Integrated-skills based syllabus for primary schools

CHAPTER II DEVELOPING SPECIFIC TYPES OF MATERIALS
2.1. Materials for the teaching of grammar
It goes without saying that the acquisition of grammatical proficiency is crucial to learning a second or foreign language. However, despite the rise of the so-called Communicative Approach in recent years and despite the daily testimony provided by students that lexis and (in the spoken mode) phonology play a major role in the difficulties students face when using a foreign language to encode their own meanings, grammar still predominates in teaching materials to the point of obsession. Furthermore, a review of the grammar-related coursebooks and supplemental resources demonstrates that emphasis on grammatical form continues to trump considerations of meaning. Wallace, C. claimed that focusing only on grammatical form is insufficient as early as 1990: Learners must understand the device's functions as a means of mediating between words and contexts and as a potent tool for the deliberate achievement of meaning.[22 ]
When properly understood, a communicative approach does not exclude grammar. Instead, it entails an understanding of its crucial mediating role in the use and acquisition of language. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the realizations and recognitions to which Williams, R. refers, as to when and where the grammar practiced might actually be employed, are largely left to the learners themselves to come to if one looks at the majority of practice material offered to learners - single sentence practice, random lexicalization, transformation exercises, wordy and inaccurate "rules," etc.[24]
Examples of this include asking students to change active voice sentences into passive voice and using "short forms" like Yes I am/No I'm not as answers to open-ended inquiries, both of which will be covered in more detail later in this chapter (or vice versa). For the latter, Phillipson, R. method is an illustration, where students are informed that the Passive is employed when "The agent is the new, crucial information."[18] In English, new information frequently appears at or near the end of the sentence, which is ignored when students are then asked to identify the subjects and objects in eight sentences and then to "rewrite the sentences in the passive voice the agent only where necessary" (a commendable, if somewhat constrained, attempt to refer to the Given-New Principle).
When it boils down to it, shape is everything. The current position of grammar in EFL is largely due to the inherent conservatism of ministries of education and the major publishing houses, as well as the fact that the "buyer" of materials is not the learners but rather the people who decide on syllabus and/or book adoptions, where the attitude is essentially one of "better the devil you know than the devil you don't" because the grammar of many publications is familiar and allows teachers to teach more effectively. It goes without saying that there is a lot of criticism of the current state of grammar in the profession, particularly the way it is taught by emphasizing a series of discrete and separate grammatical objects, or what Thornbury refers to as the "delivery of grammar Mcnuggets." [16]
Long and Robinson and others contend that there is an excessive emphasis on specific language forms and suggest a focus on form, or another strategy that asks students to pay attention to language forms as they appear in the data they are exposed to and think about how the form(s) is/are used to establish specific meanings. This comprehensive method is also a component of task-based learning (TBL), and Willis' work is significant for its novel use of texts for the analysis of linguistic data and attention to form.⁶
De-contextualized practice, examples given to and elicited from learners that are randomly lexicalized, and involving learners in production activities that are as controlled as possible to prevent learners from trying to use language that they haven't "learned" yet are just a few of the challenges that come with the effort to break up the grammar of a language into discrete chunks for pedagogic purposes. However, that is exactly the reality for the majority of grammar writers.
Therefore, this chapter will attempt to create some criteria for the development of grammar materials while not endorsing this fact. It will also offer some recommendations and ideas for grammar materials that operate inside the confines of conventional grammar domains. Some standards A variety of factors must be taken into account while creating materials for the teaching and learning of grammar. These factors include: (a) the age and academic level of the students who will use the materials; (b) the degree to which any adopted methodology satisfies the expectations of (a) students, (c) teachers, and (d) the educational culture in which the students and teachers work; (e) the degree to which any contexts and co-texts which are employed in order to present the grammar area(s) will be of interest to students; and (d) the nature of the grammatical areas to Of course, the first three on this list are crucial for anyone creating or working with educational content. This chapter focuses solely on the last three because the first two may result in material that is interesting but has little pedagogical value. Instead, this chapter focuses on how well grammar materials encourage and enable learners to produce language that is relevant to them and how accurately they reflect the language and the learners' linguistic needs.
Regarding criteria "d" and "e," one might instantly take into account the materials' ongoing propensity to avoid using standard ellipses in practice exercises that are supposed to teach conversational language. Students are exposed to conversations like, "What's your name?" How old are you? My name is Debora. When asked, "When is your birthday?," I respond, "My birthday is in September" (etc.). What is evident in such writing is that the authors (and/or editors) continue to hold the belief that the presentation of naturally occurring language is less significant than the exemplification of grammatical form(s). Another illustration is the section of "brief replies" included in almost all grammar guides: "Yes I am," "No he is not," "No they have not," etc. Yes/No questions can be answered simply in this fashion, hence it is typically addressed as a stand-alone section. To practice, learners are given questions and responses-only practice exercises. Frequently, no mention is made of the occasions when such responses may or may not be suitable, and the pragmatic significance of statements like "Yes I do" is disregarded. In Whitney's past easy practice, students are instructed to ask and respond to questions with a partner using the prompt "play football yesterday" and the example "Did you play football yesterday?" "Yes, I did / No, I didn't," and were then prompted to come up with other exchanges using phrases like "watch TV yesterday" and "study a lot at the weekend."
