One of the most important problems when teaching grammar is our conviction that grammar inputs help or do not help students learn the language. On the other hand, we feel more comfortable using a broadly communicative methodology in our teaching, and are disappointed to find that our course books provide very few ideas for interesting, meaningful and contextualized grammar practice. There are usually either „communicative” activities designed to develop general fluency, or „grammatical” exercises that are mostly based on uninteresting manipulation of forms. A few books and periodicals suggest a number of good ideas for the kind of activities.
There is no doubt that knowledge of the grammatical rules is essential for the mastery of language, because one cannot use words unless one knows how they should be put together. But the question is: do we have to have grammar exercises? Isn’t it better for learners to absorb the rules intuitively through communicative activities than through special exercises explicitly aimed at teaching grammar?
As far as this question is concerned, I think that the ability to communicate effectively is probably not attained quickly or efficiently through pure communicative practice in the classroom, not at least within the framework of a formal course of study. In „natural learning”, such as the acquisition of a first language by a child, the amount of time and motivation devoted to learning is so great that there is no necessity for conscious planning of the learning process: sooner or later the material is absorbed. However, in a formal course of study, there is less time available and often less motivation, which means that learning time has to be organized for optimum efficiency.
This means preparing a programme of study, a syllabus, so that bits of the total corpus of knowledge are presented one after other for gradual, systematic acquisition, rather than all at once. And it also means preparing an organized, balanced plan of classroom teaching/learning procedures through which the learners will be enabled to spend some of their time concentrating on mastering one or more of the components of the target language on their way to acquiring it as a whole. These components may be things like spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar.
Grammar, then, may furnish the basics for a set of classroom activities during which it becomes temporarily the main learning objective. The learning of grammar should be seen in the long term as one of the means of acquiring mastery of the language as a whole, not as an end in itself. Thus, although at an early stage we may ask our students to learn a certain structure through exercises that concentrate on meaningless manipulations of language, we should quickly progress to activities that use it meaningfully. And even these activities will be superseded eventually by general fluency practice, where the emphasis is laid on successful communication, and any learning of grammar takes place only as incidental to this main objective.
Any generalization about the „best” way to teach grammar (what kinds of teaching procedures should be used, and in what order) will have to take into account both the wide range of knowledge and skills that need to be taught, and the variety of different kinds of structures subsumed under the heading „grammar”.
In what follows I will refer to teaching modal verbs in a common grammar class. I usually begin by presenting the class with the text in which the grammatical structure, in our case the modal verbs, appears. The aim of the presentation is to get the learners to perceive the modal verbs, their forms and meanings, in both speech and writing and to take them into short-term memory. Often a story or short dialogue is used which appears in written form in the textbook.
At the isolation and presentation stage I move away from the context and focus, temporarily, on the grammatical items themselves: what they sound and look like, what they mean, how they function, in short, what rules govern them. The objective is that the learners should understand these various aspects of the modal verbs. In some classes we may need to make extensive use of the students’ native language to explain, translate or make generalizations. In more academic classes, or where the structures may seem difficult for the students to grasp, this stage may take some time. At this stage, it is very important for the students to understand very well the forms and meanings of the modal verbs and that is why the explanations should be delivered very carefully by the teacher.
Sometimes presentation takes place using personalization immediately: the teacher uses the students and their lives to introduce new language. Sometimes personalization is the final part of a presentation that is done through the use of tents or pictures. A good presentation should be clear and students should have no difficulty in understanding the situation or what the new language means. A good presentation should also be efficient since the aim is to get the personalization stage as soon as students can manipulate the new language. So, the more efficiently we can do this, the better.
Moreover, a good presentation should be lively and interesting. We want students to get interested and be involved during a presentation stage with the help of a good situation and language course. And if it is, there is a good chance that students will remember the new grammar more easily. Appropriateness is another characteristic of a good presentation. However interesting, funny or demonstrative a situation is, it should be appropriate for the language that is being presented. In other words, it should a good vehicle for the presentation of meaning and use. Lastly, a good presentation should be productive. In other words, the situation the teacher introduces should allow students to make many sentences and/or questions with the new language.
As far as explanation is concerned, teachers frequently explain new grammar. The explanations might well present problems to a lot of students because of the technical words being used and because abstract grammar explanations are always quite difficult to swallow. The explanations in the students’ mother tongue would be a lot more comprehensible, but we will want to be careful about the amount of mother tongue that we use in the English class. In general, it seems that grammar explanations for beginners and elementary students are better handed with more obvious techniques, such as isolation and demonstration. Of course this is not always the case, and where a rule is easy to explain at the students’ level, then clearly an explanation provided in the students’ mother tongue would be appropriate since there is an important difference between the English modal verbs and the Romanian moods.
Below I will refer to the discovery techniques, another way of presenting efficiently the new grammar structures. Discovery techniques are those where students are given examples of language and told to find out how they work – to discover the grammar rules rather than be told them. The students are exposed to the new language, with no focus, some time before it is presented. At a more conscious level, students can be asked to look at some sentences and say how the meaning is expressed and what the differences are between the sentences. As students puzzle through the information and solve the problem in front of them, they find out the grammar rule.
The advantages of this approach are clear. By involving the students’ reasoning processes in the task of grammar acquisition, we make sure that they are concentrating fully, using their cognitive powers. We are also ensuring that our approach is more student-centered: it is not just the teacher telling the students what the grammar is. They are actually discovering information for themselves. Encouraging students to discover grammar for themselves is one valuable way of helping them to get to grips with the language.
