Teaching Grammar Meaningfully

1. Teaching Grammar Meaningfully How to make grammar fun while actually getting students to learn Aaron Monroe Anna Nesterova

2. Importance of grammar • Why have grammar? • Students value grammar in language learning. • Support/supplemental course – Grammar is useful in being taught in support of language skills • Grammar can be taught in a way that is meaningful and communicative.

3. Issues in teaching grammar • Traditionally, grammar has been used as the focal point of language teaching • Explicit teaching of grammar does not solely lead to improvement in use of communicative skills; it needs practice in context of language use • Repetition of practice with forms is important to help students retain what they learn • Which forms are important to teach?

4. Making grammar meaningful • Consider the level of your students and their purpose in learning English! • Lower level students often focus on learning fundamental structures of English. • Intermediate groups often focus on communicative language learning, not grammar • Advanced students typically focus on complex grammar of academic registers.

5. Teaching Grammar meaningfully • Purpura (2004) presents grammatical structures in order from low order to higher order • Consideration of this order is important, but also frequency of use in language context • Many textbooks include the teaching of grammatical forms outside of their normal context of use; i.e., present perfect progressive in a intermediate level writing textbook

6. Accommodating students’ learning styles • Deductive Grammar Teaching (i.e. through rules) Advantages: • Time-saving • Appeals to adult learners • Confirms to many students’ expectations

7. Example: Deductive teaching

8. Accommodating students’ learning styles • Inductive Grammar Teaching (i.e. through examples) Advantages: • Students are more involved • Discovered rules are better memorized • Promotes learner autonomy

9. Teaching Grammar in context • Studies (Swain, 1995) have shown grammar is best taught when taught in the context of its language use • Communicative activities that involve use of language skills lead to better retention of forms as well as provide practice with language

10. Integration of language skills Grammar & Listening Grammar & Speaking

11. Integration of language skills Grammar & Reading Grammar & Writing

12. Integration of language skills Fun with Grammar

13. activities: The Dictogloss • Task: dictogloss encourages students to reflect on own output. • Short, dense text is read at normal speed. • Students jot down familiar words and phrases. • Learners work together to reconstruct the text from shared resources. • Various versions are analyzed and compared in a whole class setting.

14. Activities: The Dictogloss • The house was built in the middle of the 18th century and some signs could still be found that it had once been a famous meeting place for criminals.

15. Discussion: The Dictogloss • Swain (1985, 1995) hypothesizes that the requirement to produce may act as a means of drawing learner’s attention to form and meaning • Students then become aware of gaps in grammatical or lexical knowledge when attempting to produce a text. • A teacher can then take student samples & provide corrective feedback, helping students see how to correct these gaps.

16. What happens? • Kowal & Swain (1994): 3 things happen: 1. Student may learn through explicit / implicit feedback from group work. 2. While attempting to produce an utterance, students notice what they don’t know, leading to techniques to fill gap. 3. Students reflect on grammar.

17. Implications for Classroom Use • Kowal and Swain (1994, 1997): Findings: if solved correctly, students typically earned 80% of post-test items correct • When students made mistakes, students generally repeated their proposed solutions from previous task; follow-up thus needed • Not stand-alone activities -= teachers must be active during and after task, giving feedback

18. Reasons to Use • Gigglesworth & Storch (2009); Collaborative writing allows learners to produce more accurate texts than those by individual learners. • Kowal & Swain (1994); Raises awareness of links between form, function, and meaning of words as they construct the message; effective way to teach grammar.

19. Benefits of Collaboration • Gigglesworth & Storch (2009): Pooling of linguistic knowledge = more accurate, but shorter text than individually • Storch (1998): Text Reconstruction tasks are effective in helping students focus on form.

20. Text Reconstruction • Kowal and Swain (1997) found similar benefits to the dictogloss • Requires students to practice with editing and writing • Allows for practice with academic writing and more complex structures

21. Activities: garden path technique • Teacher: Here is a sentence using words: think and problem. I think about the problem. Now make a sentence using talk and problem. • Learner: We talk about the problem. • Teacher: Good. Read and fire. • Learner: We read about the fire. • Teacher: Good. Discuss and poem. • Learner: We discuss about the poem. • Teacher: No. We do not use about with discuss. Adapted from Nation & Newton (2008)

22. Activities: garden path technique • Introduces a grammatical rule & leads learners into situations where they can overgeneralize • Student is made aware of the exception to the rule in a meaningful context • Better than creating decontextualized exercises for error correction

23. Activities: Collaborative Dialogue • Teacher coaches the student through the process of saying/writing in a grammatically correct language • Incorporation of a new grammatical form • Meaningful and more memorable context

24. Activities: Story Circle • The teacher writes a short sentence on the board focusing on a tense or grammatical structure: • That day, when Julia came back from school, she knew something was different… • Students write down a sentence and then pass their papers to the left. Students continue to add to the story until they receive their original paper.

25. Questions?