First #ELTchat of 20 th November 2013:
Teaching Grammar at (zero) Beginner Level
The first question raised was: Should we?
@esolcourses suggested that teaching grammar explicitly was not
productive when working with beginners. Although she thought her ideas were unconventional, she has vast experience
in this area. She explained that she believed chunks of high frequency
vocabulary should come first, before learners are ready for explicit grammar
forms. @JoHart agreed that having functional language was more important than
being elegant. In fact, @Marisa_C thought that @esolcourses was using a lexical
approach, in company with many other teachers.
So, is there a perfect approach?
@OUPELTGlobal was correct: In a way, even grammatical items are lexical at
beginner level.
@Marisa_C agreed that
beginning with chunks still provided a doorway to grammar during the feedback
or error correction stages. She argued that grammar could be seen as
generative, where functions and phrases aren’t.
It appeared that an
inductive, non-explicit approach, with the target language in context, and
providing opportunities for use, came top of the list. The practice occasions
would be especially important, as many comments were made about giving
ownership of the material to the students, and avoiding having them parrot
exact phrases. Being able to manipulate chunks of functional phrases, after memorising them, would be the desired effect for the learners.
@leedsacademy felt that it
was important to give learners the tools to make the language work for them.
@OUPELTGlobal: Yes, so
inductive rather than deductive approach
@Marisa_C made us smile
with her idea of the mythical grammarless pidgin creature, but was right when
she asserted that students need to Observe, Hypothesise, and Experiment.
Is there, perhaps, a need for learner training?
@Marisa_C thought that it
might prove useful to ask students how they think they learn best, and how they
expect to learn grammar, even before they start their course. She said that a
good idea was to fill them up with lots of rules and when they are unable to
communicate, this provided an opportunity to discuss the best way. (This might
have been tongue-in-cheek). She asked whether it was possible to provide
functional chunks and yet check grammar awareness at the same time.
@esolcourses believes that uncovering grammar at a leisurely pace often works
better.
Do we need different approaches for YL and Adults?
There was consensus on this point. Young Learners are often
non-analytical and unable to grasp abstractions. @HanaTicha suggested that if
children wrote their own course books, they wouldn't contain explicit grammar
structures. It is a sad fact, however, that without some parent education,
there will be occasions when even toddlers are expected to learn rules.
Adults would, generally, be more open to thinking about the grammar. @leedsacademy mentioned that many
of her students expected explicit grammar tuition.
@esolcourses provided a word of
caution, though. She said that adult learners often learnt complex structures
in their ‘chunks’, which conventional courses would not teach until a certain
level of proficiency had been arrived at.
@Marisa_C suggested explaining
the rule briefly and then moving on to meaningful, contextualised practice,
although the odd analytical learner would have a great time with a grammar book
in hand.
Should we use metalanguage?
Is grammatical terminology useful at beginner level?
@OUPELTGlobal thought that adults might
appreciate it, although he wasn’t convinced that it was appropriate for real
beginners. But do learners have to know the term ‘verb’ to use one?
@leedsacademy thought that it was useful, as knowing the word classes could
help students generate new utterances of their own.
@leedsacademy and ‘esolcourses reminded us that students may have
varying degrees of literacy in their own language and that the teaching of
grammar could easily depend on what they bring to the classroom in terms of
previous knowledge.
‘Students have beginner English, not beginner brains’
@VeerleGrauwmans suggested that the grammatical terms could be
translated into the students L1, or @OUPELTGlobal thought that explanations in
the L1 could be given at the end of the lesson. @Marisa_C also mentioned Google
Translate in cases where the class was multilingual.
Is it easier to create materials or use a coursebook?
Using material created for the students appears to be more effective
than using a coursebook. @ddeubel reminded us of a very old classic series for
teaching conversation
@Marisa agreed that she usually prepared her own. @esolcourses has an
excellent website for students to use, which is continually updated.
Our discussion was really about how to teach grammar well, not whether
we should worry about the terminology J
So, what works in class?
@Marisa_C pointed out that highly complex free activities, such as problem
solving, are often beyond the language capabilities of beginners.
There were many good suggestions of things which could work:
- · Diagrams
- · Video clips
- · Animations (goanimate etc.)
- · Objects
- · Visuals in context: magazines, newspapers,photographs
- · Substitution tables
- · Cards with pictures or words for students to assemble
- · Start with chunks and add words to form more complex sentences
- · Mingling activities (e.g. Find someone who)
- · Pictures ( came up time and again)
- · Contextualised dialogues (if well-scaffolded)
- · Application drills
- · The disappearing dialogue, (also known as the vanishing technique)
- · Role-play
- · Scrambled sentences
- · Simple cloze or gapped dialogue
- · Chants ( Jazz Chants is excellent for ALL levels as long as not overdone)
A good point from @face_english : Context should always be the focus,
right?
LINKs
I’ll
leave you with some links from @face_english:
battleships:
using a picture grid screencast.com/t/1pFXmFdC