A Case Study on Grammar Teaching

The treatment of grammar in American Inside Out

© 2008 Octavio Plaza C.




introduction


The aim of the study

In this study I evaluate a grammar lesson in the light of relevant theoretical assumptions and perspectives of grammar, current methodology in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), and pedagogical requirements/ constraints of the particular teaching situation. We will be concerned here with the question of ‘how’ grammar is being taught in some EFL classes in Mexico City and Estado de México.
Key words
Grammar, PPP, tasks, approach, awareness-raising, communicative, consciousness-raising, English language teaching, EFL, ESL, ELT.

What is grammar?
The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines grammar as the study and practice of the rules by which words change their form and are combined into sentences.
The content of the grammar lesson

While it is essential for learners to be able to manipulate grammatical form, this is not sufficient. Learners also need to understand the concepts expressed and the functions performed through a particular grammatical element (Harmer, 1987: 9-11 & 17).

The teaching situation

Learner profile

Age: 18-21-
Level: Pre-intermediate university students. Mexico City. Learners have had two years of instruction during which very little grammar was taught implicitly.
L1: Spanish (monolingual class)
Class schedule: Mondays & Wednesdays from 12:00 to 14:00(120- minute sessions)
Aids: whiteboard, felt tip pens)
Stage of lesson: Presentation/practice
Reason for learning: Mainly school curriculum, whose long-term aim is for its students to complete 5 levels and receive a certificate to be able to get a degree. .

The course-book

AMERICAN INSIDEOUT 2 (Kay, Jones & Kerr, 1990) comprises a ‘student’s book’ (SB), a ‘teacher’s book’ (TB) and a ‘workbook’ (WB). It is targeted at pre-intermediate or at ‘‘students who have done some elementary English”. The lesson to be evaluated and adapted is Lesson 1 of Unit 16 (SB: 15-16). Since the TB offers step-by-step methodological advice and guidance, and the WB provides additional exercises, all three books are going to be referred to during the evaluation.


The Lesson: Teaching future time clauses using a reading text.

Presentation, practice, awareness-raising and the role of meaning

Step1. Warm up. The teacher writes the name of the unit on the board “lifestyle” and starts eliciting from learners what that concept suggests to them, students come up with different items such as clothes, music, religion, and when the teacher gets “health”, she stops them and ask them why they think health is important to live longer.

