Students may learn the grammatical points at hand in a very short time, but the integration of those grammatical points into their inter-language, gaining the ability to actually USE them whenever necessary takes much more time.
So, when you do some accuracy based exercises, there seems to be no problem but as soon so you move on to some less controlled fluency based exercises things get a little ugly. So what then?
1. move on and teach the next grammatical points, hoping that they’ll put it all together over time
2. Don’t cross the red line! No more points until they’ve mastered the previous one first.
If you go for option one:
You might end up having students that know what a passive sentence is, but as they open their mouths they make mistakes as in “he read a book” or “what is he want?”
If you go for option two:
How much practice and time do students need to get to that point where they can USE them? Where do you find that vast amount of exercise they need in order to roughly master the point at hand?
What do you think?
I am not sure whether my answer will help. The problem is not with integration, but with the teaching itself. If you teach the points in isolation and there is no true 'need' for them to be integrated, then they won't be. You need to create to need to use this language by setting a task in which a certain grammatical structure will have to be used or else you won't be able to make your point.
I see this on a daily basis with my student. I do not actually teach language anymore, but even with my philosophy students, the language and grammar fall into place (they are all second language English speakers) when the task which they have to write about so engaging that they really want to make themselves understood.
If this happens, then suddenly the 'forgotten' structures miraculously reappear, used in the right way and context.
thanks for your kind answers dear friends. Mr. Salmani I'm currently teaching at the ILI and their method of teaching grammar as you might already know is deductive. Nevertheless the errors persist. The language learners do make progress but I'm not satisfied with their progress rate. It seems to me the number of chances they get to USE the grammatical points is very limited. also, "Error Treatment" sounds very much like what I need to spend some more time on. Thanks a lot.
Ehsan, you seem to be referring to elementary or intermediate level ESL learners so I don't know if this article will help. It's on helping students to integrate correct grammar and spelling into their work (in this case, journalism).
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/07/how-a-dreaded-grammar-test-became-a-pioneering-model-for-bilingual-students/
Read the book Grammar, OUP (1994) Rob Batstone. The book is about teaching gramar as a skill so the student can integrate it directly into his/her language development.
Hi Ehsan,
As I have a long experience of teaching a foreign language, I admit that with every group I have to try different ways according to the learners, and I vary between explaining and do exercise but what walk more with my students is to let them find the grammar rule themselves. I may be lucky enough to have a labortory with mutli-media I use for my classes, I let them look and do the exercise and then I explain by an academic way.
They remember even after 2 or 3 semesters (I have sutends for 6 level). Feel free to experiment to find your own, the worst in a course is routine and they hate that.
good luck
Thanks for your response dear Samira,
the problem that I am interested in is not Noticing the Rule,
the question is how to best integrate a grammatical point into their competence so that they use them whenever the need arises.
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