Department of continuous professional education graduation paper

II. CHAPTER. THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR IN THE EFL CLASSROOM
2.1. TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THE PLACE OF GRAMMAR IN ELT
Like the results from past research, this study found that ESL teachers in the sample believe that formal study of grammar is of crucial importance to language learning. That is, the results of the present study further confirm those of previous studies in terms of the overall role of grammar in the language classroom. The respondents also tend to believe that studying and practicing grammar in the classroom help improve students’ communicative ability most quickly. It can be inferred that the teachers see grammar learning as an important component to help their students achieve communicative ability. Clearly, their goal of helping their learners to attain a good ability to communicate does involve the formal study of grammar in the classroom. This seems to contradict what is often referred to as the zero position on grammar teaching as advocated by some researchers such as Dulay and Burt. Although it has been argued that grammar should not be taught in the language classroom, the teachers in this sample believe that it is necessary and essential to teach grammar in the classroom as learning grammar formally can facilitate foreign or second language learning. It can be assured that, over the years, there has been, and still is, a debate about the teaching of grammar within the foreign language learning processes. On the one hand, some linguists support the idea that grammar should be avoided in the language acquisition process because language is acquired through natural communicative contexts as the first language. According to Krashen, “language classes should not introduce grammatical rules even along the ‘natural order’: the syllabus should not be based on any grammatical order. Rather, students will acquire the language in a natural order as a result of getting comprehensible input”. On the other hand, some linguists think that grammar plays an essential role when learning a foreign language. For instance, Richards (2002) points out that grammar is important to speak both fluently and accurately so that there are no grammatical deficiencies in communication. He explains that “what has been observed in language classrooms during fluency work is communication marked by low levels of linguistic accuracy”. Additionally, Long and Robinson argue that learning grammar helps students to acquire the foreign language faster, to obtain higher levels and better An approach to the teaching of grammar in the EFL classroom: history, textbooks and tasks proposals results. Concerning these statements, and agreeing that grammar should be part of the language acquisition process, Ellis affirms that, according to previous studies on language acquisition, “teaching grammar is beneficial but that to be effective grammar has to be taught in a way that is compatible with the natural processes of acquisition”. Moreover, grammar should be taught taking into account several factors such as the age of students, their level and objectives. Related to the grammar instruction in class, Brown (2007) indicates that, by using appropriate techniques, grammar is an essential factor in the language acquisition process. The author maintains that these grammar learning techniques should be “embedded in meaningful, communicative contexts; contribute positively to communicative goals, promote accuracy within fluent, communicative language; do not overwhelm students with linguistic terminology and be as lively and intrinsically motivating as possible” (p.363). Furthermore, Brown proposes some grammar techniques such as charts for “clarifying grammatical relationships”, the use of authentic objects to “stimulate students to practice conversation rules and other discourse constraints”, using maps and drawings to “illustrate certain grammatical structures”, establishing dialogues for “introducing and practicing grammatical points” and using written texts to “illustrate a grammatical category”.
The ultimate goal of teaching grammar is to provide the students with knowledge of the way language is constructed so that when they listen, speak, read and write, they have no trouble applying the language that they are learning. Language teachers are, therefore, challenged to use creative and innovative attempts to teach grammar so that such a goal can successfully be achieved. In other words, whatever exercises are given, the most crucial thing is that the teacher provide the students with an opportunity to be able to produce the grammatical item making use of syntactically and semantically correct examples of sentences comprised of appropriate and relevant vocabulary.
The other teacher, who was a non‐native English teacher, had even more episodes of uncertainty when teaching grammar and avoided this whenever possible. However, he was quite confident in teaching vocabulary, because he had spent more time teaching it than he had done teaching grammar. He was not even behaving characteristically when asked for an explanation about grammar, but rather took a more defensive, abrupt and less polite stand to close the discussion, thereby discouraging the students from continuing to ask questions. When grammar questions were posed, this teacher collected the questions and postponed the explanations for the next class, so that he could refer to the grammar reference books or teaching materials in order to find reasons and rules that would explain the particular grammatical problem (Borg, 2001, p. 26). But when feeling confident, the teacher proceeded with an explanation, even though his answer might not have been satisfactory, which proves that confidence motivates behaviour. Therefore, Borg (2001) maintains that future studies should concentrate on the following: to give teachers more opportunities to test their own knowledge of grammar so that they can realise the relationship between their perceptions and the instructional activities they engage in with their students. Teachers should increase their awareness of the importance of the effect that a knowledge of grammar has on their teaching, and this should consequently be revised with regard to the way that teachers teach grammar. Also, their willingness to engage in spontaneous grammar work should be reviewed, along with the way they respond to students’ questions; the manner in which they react when students question their explanations, and the kind of the grammatical information they provide.
The very purpose of teaching grammar is to see that the learners will be able to write and speak grammatically correctly and understand and interpret the written text and a speaker’s utterances as intended. For this, it is necessary to learn and internalize the rules of the grammar and how and when to use a specific structure. This means that the learners should know the syntactic structures of the language. The teaching of grammar, therefore, creates an awareness of the structural aspects of the language. Awareness is created by noticing Schmidt, which is believed to be central to learning. Broadly speaking, theoretically, there are two methods prevalent among language teachers: deductive or explicit method and inductive or implicit method. As a large number of studies show, while inductive method is more talked about, it is deductive method which is most commonly used in the EFL / ESL classrooms by the language teachers. Most importantly, when the rules are presented in the deductive approach, the presentation should be illustrated with examples, be short, involve students‟ comprehension and allow learners to have a chance to internalize the rule. Internalizing a finite number of rules, helps the learners to produce and interpret infinite number if sentences enabling them to acquire a native like competence.