Upgraded Grammar & Vocabulary Teaching

Course #3, Teaching Grammar & Vocabulary, introduces effective ways of teaching grammatical concepts, and answers the question ‘How to make learners accept the importance of grammar learning?’. The course reveals effective strategies of presenting new vocabulary and touches upon the problem of appropriate error correction. The core element of the course is successful application of communicative approach and task-based learning principles to grammar & vocabulary teaching. 

I had been looking forward to this course since my enrollment into this program, because I used to consider concepts “grammar” and “communicative language teaching” to be incompatible. So my professional curiosity was my major driver during this course. Another exciting discovery for me was Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow and its application in the EAL classroom. It is of essence for an adult language instructor to feel Skills & Challanges balance.

Upon the completion of this course I’ve learnt how to make grammar lessons (so unpopular among the majority of learners) be effective, meaningful and fun! I’ve learnt how to find an optimal balance between fluency and accuracy activities in the classroom and how to incorporate grammar & vocabulary aspects into the task-based language teaching.

Discovery Adventure

It’s up to a teacher to decide how to present new material: to give the rule to learners or to make learners discover this rule by themselves. Technically, the result will be the same: learners know the rule. In fact there is an enormous gap between being told about something and discover something by yourself.

As an EAL instructor I prefer inductive approach in teaching grammar. First of all, it is much more engaging and motivating for learners. Inductive grammar lesson assures adult learners that their teacher trusts them and is quite confident with their language skills. To some degree they do not want to let their teacher down, and that is why learners do their best to figure out how everything works. A good Chinese proverb states: Tell me, I’ll forget. Show me, I’ll remember. Involve me, I’ll understand. Inductive grammar lessons are all about involving, thus about understanding.

Secondly, inductive grammar lessons hold endless creativity opportunities for the instructor: realia in the classroom, field trips, stories from personal experience, etc. Therefore, grammar lessons are fun and might contribute to the flow in the classroom. 

At the same time, I am aware of disadvantages of ‘discovery’ approach (it can be too time-consuming; learners may not get some ideas or misconceive them). In these cases, I prefer to resort to Plan B (deductive grammar teaching). For example, I can explain one aspect of the rule deductively, and then get back to discovery adventures again.

Planning 4 Success

Csikszentmihalyi suggests 9 elements of the flow:

1. Clear goals

2. Immediate feedback

3. A balance between challenges and skills

4. Simultaneous processes of action and awareness

5. Setting aside destructions

6. No worry of failure

7. Disappearing of Self-consciousness

8. Loosing sense of time

9. The activity has an end in itself

To achieve flow in the classroom the instructor should deliver a lesson satisfying the above mentioned requirements. Nobody can ever tell if the lesson will be useful to particular group of learners. So the safe choice here is to start with planning. Perhaps, thorough lesson planning will not guarantee “flow” in the classroom, but at least it can minimize the risk of being not informative and dull. The worst that can happen in the adult classroom is wasting learners’ time, and thus their money. So how can we incorporate Csikszentmihalyi’s principles into lesson planning?

The best starting point is goal setting. It’s impossible to do something without knowing what you are doing. The great quote from Alice in Wonderland was given as an introduction to Learning Objectives module in the Procedures for Effective Teaching course of the current program:

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Alice: … so long as I get somewhere.

The Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

When adult learners can see a destination point, they do their best to find their way there led by their instructor. Sometimes it happens they find some other ways to achieve declared goals, sometimes they achieve them outside the classroom and/or certain amount of time later, because adults are lifelong self-directed learners. In any case I believe it is fair to tell my learners “where we plan to go” and “what they are supposed to do”. A great way to announce lesson objectives is to send an email newsletter a couple of days before the class. That will give learners enough time to do some research and to activate their prior knowledge.

Another important aspect of the adult EAL classroom is accepting the fact that learners are adults and their heads are overloaded with problems at work and in personal life. Although it is practically impossible to make them forget about everything in the classroom, an EAL instructor is still able to minimize an effect of destructors at the stage of lesson planning. The formula of success is not that complicated: take meaningful life-related topics and design engaging and interactive activities based on them. Time is flying when you have fun! Adults enjoy playing games and competing with each other.  Besides, interactivity (based on constant learner-teacher and peer-peer feedback) promotes to positive and supportive atmosphere in the classroom, and thus doubles the chances of getting into the zone.

Why Grammar Matters

When I studied at the university we had an intensive course of Spanish. We spent numerous hours reading texts and doing grammar exercises. We were overwhelmed with Grammar Translation approach. I remember endless gap filling and sentence completion exercises. We read and translated texts; and the main purpose was not to catch the main idea, but to be able to recognize every single word and its grammatical form. Right now I realize that we learned not the language, but mostly its bare grammatical skeleton. Yes, we knew a lot of aspects of Spanish grammar; we could produce grammatically tricky sentences in class. But when it came to real communication, for example when we had guest speakers from Spain, we could hardly apply all that grammatical knowledge.

That is why I think that grammar instruction should be integrated into the communicative language teaching, because communication is the main reason why languages emerged and why they have been constantly developing and evolving. But one cannot just extract grammar from the language learning process, because grammar is a means of making the communication successful and organized.

If one day one of my EAL students tells me she is very bored with the grammar lessons, and that she feels she can learn English without learning grammar separately (and I hope that I will not have this situation, because I will do my best to make my grammar lessons engaging and meaningful), I will do the following:

1. I will tell her that I understand her and admire her decision of not attending grammar lessons. After that I will ask her to teach me a few words in her native language. For example, “I”, “want”, “get”, “job”, “bank” (if it is an EAL class for newcomers), or “I”, “want”, “study”, “university” (if it is an EAP class) and so on. So the set of words should directly relate to this particular student’s needs and her personal reasons for learning English. After she tells me these words in her L1 and I write their transcription for myself I will ask her to imagine that she is an employer (or a university admission officer, etc) in her home country. I will produce a sentence in her L1 but with no grammar (because I do not know it) with intention to get a job (or enroll into the university program). Of course it will sound weird to her. After that I will ask if she would ever hire me to a well-paid job…

2. After that I will ask her for reason of being bored with grammar learning. Students’ feedback is crucial for a teacher’s professional development. May be I will even do a survey among other students as well and try to change something in my grammar teaching techniques.