Teaching Grammar: Expressing Meaning

Teaching Grammar: Expressing Meaning

OHT 1

English, like all languages, is full of problems for the foreign learner. Some of these are easy to explain; others are trickier and even cause difficulty to us teachers!

Grammar books are a great tool of reference that we should always resort to and have our students use alongside with the course book.

Some teachers may regard the teaching of grammar as structured and old-fashioned, but truth to be told, the teaching of formal grammar is in fact, a way of speeding up the learning process, by giving students the tools to enable them to generate ‘correct’ English.

But, what makes a good grammar book? Get feedback

The answers you should hopefully get should include some of the following:

OHT 2/ 3/ 4

Clear explanations The explanations in a grammar book should be descriptions of how English works, a guide to help students understand, not a set of rules to be learnt by heart. Priority one should be the language itself:

Examples It is usually more effective to look at examples of English rather than to read statements about it. If learning about the Present Perfect Continuous, it will always be more helpful to memorise a sentence like: ‘We’ve been waiting here for twenty minutes’, and to imagine the situation, maybe at a bus stop.

Contexts Grammar consists of more than isolated sentences. There are many aspects of grammar which cannot be properly explained within the confines of a clause or a sentence. Texts and dialogues should be used to take account of discourse and the wider context whenever this is relevant. By providing a character or a situation, students will immediately feel more interested

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