In the second part of her tips for new teachers – you can read the first part here – Laura explains that giving your students context and knowing your audience are two incredibly important tools in the classroom.
Give them a context
When I was thinking about writing these tips, I asked two experienced teacher friends what they wish they’d known, and they both said the same thing: ‘I wish I’d known that grammar wasn’t that important’.
My inner pedant squirms in horror at that idea, though I can’t help acknowledging I agree with them to a large extent. Certainly, it doesn’t really matter if a student says “I have eaten ice cream yesterday” instead of “I ate an ice cream yesterday”. The meaning is pretty clear, so in terms of communicating with an English speaking person, they’re doing fine. However, it would be marked incorrect on an exam paper.
So while I hesitate to declare the unimportance of grammar teaching, I will agree with this: teach language in context. It’s no use spending hours on the future continuous if students have no idea when to use it. I don’t mean an abstract context like ‘how to say that something will be happening at a certain time in the future’, I mean a ‘real’ context, like “Life in the Year 2100”.
I was lucky enough to begin my teaching career in a school where the context was part of the syllabus – Food and Drink (Countables and Uncountables), Life on Mars (Modal verbs), Disaster Stories (Interrupted Actions) – but it was still easy to fall into the trap of thinking about the grammar first and the context later. It’s amazing how many lessons I’ve taught, and seen taught, where students spend half an hour practicing the past simple vs past continuous, and then go on to write stories entirely in the present tense. If the language is explicitly put in context from the start, then this can be avoided.
It’s often helpful to plan lessons backwards. Find a final activity which will practise the target language – a restaurant roleplay for example – then elicit your language using that very same context: for example, giving them a restaurant dialogue to order, and then get them to ‘discover’ the target language in the dialogue. That way, when you come to your roleplay, you can be confident that most students will connect the scenario with the language.
Know your audience
This was one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn as a teacher, but the chances are, your students aren’t interested in the same things as you. This makes things tricky when ‘giving grammar a context’ because (depending on where and who you’re teaching) contexts that are familiar to you may not be so familiar to your students.
Being a history nerd, there’s been many a time I’ve itched to get Romans into a lesson. In fact, my DIY lesson on my CELTA course was based around the concept of a radio programme called ‘The History of the World in 100 Objects’. Needless to say, I soon realised that a classroom of teenagers would not respond well to my toga-themed lesson. “Miss, this is boring.”
It’s all cultural, of course, and it sounds obvious, but students learn better when they identify with the scenarios you are creating or when they are interested in the topic material. That’s going to vary depending on where and who you’re teaching, so there’s always going to be a bit of trial and error involved. My younger students, for example, LOVED Spongebob Squarepants and Shaun the Sheep. Basically, if I attached any lesson to either of those characters, however tenuously (what does Spongebob do on Saturdays?), it always went well. For the adults, restaurants and food were always popular. It’s worth taking the time to find out what interests your students and asking colleagues what has worked for them in the past.
In the end, I did manage to sneak some Egyptian history into a lesson on past passives. [‘First, the brain was removed through the nose…’] Funnily enough, that seemed to go down well. I wonder why!
We’ll have more tips for new teachers in two weeks’ time.