CRITERIA

Effective grammar materials should go beyond simple rules and drills to provide learners with meaningful,
practical language use. Here are the main criteria:
• Learner-Centered: paying attention to their proficiency, interests and their real needs.
• Contextual Relevance: Materials should reflect how grammar is used in real-life situations, helping
students understand why specific forms are chosen.
• Focus on Form, Meaning, and Use: Grammar practice should combine accuracy with meaningful
application in context, moving from form-focused to use-focused tasks.
• Integration with Language Skills: Materials should support grammar as part of broader language
skills, encouraging communication and comprehension rather than isolated rule-following.
• Anticipated Challenges: Identify potential difficulties learners may face, especially regarding
differences between the target language and their native language in terms of form and function.

GRAMMAR PRACTICE AS LANGUAGE PRACTICE

To make grammar practice meaningful, it’s essential to practice grammar as part of real language use rather
than isolated drills. This is where contextualized practice comes in, letting students see how grammar
functions naturally in communication.
Materials Design for Short Answers and Pragmatics
• A common example is short answers like ‘Yes, I am’ or ‘No, I didn’t.’ We tend to presume that
learners do not have the language skills to say more so traditional materials often present these
without context, which can make them sound blunt or even rude in real conversation.
• Examples from New Inspiration, Macmillan (2011)
• Improvement Suggestion: When design materials, we can embed short answers within specific
contexts, such as disagreements or correction. For instance, one student might say, ‘J.K.Rowling is
American.’ and another could reply, ‘No, she’s not, she’s British.’ to correct the statement. This
teaches students to use short answers flexibly and appropriately within realistic contexts.
• So when we create materials to get learners to produce “short answers” we would need to develop
possible conversational exchanges which begin with statements that learners can either disagree with
(because they know them to be untrue), or else to which they can give a contrary opinion.

REPORTED SPEECH – AN EXAMINATION

Next, I’ll be discussing an alternative approach to teaching reported speech. We often wait to introduce all
the rules of reported speech at once, but this can be overwhelming and confusing to students. Rather than
waiting for RS to pop up in the syllabus, we should introduce it gradually. So in RS, we have verb selection,
sentence structuring, and adjusting time and place references. Let's go through each one.
• Choosing the Right Verb:
We can teach verbs like “suggest” or “admit” when they come up in other contexts, showing their
different uses. For example, in a unit on expressing opinions, provide practice with verbs like
“admit” and “suggest,” highlighting their different implications. This helps students understand these
verbs’ meanings and grammatical structures before using them in reported speech.
 • This also works when we try to teach them that the verb we choose can affect the structure that
follows.
Verb Implications on Structure:
For example:
With “ask,” we might say: “He asked me if…” or “He asked me to…”
With “suggest,” we could say: “He suggested that…”
• Deictic References – Time and Place
In reported speech, instead of “yesterday” or “tomorrow,” we use phrases like “the day before” or
“the following day.”, “this house” might change to “the house.” So we can let them practice this in
narratives, not just in reported speech. In a narrative task, ask students to retell a story using deictic
shifts (e.g., changing “today” to “that day”). This familiarizes them with these adjustments in a way
that feels natural and less focused on strict reporting rules.
By doing this, we help students acquire the tools they need for reported speech without overwhelming them.
This approach builds a deeper understanding and makes grammar practice more integrated and contextual.
Just like professor Nguyên suggested: 1 function at a time.
Now, that’s left us with the last thing about reported speech: choosing the right verb tense to report a direct
speech. This part requires extra help for students to get it right.

GRAMMAR AS A RECEPTIVE SKILL

In teaching grammar, an effective approach is to treat it as a receptive skill. This means that, rather than
asking students to immediately produce grammar forms, we focus first on helping them observe grammar in
authentic use, so they develop a deeper, intuitive awareness of how it functions.
Focus of Grammar as a Receptive Skill
The focus here is on observing grammar in context to build awareness. Instead of learning forms in
isolation or memorizing transformation rules, students watch grammar as it naturally appears in
conversations, stories, and authentic texts.
Goal of Grammar as a Receptive Skill
The goal of this approach is to expose students to grammar in natural contexts. By seeing grammar as it
actually functions in language, students can recognize patterns and begin to understand usage intuitively,
without the pressure to produce it right away.
Application in Teaching
To apply this approach, we can use receptive tasks where students focus on identifying grammar structures
within real-life contexts. This might involve listening, reading, or noticing tasks where they observe how
grammar works without needing immediate production.

