Is There a Wrong Way to Teach Grammar?
Any ESL teacher knows if you want students to have a good grasp of the language, you need to pound the grammar basics into them. However, not many ESL teachers will put on a smile when it’s time to teach grammar.
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Sure, grammar is an indispensable part of any language, but the old ways of teaching grammar by making students remember numerous diagrams just don’t work anymore. Or does it? Is there such a thing as the wrong way to teach grammar?
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It turns out that there are “wrong” ways to teach grammar. Here are some of them:
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Not giving any motivation
Why do your students need to learn the past tense? Because it’s in the syllabus? That’s hardly a motivation.
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Lack of motivation is not a problem strictly in language teaching. Chat with students, and you’ll learn that teachers rarely ever give a background story of why should kids learn a subject. Why do I need Pythagorean theorem for? Is there any point in learning about WW II? How will learning about enzymes improve my odds of getting a job?
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Do your best to give students reasons to learn a subject. In the case of learning about past tense, let them know that it’s the natural way of telling stories of events that have already happened. That’s the tense writers use to write most novels and so on.
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Lack of practice
When teachers are chasing deadlines, it’s common to make students memorize concepts, do tests, then move on to the next grammar lesson. As a result, students have very little chance to internalize what they’ve just learned.
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It’s best for teachers to apply previous lessons in daily conversations and future lessons as well. For instance, as an icebreaker, teachers could ask students what they ate for breakfast and have them answer in the past tense.
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Focusing on grammar instead of meaning
“What the …? Isn’t the point of grammar teaching is to focus on grammar?!”, you ask.
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Well, that’s true, but we all should remember that the point of language is to convey messages and meanings. If your students have problems with prepositions and write things like “the clock is at the wall” or something similar, it’s okay. Everybody still understands what that means anyway.
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Expecting students to produce perfect English
ESL teachers need to understand that if their students can speak fluent English all the time, they won’t even be in the class anymore.
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The main reason why they’re called ESL students in the first place is to learn English. You will need to fix their grammar usage but not all of them. Yes, that’s might sound weird, but correcting every single mistake is counterproductive. It scares the students so they’ll be reluctant to speak up in class. Focus your attention on the most glaring and frequent mistakes.
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Let students fix the minor ones as they go. For instance, you can point them to the online spelling and grammar checker so they can find and fix their own errors.
