Teaching Grammar

By Ihsan Ibadurrahman

What is grammar?Grammar is the system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence.

To teach or not to teach grammar• Celce-Mucria(1991) identified variables that determine the

importance of grammar:

Age Children Adolescents Adult

Level Beginning Intermediate Advanced

Educational Preliterate Semi-literate Literate

Skill Listening, Reading Speaking Writing

Register Informal Consultative Formal

Need / use Survival Vocational Professional

Teaching adults

• A judicious attention to grammatical form is both helpful and essential to a speedy learning process. The question is not so much on whether to teach grammar but how to provide optimal conditions for overt grammar teaching.

Appropriate grammar-focusing techniques:• are embedded in meaningful, communicate contexts,• contribute positively to communicative goals,• promote accuracy within fluent, communicative language,• do not overwhelm students with linguistic terminology,• are as lively and intrinsically motivating as possible.

Teaching children• Adults have abstract intellectual

capabilities in using grammar to advance their communicative abilities, but children do not.

• For this reason, children profit most from an a structured input and an incidental and indirect error treatment.

• Older children may benefit as well from simple generalizations and concrete illustrations.

• Beginning students should not focus too much on grammar because we might block their acquisition of fluency skills. At this level, grammar is used only to zero in some aspects of language but not as the major focus of class work.

• For Advanced students, grammar might or might not be taught exclusively depending on the accuracy already achieved by learners.

Other variables

Levels

• Students who are non-literate or have no formal education might find it understand to understand the grammatical concepts taught by the teacher.

• Highly educated students, on the other hand, are cognitively more receptive and may want their errors to be corrected by the teacher.

Other variables

Education

• Due to the permanence of writing and its demand for perfection in grammatical form in written English, grammar focus might be more effective in improving written English than speaking, reading, and listening.

Style / Register:

Other variables

Skills:

• The more formal a context is, the more there is a demand on learner’s grammatical accuracy. In casual, informal contexts such as a peer conversation, minor errors are more acceptable than formal contexts such as a speech.

• Similarly in writing, tolerance of errors is higher in a quick e-mail message than a formal essay.

• Those striving for professional goals may encounter formal settings in which grammatical accuracy is a prime criterion.

• On the other hand, those who need English only for survival may only need simple forms of grammar with lots of ready-made chunks in order to deal with daily basic communicative needs.

Other variables

Needs for English

NOTE: The variables should only be looked as a guideline, rather than an absolute rule. There are numerous situations where, for instance, beginners are taught grammars because of the immediate need for passing university entrance.

Different approaches to teaching grammar

• Text-based approach• Uses reading as a tool to identify and analyze

the language

• Context-build– Uses visual interest to build a context from

which the language is generated and taught

• Test-teach-test– Uses free speaking activity as a starting point,

from which students’ grammatical mistakes are collected, taught, and later re-tested