This extract comes from Martin Parrott’s seminal work, Grammar for English Language Teachers. Its aim is to encourage you to research the impact of your grammar activities in the classroom and provides ideas for doing so. If you haven’t had an opportunity to use any of the classroom suggestions from previous weeks, make sure you try one and reflect on its impact on your learners this week!
Research activities
These extension activities help you to become more aware of issues that affect grammatical choices, more aware of difficulties your own learners have with grammar, and more constructively critical of how grammar is treated in published materials.
These activities extend the content of any of the chapters. Each time you use one of them, you need to decide which grammatical feature you wish to research/explore.
Researching the effectiveness of teaching
These activities help you to evaluate the effect your teaching has on your learners’ awareness, understanding and speaking or writing. You can carry out any of them both before and after teaching a particular grammar feature. Choose two or three learners to focus on.
Comprehension
Ask your students to listen to or read something in which your chosen grammar feature is used prominently. Focus initially only on general understanding.
You can then:
- Isolate the instances of your chosen grammar feature and ask specific questions to test their understanding of this.
- Isolate the instances of your chosen grammar feature and ask students to explain why this has been used (where feasible, they might do this in their own language).
- Ask your students to underline or pick out anything they don’t understand.
Speaking and/or writing
You can use learners’ written compositions of different kinds or can transcribe a short recording of them speaking. In some cases, the choice of topic may be important. For example, if you want to explore their use of passive constructions, asking them to describe some kind of process (e.g. What happens to letters when you post them?) should create opportunities for using the passive.
You can:
- Count how often they use your target grammar feature in contexts where its use would be natural.
- Count how often they use it in inappropriate contexts.
- Count how frequently they construct its form correctly or make mistakes in this.
- Underline problems in their writing, and ask them to correct this and to explain their basis for doing this.
After teaching the feature, you can ask them how easy or difficult they have found it to:
- Understand the use and meaning of these forms.
- Understand the construction of these forms.
- Remember these forms.
- Use these forms in speaking and in writing.
You can also ask them to compare the use of these in English with any equivalent forms in their own language(s).
If you enjoyed this snippet from Martin Parrott’s Grammar for English Language Teachers, take a look at last week’s article – it focuses on Philip Kerr’s Translation and Own-language Activities and is called Developing learners’ grammatical awareness through translation!