Department of continuous professional education graduation paper

4. Practice is usually in the form of exercises, which proceed from simplistic or automatic (to build confidence) to more challenging. In the latter, exercise-doers must consider more factors in completing each item. Even so, if someone is actually acquiring a grammar pattern or point rather than guessing thoughtlessly, the answers should come quickly, with little effort, becoming more and more “natural.” At the same time, learners should always stay aware of the meaning of the language that they are producing. 

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  The Sample Exercises A, B, and C below are from WL-E 3G: Chapter 4 / Work, Part One, pp. 59-60. The first (A.) simply supplies base verbs for blanks in a meaningful paragraph, to which doers add –(e)s endings.
  
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  The second (B.) requires them to locate appropriate vocabulary in a simulated “Application” that follows, putting affirmative or negative third-person singular verbs in the blanks.
  
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  The third (C.) has users repeat the nine (9) statements of Exercise B and add “tag-questions” at their ends.
  

In all three, the “trick” is recognizing the considerations that lead to correct or appropriate answers; the “immediate motivation” is the puzzle-like format of the exercises, which are “in need of” solutions. In addition to or rather than checking their responses with an Answer Key, exercise-doers gain satisfaction by reading (aloud) the language of the completed sections to see if they “sound right” and make sense.
After completing exercises, learners ought to “go beyond” them and get more practice. They can use various techniques such as covering the answers and supplying them again, storing the “story” in short-term memory and then paraphrasing it, making up similar items of their own, making up substitution and transformation drills with the items, etc.
5. Communicative Expression occurs through speaking and listening, sometimes followed up with writing and reading. Such activities require little printed material and few aural cues, although participants may want to refer to grammar points (including those that are not the focus of the targeted grammar) and/or collect the words and phrases they need. In this example (Activity *D.), they ask one another real questions, for which they need only the structures and phrasing offered in the Chapter Part. Then they convert those real answers into statements that include the targeted grammar, practicing it naturally. They can even adapt the same patterns to different topics, ones they truly want to know about—until the activity rises to the level of real conversation containing other structures and vocabulary that they acquire in genuine situations. Communicative interaction of this type can continue for a while, until participants have expressed all they want to say and learned all they can take in about others. Because their experience has been authentic and successful, they are likely to repeat it in different situations with other people and other information. Their freshly acquired language skills will last a long time, rising to new levels of interactive effectiveness. 

Of course, the same five steps can be adapted to deliver most grammatical topics into learners’ repertoires. They can also be designed to “teach” or practice other language skills and topics: listening skills, speaking (including pronunciation), reading comprehension, writing, vocabulary. Their stages can vary considerably from those used to grasp and embed grammar, of course. 
Grammar gains its prominence particularly in English as a foreign language. Practically, in the teaching of grammar, learners are taught rules of language commonly known as sentence patterns. The knowledge of grammatical rules enables learners to know and apply how such sentence patterns should be put together. Further, grammar is thought to furnish the basis for a set of language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In listening and speaking, grammar plays a crucial part in grasping and expressing spoken language, since learning the grammar of a language is considered necessary to acquire the capability of producing grammatically acceptable utterances in the language. In reading, grammar enables learners to comprehend sentence interrelationship in a paragraph, a passage and a text. In the context of writing, grammar allows the learners to put their ideas into intelligible sentences so that they can successfully communicate in a written form. Lastly, in the case of vocabulary, grammar provides a pathway to learners about how some lexical items should be combined into a good sentence so that meaningful and communicative statements or expressions can be formed. Learning grammar students can express meanings in the form of phrases, clauses and sentences. Many teachers think that teaching grammar separately is not beneficial to learners, since the learners only learn how the language is constructed, and very often when they are given grammatical rules, the learners work well on such cases. Therefore, in this paper, we would like to propose a five-step procedure for teaching grammar. This procedure incorporates the notions of practice and consciousness raising, explicit and implicit knowledge, deductive and inductive approaches for teaching grammar.