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.
Margarita,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate you sharing your experience with the Grammar Translation Approach when learning Spanish and can understand how this has led you to be an advocate of The Communicative Approach.
When talking with your student, I appreciate that you would bring his/her first language into the conversation as a way to provide a concrete example of why grammar is important. I think the student would definitely see your point. I also appreciate that you would encourage your student to offer additional feedback about how you could make learning more effective/engaging for her/him. Sometimes, teachers are not open to student feedback and resist altering their teaching methods for one reason or another. This openness will definitely serve you well in the profession!
Thanks for sharing,
Terena