5 Steps to Teaching Grammar

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1. Five Steps to Teaching Grammar By Work/Life English
2. Work/Life English is an experienced provider of fun, effective English language improvement content that advances the lives of native English and English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers by improving their English competence, comprehension, and communication skills. For more information, visit: www.worklifeenglish.com. Five Steps to Teaching Grammar
3. No matter what the “key learning points” are, an effective grammar mini-lesson plan is likely to have at least five (5) steps or stages: 1) Presentation with Recognition 2) Demonstrating Comprehension 3) Grammar Explanation 4) Practice Exercises 5) Communicative Expression Five Steps to Teaching Grammar
4. Presentation with Recognition • Presentation is a context that offers plenty of examples. It can be live- action, visual, printed, verbal, audio, animated, or a combination of several forms. • For instance, here’s a strip story with many instances of third person singular verbs in present statements (from WL-E 3G: Chapter 4 / Work, Part One, p. 58). This particular presentation consists of 8 frames (panels) on the subject of “Job Searches.” The captions tell the story of “Helena’s Uncle Stephen,” who's lost his job and tries to cope with the situation: Five Steps to Teaching Grammar
5. Demonstrating Comprehension • Comprehension comes next. It can be checked in many different, natural, direct ways. For instance, an instructor, helper, or self- teacher can use familiar grammar and vocabulary to ask comprehension questions about presented material. • For beginners, perhaps the first of these should elicit yes/no or one-word answers (Examples: Does Stephen have a job now? [No.]. Yes or No: He tries to get unemployment benefits, but can’t. [Yes.] Who does he ask for help? [His union rep.]). Later, the questions could evoke the targeted grammar, in this case third-person singular verbs. Five Steps to Teaching Grammar
6. Grammar Explanation • Explanation of grammar points may or may not be necessary or helpful, depending on participants’ “learning styles.” It can come in various forms, the simplest of which is a “Grammar Box,” perhaps with Review, titles like “Statements with Third Person Singular Verbs,” labeled sentence elements, and aligned vocabulary as examples. • This typical visual is from WL-E 3G: Chapter 4 / Work, Part One, p. 59. It uses parts of sentence examples from the preceding presentation, “identifying” their functions by their placement in a “chart.” Five Steps to Teaching Grammar
7. Practice Exercises • Practice is usually in exercises using an English grammar workbook, which proceeds from simplistic or automatic (to build confidence) to more challenging. In the latter, exercise- doers must consider more factors in completing each item. • Even so, if someone is actually acquiring a grammar pattern or point rather than guessing thoughtlessly, the answers should come quickly, with little effort, becoming more and more “natural.” At the same time, learners should always stay aware of the meaning of the language that they are producing. Here is an example exercise: Five Steps to Teaching Grammar
8. Communicative Expression • Communicative Expression occurs through speaking and listening, sometimes followed up with writing and reading. Such activities require little printed material and few aural cues, although participants may want to refer to grammar points (including those that are not the focus of the targeted grammar) and/or collect the words and phrases they need. • In this example (Activity *D.), they ask one another real questions, for which they need only the structures and phrasing offered in the Chapter Part. Then they convert those real answers into statements that include the targeted grammar, practicing it naturally. Five Steps to Teaching Grammar
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