Teach English in Taipingba XiAng - Chongqing

Teaching GrammarI anticipate teaching grammar to be the most difficult part of teaching ESL. First of all, proper grammar is not used or understood my many fluent and native english speakers, myself included. How many people really know the difference between the past perfect and the past perfect continuous? My biggest concern is being able to communicate the precise differences the tenses without speaking a student?s native language. Some teachers take a hands-off approach to teaching grammar. That is, they simple expose them to the language and let them play around with it. This may work for young children, but it can be a problematic approach to take with young adults and older students. Children have a greater mental capacity for acquiring new language. They can pick up on the colloquial tendencies while still adhering to the proper rules of grammar. Young adults and older students will have more difficulty with the complex workings of grammatical structures. This is not to say that the teacher has to teach older students as if they are robots. However, older students need to be taught the rules, usage, and exceptions with more detail. There are two sides to this sword. Some argue that taking a controlled approach to grammar results in a difficulty when trying to produce language spontaneously. Even if the student knows the rules for forming the tense, they are still likely to make mistakes when speaking casually. I can attest to this. I studied Spanish for three years. Grammar acquisition was taught with a very formulaic approach. I learned verb forms by looking at charts that indicated what form the verb took in for tense, person, and number. I did little fill-in-the blank exercises for homework and took a few tests per semester. Needless to say, my knowledge of Spanish can get me tacos and beer at a Mexican restaurant and maybe directions to the beach?maybe. I know how the past and future tenses should look. When listening to others speak in Spanish, I can recognize a great deal of what?s being said, but it is not part of my explicit knowledge. This is called passive grammar, when someone has the knowledge of it, but cannot use it. The real question is how to turn passive grammar into active grammar, that is, grammar that we can use in conversation. Rod Ellis, a prominent language theorist puts forward that the teaching of grammar is important, but perhaps not in the way that most teachers think. Ellis distinguishes between two types of grammar instruction; practice and consciousness-raising. Practice refers to lessons where students learn an isolated grammatical feature, produce sentences with that feature, and receive feedback from the teacher on their performance. Consciousness-raising involves teaching grammar formats and meanings in detail. Rather than have the students practice it with speech, this approach focuses on ingraining the rules of grammar into students. In Ellis? research he finds that consciousness-raising is a more effective way to make grammar a part of one?s explicit knowledge. He does say however, that both practice and consciousness-raising have their place in the classroom. Also, communication activities should be supplemental to this approach. The consciousness-raising method probably will not work with especially young children since they learn by doing rather than hearing. Furthermore, this type of teaching is difficult to communicate to beginners because they do not have a sufficient vocabulary to understand the grammar behind what they are learning. While, I think Ellis has done some very useful research, his approach to teaching is a bit too mechanical and formulaic for my taste. If I were to be in a class where grammar was taught through consciousness-raising, I would get bored pretty fast. I do believe that some grammar instruction is important, but I?m not sure that consciousness raising is the right approach. I am curious as to how other teachers feel about this. I would consider using it if others had luck with it, but I?m not sure that I would start using it right away. Works Cited Baere, Kenneth. "Basic Guide to Teaching Grammar in an ESL / EFL Class Setting." Teaching Grammar in an ESL / EFL Setting. About. Web. 30 June 2011. . Ellis, Rod. "Grammar Teaching- Practice or Consciousness Raising." Ed. Willy A. Renandya. Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice. Ed. Jack C. Richards. new york: Cambridge UP, 2002. 167-74. Print. Nooan III, Francis J. "Noonan - Teaching esl students to "Notice" Grammar (TESL/TEFL)." Internet TESL Journal. July 2004. Web. 30 June 2011. . Raynaud, Marianne. "Why Teaching Grammar Is Important." Quality Time ESL. Web. 27 June 2011. .