Developing linguistic competence:

Teaching Grammar
New grammar: introduced at the ‘Presentation’ stage, either inductively or deductively,
then controlled practice of the grammatical item follows at the ‘Practice’ stage. Practising
in a gradually less mechanical and more meaningful manner should go on until learners are
able to use structures freely for communicative purposes at the ‘Production’ stage.

Presentation of grammatical structures includes:

• building up an appropriate context in which the meaning of the item is clear

• eliciting/ providing target structure in a marker sentence
• drill target structure chorally, then individually
• focusing on form, explain/ demonstrate how structure is formed
• focusing on meaning, check understanding of meaning through concept checking
questions
• providing written model on board

Stages Aims
Setting context Create interest, make conveying of meaning easier
Elicitation/ Keep students involved
Providing structure in
marker sentence
Drilling Help with pronunciation
Focus on form Clarify elements and their order making up structure
Focus on meaning Clarify meaning and check if students have
understood
Providing written record Reinforcement

This is one possible way, but far from the only one. Variations numerous, both in order and
weight of individual stages. The order and which we leave out depends heavily in context-
specific factors, such as age, level, needs, styles of students, teaching style of T.

Practice

Aim of practice stage: give students thorough practice of target items, both in speaking
and writing, so that they will be able to use them correctly and fluently, in a variety of
contexts, on their own.

For this to occur, we need to provide activities ranging from fully teacher-controlled,
mechanical ones to less controlled, more meaningful, then to (relatively) free,
communicative activities.

Fully and partly controlled (semi controlled) activities = ‘restricted use’ activities, since
they provide limited options for realistic language use or for communication, and they focus
primarily on accuracy.
The activities which are designed to make students speak and listen to each other, that is, to
use the language to communicate information or ideas, are communicative ones. When
participating in these, students are expected to incorporate the smaller bits of language
intensively practised previously into the whole of their language repertoire. With these
activities focus is on fluency, on fluent use of the language, not accuracy, thus they are called
‘authentic use’ activities.

It is important for us to see that authentic use/communicative activities may be virtually the
same as skills work. Activities built around a specific grammar item, but with a focus on
fluent use of the language are communicative grammar practice activities.

Our job as teachers is to provide sufficient practice of all kinds, until our students are able to
produce correct samples of a structure freely in speech and writing. If they are only able to do
so for tests or with conscious monitoring of their production, that is, use of the items has not
become automatic, it is a clear sign that we will need to provide more practice activities. Not
necessarily in an order that proceeds from fully controlled to free. But the balance of form
focused, accuracy work and meaning focused, fluency work is essential to create.

Controlled practice
Drills: based on the behaviourist belief that through repetition and restricted response to
stimuli language items become automatic. That is, if students produce the same utterance to
the same stimulus ten times in class, there is a fairly good chance that they will be able to
produce that utterance outside the class. A legacy from audio-lingual classes, ‘survived’ to be
used with a far less prominent role in the communicative era.

Language practised through drills is very restricted, opportunities for individual contribution
of students’ own ideas are limited. Drills provide mechanical, tightly controlled language
practice.

The easiest of all are choral and individual repetition drills. As students are expected to do
almost nothing, this type of drill can only be useful as the very first step. Emphasis should be
on enabling students to have a feel for the pronunciation of the structure, first – perhaps – in
the security provided by the chorus, then individually. Far too mechanical and easy. SS can do
them without understanding meaning. However, if restricted to the minimum, they may be
useful for younger learners, who do not mind sounding a bit like parrots, and for beginners of
any age, for whom saying anything in English is often a pain.

Other types are based on the principle of substitution. Gradually more difficult, → more
useful. The teacher gives prompts – sentence, word or picture prompts – which get the
students to produce the structure. Though students need to be thinking more actively, these
activities still focus on manipulation of form.

Mechanical repetition and substitution drills, when used mainly to help students ‘get their
tongue round’ a new structure and for purposes of mastering form, may create a valuable part
of grammar practice. However, they should gradually give way to ones in which learners are
encouraged to think, which they cannot complete without understanding and expressing
meaning.
More meaningful, less/ semi controlled grammar practice:
Ways of making practice more meaningful:
1. One way of moving away from controlled, mechanical practice is making SS say true, real
things about themselves. Most SS like talking about themselves and are interested in others.
Linking structures to SS’ everyday reality makes language practice sound more natural and
more attractive. → Personalisation is important.

2. Exercises that suggest structures instead of prescribing ones, or allow scope for SS own
ideas are also a way.

3. Instead of very real things appeal to SS imagination.

Intensive, semi-controlled language practice activities in speaking: picture dictation,

miming actions, chain story building, class surveys or interviews and games with a strong
grammatical focus.

Written activities: Gap-filling exercises, sentence transformations, writing elicited

dialogues, matching split sentence halves, story writing, picture descriptions.