An autobiographical reflective narrative piece of writing

With a view to effectively communicating with as many people as possible in an increasingly

globalised world, one is required to learn as many foreign languages as possible. The degree of

priority of these languages varies as we move from one country to another. In Morocco for example,

French administratively continued to top the list as a second language since the day of independence.

Nevertheless, lately there has been a noticeable social trend towards learning English language owing

to its wider use on the international level. Yet, as the case with all languages, the English language is

still in desperate need of effective and productive teaching methods to suit the original purpose of

language embodied in communication. This autobiographical reflective narrative piece of writing will

cast as much light as possible on my experience of learning English language, my teaching experience

and my perspective about some grammatical and pedagogical elements of the General English

course.

It was fourteen years ago when I first stepped into the English language classroom in a public

school in Zagora in the East of the country. The first time I heard the teacher uttering the first words

in English, I was really amazed. Since then a new dream started to shape in my mind that I hoped I

would speak English like my teacher did. Luckily, albeit poverty, my dad never turned down my

request regarding school materials; I asked him to purchase a dictionary for me which I kept using

frequently, but it didn’t help as it was an English-English dictionary. In response to this, I bought an

English-Arabic dictionary to facilitate my understanding of the targeted English words. This strong

motivation was bit by bit intensifying as all my English teachers at that time were inspirational. Unlike

the other language classes including French and Arabic, The English classes were engaging thanks to

the creative use of the available materials; friendly and flexible teachers who successfully

incorporated music, jokes and humor on the whole and managed, in turn, to draw our attention and

motivate us.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned push factors, it’s note-worthy to mention that our

instructor failed to make me communicate in English; as a high school student, I could not figure out

the reason, but now as a master student who has already experienced teaching for a number of

years, I would say that the way I was taught language was not balanced in terms of skills. To clarify

more, my ex-teachers stressed accuracy more than fluency; much time was devoted to grammar, and

the worst of all is that grammar lessons were presented deductively, which is to say we did not have

any contribution to the lesson. We were presented with grammatical rules and then given

opportunities to practice the rules (like doing math’s exercises). The coming paragraphs will elucidate

more, with examples, some of the grammatical structures.

Regarding speaking, pronunciation and speaking skills, they were far from being satisfactory

precisely as the teachers, for some reasons, seldom covered them in the class. I believe that, in the

eyes of those teachers, that for the students to learn English and speak it, they ought to master

grammar, which I entirely found out wrong when I joined teaching. During my seven-year period of

teaching, I applied the same method that grammar leads to better mastery of English and as I tried it

for two years, I noticed that communicative purpose of language in general was not achieved at all in

my class. This was confirmed by many parents who complained to the administration about the poor

communication skills of their kids. In response to that I was forced to change my way of teaching in

the sense that I hugely focused on fluency rather grammar. I devoted much time to language

function, writing, speaking and listening.

The aforementioned learning and teaching experience can help me assess the quality of

course book “the teacher’s Grammar of English”, the teaching activities and some grammatical and

pedagogical elements of the book. My assessment of the book will be done on two levels – the

content and the teaching activities at the level of practice. To begin with, the content of the book is

rich. Thanks to it, I learnt plenty of new grammar notions and structures. For example, I learnt about

ergative phrasal verbs, order of determiners in noun phrases, dative movement pattern …etc. the

book is additionally great as it covers some authentic structures, formal and informal structures

which has made the book inclusive. Another positive aspect of the book lies in its design in the sense

that the 24 chapters are introduced in order of simplicity and priority (questions, negation,

imperative sentences …etc.) and in each chapter, there are headings and at the end of each heading,

there is a summary.

Despite these positive aspects, the book has failed to address the communicative part which

deems the key purpose of any language. One the weakness of the book, which makes some parts of it

irrelevant to Moroccan context, has to do with problems that EFL and ESL students have with some

structures. Most of the compared languages do not concern Moroccans. What concerns Moroccan

learners is French and Arabic languages. Furthermore, I personally think that the types of exercises

proposed for practice are designed for students to check their comprehension of the rules. In other

words, learners are not given the exercises in which to exploit the rules to improve both accuracy and

fluency. This had a great impact on the teaching demonstrations precisely as the students in the class

limited their work to “copy-paste” process. let’s take questions for instance, the presentation was

somewhat successful as it focuses more on grammatical terms, which made it rich in content;

nevertheless, the presentation failed to address communication as most of the exercises suggested in

the book and taken by students are controlled; at page 70 the questions about tag questions in

conjunction with falling and rising intonation and the second question of indentifying the function of

the sentences are not realistically effective provided that we think about Moroccan context. Another

example at P. 75; if I were the presenter of this lesson, I would choose an exercise which will teach

both accuracy and fluency like “asking for the bold part of the sentences” questions for example instead

of using identifying, matching and filling the gap questions.

Other examples of grammatical structures have to do with articles and adjectives, the teaching

demonstrations of the two structures were great. As to the articles, the lesson was not different from the way

I was taught it in my high school classes. The difference is that, at the that time, the teachers presented the

rules without mentioning the interference of French and the targeted language, and the problems it might

generate while using articles in speaking English. But this book suggested some examples that might occur; for

instance if we translate “la vie est belle” into English language it will be “the life is beautiful” which is wrong in

English, but I think that French is not a big problem to the vast majority of Moroccans as they have problems

speaking it fluently, which is to say that the problem of interference is far from being a real issue unlike Arabic.

The third grammatical structure I’d like to shed light on is adjectives. The biggest problem that students have

with this lesson is the word order in a sentence. Usually the problem is associated with interference of Arabic

language with English. Let’s take this example, in Arabic, we say “the girl beautiful” , which is incorrect in

English, in that in English the adjective modifies nouns. Thus the previous sentence will be “the beautiful girl”.

AS I mentioned earlier that pedagogical elements of the book are not productive only if we take Moroccan

situation in accounts mainly as the most languages given to compare to English are NOT used in Morocco. On

the other hand, it will be great for people who speak German, Chinese and Japanese languages.

Basically, the conclusion that I can draw from the above autobiographical narrative piece of writing is

that for the teacher to teach any grammatical structures, she/he should bear in mind three basic ideas:

learning grammar DOES NOT help learners speak English. Yes, it is true that learning rules is really useful, but

learning terms ISN’T. Finally, people did not need grammar terms and rules when they learnt their first

language.