The idea behind encouraging students to give only these "short responses" is likely founded on the assumption that they lack the language resources to elaborate. However, when used in conversational contexts, these "short replies" can frequently come out as harsh, if not outright impolite. Such statements typically do not serve as answers to inquiries but rather serve to contradict or disagree with the assertions of another speaker. They are typically followed by a correction or additional comment.
A significant amount of reported speech grammar practice involves having students "convert" a particular direct speech utterance into reported speech by "changing" the verb tense. It is difficult to envision how this is similar to genuine language production, which is what learners need and want to be able to use. Real-time, online language production. Sentence grammars, which derive from an abstraction removed from prospective usage, raise issues regarding the structure of language that don't seem to have much to do with the issues capturing the interest of those participating in interpersonal communication, according to Brazil. Additionally, transformation grammar exercises (whether for "reported speech," "the passive," or any other grammar topic) ask students to make choices and generate language in ways that are very dissimilar from the choices and production needed for online communication. What alternatives exist to exercises for transformation? Lewis suggests a possible course of action by urging the focus on grammar as a receptive skill:⁷
The phrase "awareness raising" has recently become commonplace in vocabulary used in language instruction. All of these critics agree on one thing: the capacity of students to appropriately detect, perceive similarity and difference within target language data is most likely to help students learn the grammatical system. This theoretical framework places a high value on grammar as a receptive skill. One may also make the case that grammar instruction materials ought to make an effort to explain to students some of the semantic implications of certain grammar concepts, where applicable. Returning to reported speech, one can consider exercises like the one Huth, T. and Taleghani-Nikazm which asks students to match three images with spoken words. The drawings show three different scenes of the same woman: [10]
(1) arriving at a hospital on a stretcher while the person accompanying her speaks to a nurse;
(2) lying in bed behind a hospital curtain while the companion converses with a doctor; and
(3) lying in a casket while two people converse about her.
The statements are: "She stated she hasn't been feeling well," "She said she hadn't been feeling well," and "She claims she hasn't been feeling well." This teaches students to pay attention to the tense of both the verb in the reported phrase and the "reporting verb." However, one or two queries tend to surface: Does learners' misunderstanding stem from the near-perfect similarity of the lexical material, which was done on purpose to allow for a sole concentration on verb forms? 2 The lesson plan for the activity is from a teachers' reference book. Could it be used in a textbook? Would editors of publications incorporate it in a textbook for students? (The writer's experience suggests they might not, given the assertions made regarding instructor capabilities and available space.) 3 What is the next step?
The mentioned literature advises asking students "whether they can justify the choice of tense." And all of a sudden, the analytical and, in some ways, academic/intellectual, replace the illustrative. Later in the lesson, students are asked to recall and describe times when someone deceived, lied to, or duped them. This suggests a high likelihood of a reported speech act occurring in the telling, but obviously not of grammatical precision in such reporting. When grammar resources provide incredibly fabricated instances of the language topic in question, learners can sometimes be let down. Jones uses the example of a lone man reading a book and declaring to no one: "I don't like this book I'm reading right now." to illustrate several features of "reported speech." He told me he didn't enjoy that book he was reading at the time, a woman then reports to another. The reasons given for the'speakers' in these cases using the terms I'm reading right now, in that book, and then are not obvious, and they don't even remotely make sense.
However, grammar resources can fail students in additional ways. It would seem to be preferable that the utterances produced by doing the exercise be ones that are a) feasible language and b) bear some resemblance to language that the learners themselves might wish to utter. This is true when practice activities or exercises are given to learners to practice a specific aspect of grammar. It's not difficult to find grammar drills in which the students completing the exercise will produce at least improbable language. Here is a random selection from a variety of textbooks:
Many ingenious ideas are produced by scientists. (using the word "a lot of") To be champions, athletes must put in a lot of training. (using the modal 'must' for responsibility) l Has John heard her most recent album? (using present perfect simple as a model) James and Emma are fluent in French. (using "can" as a modal verb for capability) There are also a lot of times when statements are made that just state the obvious, such "An elephant is bigger than an ant."
The final sentence in particular highlights the common tendency to lexicalize arbitrarily as well as to encourage learners to use collocations that are actually uncommon ('can' is much more frequently used to indicate possibility than ability, and despite how inconvenient this may be for material writers, tends not to be used when talking about things like speaking a language, operating a vehicle, or riding horses). In fact, the first of the examples above contains a collocation that seems to this native speaker to be one that would never happen ('create innovations'). Writing exercises that produce language that is consistently relevant to the learners, within their linguistic capabilities, and true to language use is admittedly not always simple (especially when so many learners around the world have little or no desire to use English at all, certainly not in the short term). However, the professional materials writer in particular is obligated to make an effort to do so, even only by keeping standard lexical and collocational traits. Thus, the need for the materials writer to rely on intuition is diminishing (or what has simply been encountered in materials previously published). Concordancing programs and language corpora make it possible to examine language users' real behavior rather than our assumptions or idealized expectations. Additionally, a reference work like the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language, which is based on a corpus of more than 40 million words, offers illuminating statistical proof of how language is used (showing, for example, that will is, somewhat surprisingly, more frequently used than going to, and that the modals will, would, can and could are far more common than other members of that group). Additionally, there are commentary on register, style, and collocation, making this kind of work almost a must for authors who want their grammar materials to accurately reflect actual language use.⁸