Lecture 11. Teaching grammar lecture outline

INTERACTIVE ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING GRAMMAR
Techniques to teach grammar:
The teacher must induce, attract and persuade students to make a joyful learning of grammatical items. The following techniques would help the teacher as well as the students to learn grammar in an interesting way. They are:
Tasks, Games, Activities, Story-telling, Cloze exercises, Dramatization and role play,Pictures, Dialogues, Situations, Demonstrations, Description/ narration, Drills.
Activities: Expanding texts: Forming grammatical sentences by adding words or phrases.
1. Eg: go
2. I go
3. I go to school.
4. My neighbor’s cat.
5. Review of adjectives,
6. Adding adjectives or in a sentence or framing new sentences.
7. I have a white cat. I have a small, while cat etc.
Tasks:
Tasks like language-based (yes/no questions) and non-linguistic (guessing) will get the learners engaged to the grammar item. The objectives are clear (grammar item) and there is provision for repeated practice.
Eg: Making a cup of tea - using imperative form.
Describing a picture by using “there is / there are”
Games:
Game like situation will help the learners feel, think, act and produce the grammar item as expected by the teacher.
Game -1: identify the real time by arranging a circle of twelve chairs and two volunteers inside the circle to represent time.
Game -2: challenge Word endings and suffixes are done by the learners. F r e e , W a l k e d , -s, -ed, ing, etc.
Using Textbook Grammar Activities
Textbooks usually provide one or more of the following three types of grammar exercises.
Mechanical drills: Each prompt has only one correct response, and students can complete the exercise without attending to meaning. For example:
George waited for the bus this morning. He will wait for the bus tomorrow morning, too.
Meaningful drills: Each prompt has only one correct response, and students must attend to meaning to complete the exercise. For example:
Where are George’s papers? They are in his notebook.
(Students must understand the meaning of the question in order to answer, but only one correct answer is possible because they all know where George’s papers are.)
1. Communicative drills, described in Strategies for Learning Grammar
2. To use textbook grammar exercises effectively, instructors need to recognize which type
Questions:
1. What is “grammar”?
2. What modern approaches are used to teaching grammar?
3. What are distinctive features of the active and passive grammar minimums?
4. What are the principles of selecting grammar minimums?
5. How to teach grammar?
6. What interactive activities are useful for teaching grammar?