PEDAGOGY AND ASSESSMENT

Grammar

 

◈ PEDAGOGY AND ASSESSMENT 
■ At present, few would disagree with the proposal that EFL/ESL learners must be made aware of and given opportunities to interpret and practice the use of cohesive devices that signal reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction in English.


■ There are also encouraging signs that leaders in the language teaching profession are beginning to acknowledge that teaching grammar to ESL/EFL learners should be carried out in context with discourse or text, providing the appropriate pedagogical frame (cf. McCarthy, 1991; Widdowson, 1990). In other words, there is growing agreement that teaching grammar exclusively at the sentence level with decontextualized and unrelated sentences, which has long been the traditional way to teach grammar, is not likely to produce any real learning.



■ However, the biggest problem is that there are very few materials currently available that show the teacher how to teach grammar using discourse-based and context-based activities and formats. In this section of the chapter, we would like to make some concrete suggestions that classroom teachers can adapt and extend for their purposes when teaching grammar. 



▶ TEACHING YOUNGER LEARNERS 
■ It is generally accepted that younger learners do not benefit from formal grammar instruction, yet some focus on form can be helpful. We suggest using meaningful exchanges that highlight proper grammatical forms to focus on form painlessly. For example, if the grammar objective is yes/no questions ("Can you ...?"), students could be exposed to questions about themselves. 



■ In order to make sure that young learners use language in meaningful ways, we must remember to combine form and context. For example, students can talk about personal experiences to use verbs in the past tense. Students can discuss their plans to use future verb forms and future time expressions. 



▶ TEACHING BEGINNERS (OF ALL AGES) 
■ With just a few articles of clothing, for example, the teacher can use the TPR technique to introduce and practice two intransitive phrasal verbs (stand up, sit down) and two separable transitive phrasal verbs (put on, take off). This type of activity, given the continuity and flow of speech from the teacher, prepares the learner for the subsequent comprehension and production of related narrative discourse (e.g., The boy stood up and put on his hat). 



■ Each scenario can be repeated several times, especially the first one. The teacher should help the first few students if they have difficulty and repeat each scenario with several different students until the whole class can easily follow the instructions. When this happens, the teacher can introduce the following new scenario. 



■ Each student would receive a picture of a boy and a girl wearing a tee-shirt and pants and walking a dog. The teacher gives – as many times as needed – a set of connected instructions that require the students to distinguish the possessive pronouns his and her (and recognize vocabulary dealing with colors, articles of clothing, and body parts). 



■ When moving on to beginning-level activities that include the production of simple discourse, it is essential to spend time eliciting or learning the vocabulary related to a particular topic or task so that the words tore can be used to practice structures and perform activities relevant to the topic. For example, in a beginning-level ESL/EFL class, each learner can generate a nuclear family tree in diagram form (following a model from the teacher, who presents first, thus building up the learners' receptive vocabulary and grammar). Then by learning a few kinship terms (in singular and plural form), the first-person singular possessive adjective my, and the three present-tense forms of the copula be (am, is, are), learners should be able to present their family trees and introduce their families to the class in the form of a short discourse not simply as a series of disjointed simple sentences. 



▶ TEACHING INTERMEDIATE LEARNERS 
■ Stories are often an engaging way for intermediate-level students to comprehend and practice grammar and discourse. The following fable about the fox and the crow, for example, can be used to present or reinforce (or to test) one of the primary conventions of Language knowledge governing English article usage. 



■ Much like stories, the lyrics to songs can also present and practice grammar in discourse. For example, Pete Seeger's antiwar song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" can be used as a warm-up activity to prepare students to participate in short exchanges that require wh-questions with the present perfect tensel3 since in this song, each stanza repeats the frame (Where have all the gone?). The construction practiced in the song could then be extended to talk about more concrete information familiar to class members. 



■ Similarly, listening to and singing the well-known folk song "If I Had a Hammer" can be a warm-up activity for practicing the present hypothetical use of conditionals in drills.