Teaching English Grammar Penny Ur 2015

The aim is to equip the learner with a repertoire of automatic grammatical ‘chunks’

• Jazz chants (Graham, 2006)
• Dialogues
• Rhymes
• Songs
• Plays, sketches
• Proverbs, idioms

Jazz chant

THROW it!

I THREW it!

CATCH it!

I CAUGHT it!

HIT it!

I HIT it!

WOW! that’s WONderful!

(Graham, 2006: 109)

Dialogue

A: Did you remember to call him?

B: No, I didn’t… Oh no! What shall I do?

A: Can you call him now?

B: Too late! Disaster!

(Ur, 2009: 110)

Proverbs

(present simple)

Distance makes the heart grow fonder.

All roads lead to Rome.

Pride goes before a fall.

Time and tide wait for no man.

Walls have ears.

Appetite comes with eating.

Idioms

(verb complementation)

call it a day

call a spade a spade

get into deep water

keep your head down

get to the point

have a think

Language play

Cook (2000): The importance of language play (including learning by heart).

Bell (2012): Playful use of language produced better learning of new items than did serious communicative use.

Focus on form

Focus on form

• The basis of the lesson is a communicative task.
• The teacher takes brief ‘time out’ to focus on a grammatical point (Long & Robinson, 1998).
• Could be based on:
• Error-correction
• Student question
• An interesting feature noticed by the teacher
• Difficulty of comprehension or self-expression