TEACHING TEACHING GRAMMARGRAMMAR

Larsen-Freeman, 2001

IN GENERAL TERMS…• Few learners are capable to pick

up language from pure exposure.

• Most classroom have an EFL environment.

• Form is important to be considered within communicative interactions and meaningful contexts (Spada and Lightbrown, 1993; Lightbrown, 1998)

A THREE-DIMENSIONAL GRAMMAR

FRAMEWORK

• Morphosyntactic and lexical patterns

• Phonemic/ graphemic patterns

• How is it formed?

FORM

MEANING• Lexical meaning

• Grammatical meaning

• What does it mean?

USE• Social context

• Linguistic Discourse context

• Influence of Pragmatics

• Why/when is it used?

EXAMPLES• Possessives:1)Form: o Inflecting nounso Allomorphs

2) Meaning:o Possession o Descriptiono Amounto Relationshipo Part/Wholeo Origin /Agent

EXAMPLES3) Form: o ‘s versus possessive determiner

o ‘s versus of the

o ‘s versus noun compounds

• All three dimensions have to be mastered by the learner (although not necessarily consciously)

• Important imformation by recognizing where students need to be reinforced.

• It is not only the form of the structures what creates conflict in students and the most significant challenge.

THE CHALLENGE

“GRAMMARING”

Thinking of grammar as a

skill to be mastered

(Larsen-Freeman, 1997; 2001)

THE LEARNING PROCESS

SLA reasearch on how students develop their ability to interpret and produce grammatical utterances:

1) First encounter – Processing – Usage: not acuumulation of structures.

E.g. The definite article.

THE LEARNING PROCESS

2) Interlanguage and Backsliding

3) SL learners rely on the knowledge and the experience they have.

4) Different learning processes are responsible for different aspects of language (Gagne and Medsker, 1996)

If we understand our students’ learning processes, we will be able to make the right teaching decisions

WHAT DOES TEACHING

GRAMMAR MEAN?“It means enabling language students to use linguistic forms accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately”

(Larsen-Freeman, 2001)

LANGUAGE APPROACHES

• Traditional Grammar teaching: PPP

• Task or Content Based approach.

APPROACHES ON HOW TO ADDRESS

GRAMMAR• Recasting

• Enhancing Input or Input Flooding (Sharwood Smith, 1993)

• Consciousness-raising Task (Fotos and Ellis, 1991)

APPROACHES ON HOW TO ADDRESS

GRAMMAR• The Garden Path (Tomasello

and Herron, 1988-89)

• Input Processing (Van Patten, 1996)

OUTPUT PRODUCTION• Hypothesis -Testing

Process

• Collaborative Dialogue (Donato, 1994; Swain and Lapkin, 1998)

• ‘Grammaring’

OUTPUT PRODUCTION• Meaningless mechanical drilling

not longer useful

• Students not engaged: Inert Knowledge

• Motivation can be enhanced if we give students meaningful contexts.

• From decalarative to procedural knowledge: meaningful practice

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUT ACTIVITIESREINFORCING FORM

• Twenty Questions• Game on Possessives• Information-Gap Activities• Sentence Unscrambling

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUT ACTIVITIESREINFORCING

MEANING

• Realia and pictures• TPR Activities• Concentration Games• Operations

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUT ACTIVITIESREINFORCING USE• Role plays• Dilemmas

THE IMPORTANCE OF FEEDBACK

• Zero Teacher Intervention

• Collecting Mistakes

• Classifying errors according to the Pie Chart.