Very often this discovery of grammatical facts involves students in a fairly analytical study of the language. Teachers will have to decide how much of this kind of material is appropriate for their students, but one thing is certain: the use of grammatical techniques can be highly motivating and extremely beneficial for their students’ understanding of English grammar. So then the question is whether these techniques are particularly time-consuming. Obviously, reading a text takes time, but teachers should remember that the students will get reading practice as well as focusing on the grammar. So the time is not really a problem. What is much more important is weather teachers feel happy with these techniques and whether or not they suit the students.
After a period of grammar presentation the practice stage consists of a series of exercises done both in the classroom and for home assignments, whose aim is to cause the learners to absorb the structures, that is, to transfer what they know from short-term to long-term memory. Obviously, not every grammar practice procedure can cover all aspects of the structures, therefore we shall need to use a series of varied exercises which will complement each other and together provide through coverage.
Generally, the activities are designed so that the students practice the language while at the same time being involved in an enjoyable activity. Students need to practice their grammar a lot and where possible, this will be done in pairs using interaction activities and so on. But, where drills are used, the teacher must always remember that they are only a means to an end. As soon as possible they should be abandoned in favour of one of the creative activities.
As we have seen, practice is an important part in the process of learning a structure because the function of a practice procedure is to familiarize learners with the material, not to introduce it. This is why learners should not be asked to practice material they have not yet been taught. It is very important for the teachers not to launch into practice activities in the classroom without sufficient initial presentation of the material. If effective pre-learning has not taken place prior to the practice – if the material has not been clearly perceived and taken into short-term memory by the learners – then much time will be wasted on incomprehension or unacceptable responses, forcing the teacher to interrupt the procedure for explanations and corrections, and lessening the time available for real practice.
If we refer to success-orientation, we might say that practice is most effective if it is based on more or less successful performance, and practice activities should be designed and presented in such a way as to make it likely that learner responses will be acceptable. Besides immediate efficiency of practice, this principle of success-orientation has wider pedagogical implications, no less important. A student whose performance is consistently successful will develop a positive self-image as a language learner, whereas one who frequently fails will be discouraged and demotivated. It should also be noted that tension and anxiety are fairly high if learners feel there is a possibility of „failure” and are correspondingly lowered if they are confident of success. Thus, success-orientation contributes significantly to a positive classroom climate of relation, confidence and motivation.
On the other hand, the fact that there is no risk of failure in producing acceptable language lessens the challenge of the activity for some participants, so we have to find other ways of making it interesting. Having presented the practice task, we then need to make sure that our students do in fact perform it successfully and get through as much volume of language as possible and maintain interest. There should be very little correction of mistakes if there has been proper pre-learning, and if the exercise is really success-oriented.
Teacher activity in the course of the practice should therefore be largely directed towards supporting and assisting the students in their production of acceptable responses rather than towards assessing and correcting. Examples of such assistance are: giving extra time to reread or think; repeating or simplifying a text: approving the beginning of an utterance in order to encourage the production of the whole: suggestions, hints, prompts. All this means that we have to be very alert to sense when and where help is needed and to what form it should take. Again, there is a wider message: I, the teacher, am here to help you, the learner, succeed and progress in your learning, not to judge, scold or make you feel inferior.
It may be agreed that since we constantly help our students to get it right, we will never know if they can manage by themselves or not. Part of the answer to this is, of course, that we should be sensitive enough to feel when they are going to be able to produce acceptable utterances on their own, and not to rush in to help unnecessarily. If, on the other hand, we let them get it wrong and then correct, there will have been virtually no practice: only a brief test, followed by a representation of the correct form.
It is very important to know that a well-designed grammar practice activity should be based on the task that has clear objectives and entails active use of the structure being practised; and it should maintain learner interest and motivation through careful choice of topic, use of information-gap procedures, role play, personalization etc. But much of the effect of all this may be lost on a large proportion of the class if we do not do something to ensure maximum, balanced participation of its members.
The way learners are activated when performing an exercise, moreover, may affect not only the amount of participation, but also the level of motivation and involvement, and the learner value of the practice given. We all know that the main techniques of learner activation available to the teacher have both advantages and disadvantages for various teaching situations or kinds of practice activities. Some techniques are based on language reception with little or no learner response and it is the teacher who does most, if not all, of the language production, and clearly controls what little learner activity there is.
In one-to-one teacher-student exchanges (probably the most common form of classroom activation) the teacher is still dominant, but there is increasingly active participation on the part of the learners. This participation increases still further in brainstorming (the students are given a single stimulus which serves as the cue for a large number of responses) or „chain” techniques (instruction and initial cue are given by the teacher, resulting in a large number of responses by the learners, but only the first response is related to the original cue, the rest of the utterances being made in response to the one before); and in the most forms of pair or group work, nearly all the actual learning production is in the hands of the learners, the teacher merely providing instructions and materials and acting as monitor and helper.
Finally, testing grammar is the last important part in the grammar teaching process. Learners do tests in order to demonstrate – to themselves and to the teacher – how well they master the material they have been learning. The main objective of tests within a taught course is to provide feedback, without which neither the teacher nor the learner would be able to progress very fast. We have to know where we are in order to know where we are in order to know where to go next.
Formal examinations, usually preceded by revision on the part of the learners, and followed by written evaluation on the part of the teacher, are only one kind of testing, useful for immediate teaching purposes. Most testing, however, is done automatically and almost unconsciously by teacher and learners as the course proceeds, the most valuable feedback on learning being supplied by the learners’ current performance in class and in home assignments. Often practice exercises are used to supply such informal feedback, in which case they may function virtually as tests.