Grammar Instruction

Matt Altstiel
5/2/07
TESL 3001

Grammar Instruction

When designing a grammar lesson, it is important as a teacher to know the exact grammar rules and how to go about teaching them. Content can be expanded to incorporate speaking / writing exercises but should stray too far from the original. Grammar can be taught either inductively or deductively, however I have found that more overt grammar teaching (especially at lower levels) has been more effective in my teaching (Brown 365). Therefore, actually teaching the rules and having students generate grammar based content such as relevant spoken or written sentences. This teaching method varies substantially from my own learning style which is much more inductive. I personally hated grammar drills and had a heard time memorizing lengthy drills. However, when I tried more meaning based instruction to teach in keeping with natural language acquisition, students did not really get a communicative feel for the grammar element.

I tried inductive when teaching the future tense and deductive when teaching the past tense, receiving completely different results. In the future tense experiment, I wrote a story on the board telling them what I was going to tomorrow or further in the future. Without overtly explaining that they were learning the future tense, I assumed they would notice how the verbs appeared different for this tense. The example I gave on the board also clearly illustrated multiple forms and contracts that are more commonly associated with future events. Therefore, when compiling their own <> stories I wrongly assumed their form would be correct and they would subconsciously absorb the lesson. However, students continued using present tense form such as <> instead of including indicator like < or the contraction <>. Rather than building intrinsic motivation for the students, their collective inability to grasp the idea of the lesson raised their affective filter.

When teaching the past tense, I tried a very different approach. I announced that we were switching to a grammar based lesson and would specifically practice the past tense. I told them that we would be only discussing regular forms, that is the standard -ed ending. Since the students generally had pronunciation errors resulting from the linguistic concept of overgeneralization (Lightbown and Spada), I gave them a rule on how to pronounce that pesky –ed ending. After students generated past tense words for the three ending sounds (d, t and id) I had students pronounce them again and place each word under the sound heading. Using the words from the board, I had them construct sentences using the past tense. Therefore, even though I overtly told them a rule and spent class time explicitly on grammar, the students had fun and responded. I could see the little light bulb go off here when it had not in my other experiment. In summation, while I learn differently and Brown advocated inductive grammar instruction, the validity of explicit grammar instruction is still very clear.