROACH (RULE-
DRIVEN
LEARNING)
Starts with the
presentation of a
rule and is followed
by examples in which
the rule is applied.
 EXAMPLE OF DEDUCTIVE APPROACH
SUBJECT AND OBJECT PRONOUNS
The subject is the person or thing doing the action:
I left early
She went home examples of rule
We said goodbye

The object is the person or thing receiving the action:

She telephoned me
I hit him examples of rule
We saw her
 Starts with some
examples from
which a rule is
INDUCTIVE inferred.
APPROACH
(DISCOVER
Y
LEARNING)
Students are given a sample and
the teacher guides them in
discovering the grammar rules
used in the sample.
 An inductive exercise

Grammar: Answer these questions about

so….that/such…that so and such
1. It was so embarrassing! • Which word goes before an
2. I’m so tired I could go adjective on its own, so or
straight to bed such?
3. Are you so young that you • Which word goes before a
can’t even share? noun, with or without an
4. She’s such a nice person adjective?
• Which sentences have two
5. It’s such a shame that he’s clauses/two main verbs?
gone Is it necessary to start the
6. It was such a warm day I second clause with that?
thought it could be nice
 The basic teaching sequence
“present then practise”
The teacher first presents/ introduces/
explains/ clarifies/ inputs the language
point and then gives learners a chance to
practice using the language themselves.
 If we want to plan a well-focused
grammar lesson, we need to decide:

• Which of these areas we want to spend time

on
• how long we want to give to each one

• What the best sequence is to have them in

 Many “ present-practise” lessons are
structured as shown below:

Clarification- restricted output

– restricted output

– authentic output
Lead-in: the teacher shows pictures connected to
the lesson topic/ context and elicits ideas from
students
Teacher clarification: T gives/elicits examples of the
language and explains/elicits information about
them from students.
Restricted output: the students work on oral
practice of examples of these items
Restricted output: the students do a written exercise
to practice these items
Authentic output: the students are given an
opportunity to use these items along with the other
language they know, in communicative activities
 Many “present-practise” lessons
are more complex than this
one.
The use of examples, explanations
and practice elements may be
integrated.
There should be a balance
between practice and presentation
which of these two lesson structures
seems more useful to the learners?

Lead- presentation practice

in

Lead- presentation practice

in
a language teacher’s job is to push,
encourage and help learners to try
using the language themselves.
The primary learning experience is
doing the thing yourself, not
listening to someone else telling
you about how to do it.
Thinking about grammar teaching
as primarily ”practice” rather than
“presentation” can help to solve a
number of problems that
teachers feel they face in class.
 What makes the lesson
challenging is not the level of
theoretical knowledge the
lesson deals in, but what you
ask students to try and do.
When teachers want the learners
to focus on a piece of grammar, to
see it, think about it and
understand it, to become much
clearer on its form, meaning and
use they refer to a clarification or
presentation.
 We could differentiate three general
categories of clarification
1. Teacher explanation (teacher tells the learner)

2. Guided discovery (T helps the learner to tell himself)

3. Self-directed discovery ( learner tells himself)

 handout
classify the following grammar clarification activities. Are they mainly (E) explanation,
(G) guided discovery or (S) self-directed discovery?
1. You write some sentences (all using the past perfect) on the board, but with the
words mixed up, then hand the board pen to the students and leave the room.
2. You tell a story about your weekend. Every time you use a verb in the past
simple, you repeat it and write it on the board. at the end , you write ‘past
simple’ on the board and explain that you used all these verbs in the past
because the story happened last Saturday
3. You lecture about the construction of conditional sentences
4. You create a board situation, clarify a specific meaning and then elicit
appropriate sentences from the students or model them yourself.
5. You hand out a list of 20 if sentences. You ask students to work together,
discuss and find out what the ‘rules’ are.
6. Students discuss interpretation of timelines on the board and try to make
example sentences for them. you intervene when answers seem elusive and at
one point explain the difference between two tenses
7. Students decide they want to learn about reported speech. They go to the
library or learning centre and find out more.
 The answers
• 3,2 –explanation
• 4,6,5- guided discovery
• 1,7 –self- directed discovery
 Teacher’s explanation should be:

• Quite short as too long one gets students

confused, bored and embarrassed.
• Talk slowly
• Use less complicated language
• Give examples
• Ask questions
• Use diagrams or visual aids
 Guided discovery

An alternative to giving explanations would be

to create activities that allow learners to
generate their own discoveries and
explanations.
Teacher questions will ‘nudge” the learners
towards key points. In this way, long
explanations can be avoided and learners can
take a more active role in their own progress.
 Teacher’s role in guided discovery is:

• Select appropriate tasks

• Offer appropriate instructions, help,

feedback and explanations
• Manage and structure the lesson so that all
learners are involved and engaged.
 “Socratic questioning” that leads
people to discover things that they
don’t know.
• Ask questions that focus on the meaning,
context and form.
• Offer appropriate examples for analysis and
discussions
• Ask learners to analyse sentences from
texts
• Ask learners to analyse errors
• Ask learners to hypothesise rules
• Raise the awareness as to what they have
learned
 Self-directed discovery

This is what learners do when studying on

their own without a teacher- or in a class
where the teacher’s role is primarily to
facilitate the learner’s own self-direction.it is
the least commonly found in classrooms.
Although teachers often spend a lot of
time on ‘input’ stages- for example, in
giving explanations- the real learning
experience is when learners try to use
the language themselves. In order to
give students intensive oral or written
practice of specific language points,
you can use carefully designed
activities.
 Restricted output

Oral drills
Written exercises
Elicited
dialogues
grammar
 Drills

Drills provide intensive oral practice

of selected sentences, giving the
learners a chance to practice ‘getting
their mouths around’ the language
without worrying too much about
meaning.
 The basic drill involves simple
repetition:

• Teacher: he’s going to open the door

• Students: he’s going to open the door.

 Many teachers consider drills old-
fashioned and never use them.
certainly there is some danger that
students repeating are just making
noises with little idea what are they
saying, but of all activities in the
classroom, the oral drill is the one
which can be most productively
demanding on accuracy
 Variations on a drill
• Repeat the grammar item on its own
• Repeat the grammar item in a phrase/ sentence
• Repeat the intonation pattern
• Repeat a sentence starting with the first word/
starting at the end rather than the beginning
• You give opening of sentence, students
complete it
• You introduce sentence by repetition, students must
respond with a follow-on ‘reply”, or then give an
instruction for transformation of sentence (e g change
to the past perfect)
• You say sentence with errors, students put it right
• You say /show cues( key words, pictures) and
students construct a complete sentence.
 Exercises
• Do it as individuals, then compare and discuss answers
with neighbours
• Work in pairs or in small groups
• Work in teams- make a competition out of it
• Do it together on the board- teacher-led or student-led
• Hand out a jumbled list of answers to match to the
questions
• Cut up the sentences and give one to each student,
negotiate arrangement and answers
• Hand out the exercise with your answers already written
in, some right, some wrong. The students must correct
your work
• Make various games out of it. E.g. Auction
 Elicited dialogues

These are short dialogues (four-ten

lines) which contain a number of
examples of specific items to be
practiced. Students will get many
chances to repeat the dialogues in
class and thus increase their
familiarity with these items.
 Grammar practice activities and
games

Grammar practice activities are

designed to focus on the use of
particular items of grammar. The
material is designed so that the
students have opportunities to work
with the target language
 The examples of grammar activities
are:
• split sentences
• Grammar quiz
• Memory test
• Picture dictation
• Miming an action
• Growing the story/ chain story
• Questionnaires
• Grammar auctions
• Board games and so on
Thank you