How is grammar best taught?

 

 

Autor:prof.Grama Irina Cătălina,Școala Gimnazială Gâdinți ,județul Neamț,2018

 

            At the start of this new millennium, grammar was a broken subject. Grammar is often ignored, broken off altogether from the teaching of literature, rhetoric, drama, composition, and creative writing.

            The tensions between the traditional teaching of grammar and the goals of both confident writing and the culturally inclusive classroom entail complex issues and valid charges. We should propose answers to several questions:

• How can we teach grammar to support learning in all language skills?

• How can we teach grammar so that students discover its rules and principles on their own instead of hearing us impose those rules and principles on them?

• How can we teach grammar so that we strengthen rather than undermine our efforts to honor the voices and cultures of all students?

• How can we teach grammar so that the knowledge it provides can help students feel confident about their own language and appreciate the languages of others?

            We must answer these questions because, despite the rejection of traditional grammar teaching, grammar does not go away.

            The term grammar refers to two kinds of knowledge about language. One type of language is subconscious knowledge, the language ability that children develop at an early age without being taught. As children begin to talk, as they become able to form sentences, their brains are forming their grammar circuits automatically. The other kind of knowledge is the conscious understanding of sentences and texts that can help students improve their reading and writing abilities by building on that subconscious knowledge. This conscious understanding includes knowing the parts of sentences and how they work together, knowing how sentences connect with one another to build meaning, and understanding how and why we use language in different ways in different social situations.

            In teaching grammar in school, we are not really teaching grammar at all: children learn that automatically; rather, we are teaching students about grammar, and we are hoping to bring them the added clarity and confidence that go with any knowledge that strengthens skills and deepens understanding.

            According to the literature in the field, the three goals for teaching grammar are:

Goal A: Every student will complete school with the ability to communicate comfortably and effectively in both spoken and written English, with awareness of when use of English is appropriate.

Goal B: Every student will complete school with the ability to analyze the grammatical structure of sentences within English texts, using grammatical terminology correctly and demonstrating knowledge of how sentence-level grammatical structure contributes to the coherence of paragraphs and texts.

Goal C: Every student will complete school with an understanding of, and appreciation for, the natural variation that occurs in language across time, social situation, and social group. While recognizing the need for mastering Standard English, students will also demonstrate an understanding of the equality in the expressive capacity and linguistic structure among a range of language varieties both vernacular and standard, as well as an understanding of language-based prejudice, spoken and written English, with awareness of when use of English is appropriate.

            How well do the grammar lessons help students meet these three grammar goals? The teacher should ask himself the following questions about the grammar lesson plans:

v  Are students applying grammar to a real communication context?

v  Does the lesson take audience and purpose into consideration?

v  Will the lesson broaden the students’ understanding of and respect for different varieties of English? Different languages?

v  Are students using grammatical terminology correctly?

            A skill is treated as a self-acting part of awareness. Automatization of the action is the principal characteristic of skills.

            In order to form skills, it is necessary to know that:

v  just some definite elements of the action are automatic;

v  the automatization occurs under more difficult conditions, when the child can not concentrate his attention on one element of the action;

v  the whole structure of the action is improved and the automatization of its separate components is completed.

          Grammar is one of the most difficult aspects to teach.

Many people, inclusively some teachers, think of grammar as a fixed set of rules of usage and word forms. Teachers who adopt this definition focus on grammar as a set of rules and forms and they teach grammar by explaining the forms and rules, followed by training students on them. Other teachers tend not to teach grammar at all, influenced by recent theoretical work on the difference between language acquisition and language learning. Believing that students acquire their first language without overt grammar instruction, they expect them to learn their second language in the same way. They assume that students will absorb grammar rules as they hear, read, and use the language in communication activities. This approach does not permit students to use one of the major tools they have: their active understanding of how grammar works in the native language and what it is.

            The communicative competence model balances these extremes, recognizing that overt grammar instruction helps students acquire the language more efficiently, but it integrates grammar teaching and learning into the larger context of teaching students to use the language. Teachers using this model teach students the grammar they need to know to accomplish defined communication tasks.