To help learners understand their choices for using different tenses in reported speech, a useful activity
could involve examining examples of reported speech such as categorizing examples like this:
Students will notice that some reported speech uses past tense while others use present tense. To help them
begin to perceive why this is the case, they will likely need another exercise that focuses on listening and
comprehension, possibly similar to the following:

In these convesations:
- Present tense indicates information that is still true now
- Past tense implies that the information might not be true or has changed
Understanding this use of tense allows speakers and listeners to better interpret whether reported information
is still accurate or potentially outdated. In teaching reported speech, it’s helpful to show students how
different tense choices convey different meaning.
So the idea of us teaching them reported speech with some rules like “shift the verb one step back in time”
are inaccurate. Instead, we have to get them to look at a broader picture for better understanding of how
things actually work.
But what about practice which requires learners to produce language? Rather than asking learners to produce
utterances involving reported speech, we might want to ask them first to make selections:
Exercises like this may be problematic because several examples allow more than one possible choice but
language, including grammar, is often not just about correct or incorrect. So asking learners to think about
which option is more likely or appropriate helps them see that choices are available and that there are
differences in meaning.
If these kind of exercises still may not be helpful in some cases, then you can ask them to think of
memorable things that someone said to them in the past. They can then report those statements, and you can
give them correction and modification when needed. This is an even better approach.

In summary, grammar as a receptive skill helps raise students' language awareness by allowing them to
observe and understand grammar in context, which sets the stage for Grammar and Meaning, where they
actively produce language based on this understanding.

GRAMMAR AND MEANING

Focus of Grammar and Meaning

This approach emphasizes using grammar purposefully to express different meanings. Instead of treating
grammar as strict rules, students learn that grammar choices are flexible tools that can change the tone of a
sentence. It can make a speaker sound more polite, certain, or hesitant.
Goal of Grammar and Meaning
The goal is to help students understand that grammar choices carry subtle messages. A single change in
tense, verb form, or sentence structure can adjust the entire meaning of a statement, influencing how it’s
perceived by others.
Application
By using real-life language data, we identify common patterns so students practice with language that
resembles everyday conversation. This approach helps us focus on typical phrases (like “invent things”)
instead of uncommon ones (like “make inventions”).

Now please take a look at an exercise for students to choose the verb tense for each picture.
This involves using visuals that relate to the context and timing of an event. In this activity, students are le to
observe how tense shifts in the reporting verbs and reported clauses reflect timing and context.
For instance:
• In the first image, we use ‘She says she hasn’t been feeling well’ to indicate the immediacy of her
condition.
• By the third image, ‘She said she hadn’t been feeling well’ reflects a past report, distanced in time
and outcome.
This activity encourages students to notice changes in verb tense, helping them understand that tense choice
reflects timing and perspective intentionally, rather than just following a rule. Our goal is to help students
grasp the meanings behind different verb tenses, giving them a clearer understanding of how reported speech
functions in real life then they will be able to use them purposefully in real-life situations.

In my class, I use songs and movies to make grammar meaningful. Here’s a video with examples of
conditionals from:
• ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay – first conditional, expressing real possibilities.
• ‘Die with a Smile’ by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga – second conditional, expressing hypothetical
wishes.
• A scene between Iron Man and Spider-Man – using both the second and third conditionals for
hypothetical situations and regrets.
I ask my students to identify the conditional types and interpret their meanings based on context. Then, we
discuss how verb tenses shape meaning. We can then use corpus data to show that the third conditional
often appears in hypothetical discussions, while the first conditional is common in everyday advice.

These approaches align well with the updated Vietnamese high school graduation exam format, which now
focuses on reading comprehension and contextual understanding over rote-focused sections. By using
corpus data and authentic examples, we prepare students to interpret and use grammar in meaningful
contexts, supporting the Ministry’s goal of assessing English as a practical communication skill.
In short, Grammar as a Receptive Skill provides a foundation by allowing students to passively recognize
grammar choices, while Grammar and Meaning shifts to active decision-making. This transition helps
students understand that grammar choices carry meaning, moving from simply recognizing forms to using
them purposefully based on context.

GRAMMAR AND TECHNOLOGY

All of the approaches that I’ve just mentioned can be a lot better if we aid them with technology. Nowadays,
there are many tools that can help students learn English grammar engagingly with colourful visions or
game-like effects. It’s our job to show students how to use these tools effectively and properly.
To sum up, grammar materials should ideally present grammar as an integral part of language, rather than as
a separate set of rules to memorize. By designing grammar materials within language use, we allow students
to see it as a practical tool for communication, not just an isolated feature to master.