Step2. Presentation. The teacher then asks the class if they would like to live long and how long. Learners are asked what they need to do to stay healthy and live longer. This, besides being a lead in activity seems to aim at activating learners’ previous knowledge of the topic. Learners come up with a sufficient number of opinions and recommendations.
The teacher asks the class to complete this sentence “If we have a good health, …” students come up with completions like “we can live better and longer, and this is it, the teacher decides it is time to have ss to opens their books and look at a picture which shows an old woman and a reading texts under the title “How not to die before you get old”.
Commentary: The approach is obviously communicative, there is an obvious (Nunan, 1991) “emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language, and the grammar presentation intends to be covert or inductive in which the rules are inferred through guided discovery and there is an enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning. (Thornbury,1999).
Step3.While Students are then asked to look at some tips to live longer which include a multiple choice type exercise: “You‘ll live longer if you…eat a low calorie/vitamin/protein diet, which seems to aim at activating learners’ schemata. The teacher then gets students to scan the text and find the tips mentioned in the first task.
There was a short vocabulary exercise to provide the learners with more communicative tools by means of a few collocations.
Step4. The teacher tries to guide learners to produce there own examples based on the reading. “If you do a lot of exercise… what will happen? And gets students to repeat the conditional clause and say what will happen. “If I do a lot of exercise, I’ll be healthier”. As soon as they have done this partly mechanical, partly meaningful practice, the teacher tries some sort of chain practice with students. Ask the person next to you what will happen if he/she does or doesn’t do this and that. The learners again have to repeat the conditional clause first and then the main clause.
Step four. Finally the teacher writes a couple of conditional sentences on the board highlighting the difference between conditional clause (in red) and the main clause (in blue) and gives a brief explanation on the possibilities in the main clause can instead of will.
Commentary: One of the main tasks of pedagogical grammar is the formulation of rules; concrete, non technical, simple, which is reasonable if we concentrate more on meaning rather than form. (Westney,1994). New critiques suggest; however, that an emphasis on truth, clarity and simplicity could also enhance learning. An awareness of form can result in better understanding of the structure, better spelling and might eventually enhance productive skills. The class is, on the whole, adequate regarding the presentation of grammar, as well as the practice stage, which seems to work well. The activities presented lead students to the awareness raising needed to try to figure our rules when using future time clauses. After practicing for a while students are presented examples of the structure in written form and two colors to differentiate the clauses, which also seem appropriate and seems to provide learners with a visual cue, so that they pay attention to form as well. After learners have focused on meaning mainly, some consciousness raising work can be done, to focus on form and foster accuracy as well as fluency.
Time. The teacher spent about 20 minutes teaching grammar both implicitly and explicitly. The remaining time was used for warm up, instructions and a reading text to provide students with some input.
Integrating Skills. Three skills were put into use, listening (when teacher gives instructions), reading (learners scan a reading text) and speaking (students come up with examples and utter some phrases, words and exclamations). A writing exercise could be done the following class as a post activity. Learners could be asked to write about health issues (sleeping, working out, food for thought, etc).
Commentary: All in all, the teacher did a pretty good job. The approach to teaching grammar seems to me to be adequate; she never told learners they were doing conditionals, or future clauses, and the activities, on the whole, worked out pretty well too. The teacher speaks English at all times, and the learners were actively involved in the activities; however, learners are so used to this kind of presentation of grammatical structure that they become predictable and uninteresting at times, therefore a little variation will not do any harm. Consciousness raising deals with the fact that students have to actually discover the rules that govern a given structure by means of some well designed activities which naturally lead them to understand, practice, produce and eventually use the structure. The course book intends to do so ,but takes understanding for granted at very early stages; this may be because, the book was originally though as for TESL, in which students have much more exposure and have heard and used the structure before, though unconsciously. Teachers need to understand the big differences between EFL and ESL.
EFL classrooms in Mexico might need a slightly different approach. I would suggest involving students more by means of some consciousness-raising tasks, which present the language in a more implicit way at first through either a listening or reading text or both, which aims at providing a some suitable input. Carefully designed questions about the text might guide learners to both, use the structure quite naturally, without having to present it explicitly, and practice. Having students to work on the questions about listening or reading text can raise their awareness of both meaning and form. It might not be necessary to carry out mechanical practice and drilling afterwards, though it is advisable for some learners and learning styles. Finally I would check the learners' understanding of the structure by having them to focus on meaning and then form (without telling them they are doing so, of course), by means of a match-the-two-halves kind of task for meaning and a fill-in- the -gaps one for form. We're ready for a post activity which is a perfect time for productive skills, speaking and writing.
“How explicitly should grammar be taught? Accurate grammatical understanding and accurate rules are "neither realistic nor desirable in learning/teaching situations beyond the low-level area." Users of L1, as well as advanced learners of L2, can internalize higher level of grammar through massive exposure; "any language user 'knows' that language is like this, without necessarily knowing the rules. Westney suggests that "an adequate model of language must allow for structure to be relatively obscure and only indirectly accessible to consciousness”. (Odlin, 1994)
Learners in Mexico City and Estado de México cannot normally have such “massive exposure, so a sufficient focus on form, can help to overcome such obstacles as lack of exposure.

Practice and awareness-raising

“Since evidence for/against practice and consciousness-raising is inconclusive and contradictory (Ellis, 1992) TEFL methodology would be wise to cater for both. There is also a theoretical framework which seems to call for their combination. Anderson’s (1983) model distinguishes between declarative (‘what’) and procedural (‘how’) knowledge. Declarative knowledge can be used to ‘‘guide behavior’’ through ‘‘interpretative procedures’’. It can be argued that awareness-raising/noticing will bring about declarative knowledge, whereas practice will lead to enhance procedural knowledge. Ellis (1992: 235) came to a similar conclusion” (Gabrielatos, 1994).












References

Odlin, T. 1994. Perspectives on Pedagogical grammar. CUP
Harmer J. 1997. Teaching and Learning Grammar. Longman
Thornbury, S. 1999. How to teach Grammar. Longman
Ellis, R. 1988. Classroom Second Language Development. Prentice Hall.
Harmer, J. 1987. Teaching and Learning Grammar. Longman.
Littlewood, W. 1981. Communicative Language Teaching. CUP
Gabrielatos, C. (1994) Materials Evaluation & Adaptation Retrieved: April 9, 2008 from: http://www.gabrielatos.comGrammar/Evaluation.htm