Grammar and Your Classroom

March 7, 2008

Hat tip to the TEFLtastic blog  and a post about a TESOL revolution underway.

There’s not a single doubt in my mind about Grammar and my classroom: They should be together. Actively.

In my own experience learning Spanish as a second language, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity - and curse - of being immersed in the target language 24/7, 365 - for a grand total of almost 9 years.
The wonderful result: I’m pretty near fluent in Spanish. I can read, speak, and listen to most Spanish content at a native speaker’s level without much effort.

The curse: I never took a single Spanish class, nor learned about the grammar. In fact, if you were to offer me some Spanish grammar lessons, I’d likely turn you down…scared off by the potential for brain numbing boredom that is often associated with this content.

But I know deep down somewhere, that I need to learn how to properly construct my sentences. I need to learn some rules. I sense their lack, and know that - my writing especially - is suffering because I don’t know how everything works.

This is true for most everyone. Grammar needs to be in our classes, as Case underlines in his post. It’s a bad move to solely rely on exposing students to English, and over time expecting them to pick it up. Children, perhaps, would best respond to this method for fluency development, but at some point they will need grammar to help them organize and structure, adults even more so. 

Where I think teachers need to be careful is to not swing too far to the right in grammar instruction. Classes that are 100% grammar, are 100% boring. Even if you manage to keep your grammar work down to respectable doses, you still need to be careful about how you present and serve up your content.

It’s kind of ironic: the very thing we know we need to teach, and the very thing many students know they need in order to improve, is the very thing that can shut our brain off, and kill enthusiasm if served the wrong way.

So DO teach the grammar. Do make it a part of your class. But DO pay careful attention to keeping it interesting. Remember, cognitive science tells us that:

Brains love the unusual, the strange, and the unexpected. And they love emotions as well:  Surprise. Curiosity, and Fun.

But the real trick is to employ the above with your next grammar lesson…

where are your grammar lessons?

 

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How A Simple Quote Became a Powerful Classroom Experience

March 4, 2008

I’m really starting to love the idea that "Simple is Beautiful." A few weeks ago, without even looking for it, I came across a really great quote over at WorkHappy.net. This is what I found:

"Be mindful of the link between present action and desired future outcome. Ask yourself: if I repeat today’s actions 365 times, will I be where I want to be in a year?" Roz Savage.

I liked this quote a lot. There’s so much truth behind it, and I think that very few of us are really conscious of it - mindful - as much and as often as we need to be.

In a pre-intermediate group I’m working with, we’ve been looking at the simple future tenses, as well as the present progressive. That night I came across the quote, I thought to myself: Wow! What a great way to talk about something that matters to most of us (living a life that’s on purpose, and going the way we REALLY want it to) while working on some target language along the way - "will", "going to", "want to."

After teaching new words (mindful, link, desired, outcome) we read the quote together a few times. Then we worked on a really quick explanation of "will, going to, and want to" 

We read the article multiple times, and each time the students understood the text a little more. And then we started talking about it. I encouraged them to take a moment to pause, and consider what they were wanting to be by the end of 2008. After they had thought about it, I asked them to share. (Of course, having to use the simple future tense we had just been learning about.)

It was incredible. Mistakes happened, but not many. Because they had time to think a little about what they wanted to say, the ideas flowed very well…and best of all, they were very real. Then the really fun part came…the present continuous. So you want to do "x"? What are you doing today to make that happen?

Again, I encouraged them to take a few seconds and think about it before speaking…but the moment was electric. As I looked around the small meeting room table, I saw that a few were starting to think about things in ways they had never done before. What AM I doing to make my dreams happen???? You could almost hear their thoughts as they worked away in silence.

The end results: We spent the whole class talking about THEIR future, and THEIR present action. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t fake. There was no tooth pulling….the conversation flowed quite freely. The best of all, at least for me, was that it didn’t feel like a typical grammar lesson. No pain or suffering…at least in trying to figure out how to use the new structures. It just flowed because there was, I think, a strong connection to the content.

 

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