Grammar is central to the teaching and learning of languages. It is also one of the most difficult aspects of language to teach well. Mostly language teachers have definition of grammar as a set of forms and rules. They teach grammar by explaining the forms and rules and then drilling students on them. This results in bored, disaffected students who can produce correct forms on exercises and tests, but consistently make errors when they try to use the language in context. Is it a good way to teach grammar? If not how should we do that to know our students will learn something? Jim Scrivener who is an English language teacher can help us to find answers on those questions. In his article he is trying to explain how to teach grammar not only by going through the material in the course book but also to know that your students will learn something, moreover teachers should have proper features, abilities and use accurate methods and strategies and have some knowledge about the way how people learn grammar
The main sense of his article is: teachers, including experienced ones such as Scrivener himself, deliver proper, engaging, well-prepared, lessons – but it takes much more than that to “teach” grammar. He definitely suggests that doing more reading and listening at lower levels, and waiting for students own interest/noticing/need to arise might well be more effective than focusing explicitly on grammar. He presents that if we want to plan lessons that are more simply entertainment, we need a clear idea of how we think people learn grammar, moreover he says the activities we plan can then closely reflect those things we believe are important part of the learning process.
What is the most appropriate pace of teaching grammar? What rate the lesson should have? Slow? “A lesson that is too slow feels boring and uninvolving to students” Or maybe fast? ”A lesson that is fast also uninvoling for many students because they cant keep up with it and can only respond by mentally switching off” saying this words Jim Scrivener is truly right that we must find the right pace of teaching grammar. A large number of teachers tend to do things much too fast. They often seriously underestimate how difficult things are for students, or are responding to a fear that students will find things boring. Learning to really slow down takes time- but it is worth bearing in mind from your first lesson onwards. Scrivener presents good tools which helps us to slow down the speed of the lesson. One of suggestions are questions, a lot of them, directed to many students. We should ask questions to a range of students instead of just accepting answers from the ones who always reply first, we should just simply disregard, ignore them: “If they do call out, try being deaf to them and waiting until the students you asked can answer”. According to the author of the article, a skill which is very helpful in teaching grammar, is that the teacher should be accustomed with the silence in the classroom: “Train yourself not to feel uncomfortable with thinking silences. It is not necessary to have voices filling every second of class. Getting comfortable with silence is typically very difficult thing to teachers to get used to.” It is a good thing to give your students more time to think about the question, not at once after asking the question waiting for answer. You should allow some real thinking time, wait for a while, few seconds, so that their answers would not be simple but more well-considered. Another teacher’s difficulty which Scrivener is trying to discuss are requirement of the material:” Your school or director may require that you finish a certain amount of work in a period of time”- he is right that we should not strictly follow the textbook, but try to make sure that students are learning. Yes, there are outside constraint – school’s curriculum. It tells us what to do, what to talk about, what not to talk about, what to spend time on, and what not to spend time on.
“How do people learn grammar?”- It is a very difficult question which Jim Scrivener is trying to answer. He also suggests that we should tackle one basic question: how do think people learn grammar? You need to sort out why are you doing the things you do, what is more he is right that real learning of grammar is process which is very slow and we last over a long period of time.”Exposure…Noticing…Help…Memory…Practice…Owning…”-according to him those are the most important factors which help people learn grammar more effectively, he also states that the are accurate but there maybe so other which are taking part in learning process. “At Pre-Int level wouldn’t I do better offering lots of work on reading and listening…and largely ignoring the explicit grammar teaching until students have started to ask specific questions about things?”- he ultimately suggests that doing more reading and listening at lower levels, and waiting for students own interest/noticing/need to arise might well be more effective than focusing explicitly on grammar. I think what Jim Scrivener says makes sense. One difficulty in implementing this though is simply that many students want to be taught grammar and will just not put up with a class or school where they do not feel they are learning it (or are being taught it) as quickly as they would like. And I believe that while many people do genuinely want to know English and really need to know English, they will not ever take an interest in “why is like it this”. People who like languages might – but I would say that these people are more likely already to have learned languages however they were taught, and less likely to be members of a language school later.
All things considered, Scrivener’s article:” It is really possible to teach Grammar at all”, includes many useful methods and strategies to teach grammar. It really got me thinking about how we should do that. The author of the article made very important points about teaching grammar that are really very helpful. If you still do not know how to do that and have difficulties in answering the question: How should we teach grammar that we would know our students learn something? ,you should read Scrivener’s article and follow his ideas.