Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Qilihai Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Tianjin? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Teaching Grammar Teaching grammar is arguably the most difficult part of teaching a language class (not even necessarily a foreign one, either). Students in general find it boring because it requires various amounts of inductive reasoning, depending on how "foreign" the language being learned is, and thus make the learning process rather difficult in general for everyone. Learning grammar relies greatly on pattern recognition and therefore can actually be made to be fun for students if it can somehow become possible to morph words into numbers (or even perhaps words themselves in the students' own native language), which people find to be much more intuitive. Literal translations can be a great help for learning grammar, though it may not always be applicable (for example, if a native Swahili speaker were to try and learn english). At its most abstract, grammar itself is actually a topic in mathematics, specifically in the fields of discrete analysis and logic. Famous mathematicians such as Kurt Godel, Noam Chomsky, and Alan Turing are famous for their work in the realm of language. In fact, the modern definition of a grammar was given to us by Noam Chomsky when he was in his prime, during the 1950s. A popular example that comes from the days of the ancient greek civilizations involves the story about the philosopher who said, "This statement is false." A language is also a topic in mathematics, a topic for which for which Godel became famous when he proved that logic itself is flawed in the sense that it is not sufficient for discovering the truth or falsity of everything in the universe. Further research into language and grammar also lead to the development of the computer, thanks to the astounding inductive reasoning by the late Alan Turing. Coming back down to Earth, though, grammar itself in a foreign language classroom isn't that special, though it is the most fundamental feature of any language. One way to make things more interesting for the student to learn the patterns in a language is to differentiate the patterns about which the student is learning and the patterns used in other foreign languages. In general, classrooms can be made much more informative and interesting when relevant trivia can be thrown into a topic of discussion. For example, when discussing postpositions to a native english speaker learning japanese or Korean, the contrast can be made from the Romantic and Germanic languages where prepositions are instead used (pre and post meaning before and after, respectively). A similar gimmick used for teaching grammar is a "laissez-faire" approach, where the teacher simply tells the student to "go with it" and just try to memorize. Teachers have also been known to use another gimmick where they ask the student not to worry too much about it, as native speakers will still be able to understand you if you use the wrong preposition or what have you (though it should be noted that this is not true for all languages, such as japanese and chinese). In Conclusion, grammar is one of the most boring things to teach to any language (or even mathematics) student. Mathematicians have spent millennia studying the concept of grammar and its connections to the foundations of logic. Teaching grammar can be made more interesting for a student if it can be delineated from other grammars in the world.
