The ESL Educators’ Guide: How To Teach Grammar Effectively

By Carrie on February 19, 2011

The ESL Educators’ Guide Part One: Teaching Grammar Effectively

Teaching Grammar is a Tricky Business

Teaching grammar, especially for first-time ESL teachers and even for experienced ESL teachers, can
often be a tricky business. In fact, it is one of the most difficult aspects of a language to teach.

When we think of grammar, we think of a set of word forms and rules of usage that govern how we
speak and write. Some teachers tend to focus on these rules and forms in their classroom, believing
that their students learn best through rote memorization. While it is imperative that ESL students
learn the rules and forms of grammar, this is not an effective method of teaching grammar. It tends
to result in a classroom full of bored and uninterested students who know how to produce excellent
results in exercises and on tests, but fail badly at using the language in contextual situations.

On the other hand, there are teachers who teach grammar through osmosis. Teaching methods tend
to revolve around the assumption that students will absorb grammar rules in communication
activities or they believe that children learn their first language without grammar instruction;
therefore learning a second language should be learned the same way.

Think back, for example, to what you learned about grammar in elementary school and high school.
Your grammar lessons most likely focused on identifying the basic parts of a sentence, but you
probably didn’t learn much about specific grammar forms. This is because we learn these forms
naturally as native English speakers. Thus, many first-time ESL teachers and even long-term ESL
teachers never really learn how to teach grammar effectively to ESL students because they
themselves never learned grammar in that manner. How then, can an ESL teacher teach grammar
effectively when the teacher never learned grammar as part of learning a second language?

The trick is to take examples from both teaching styles.

Here are a few tips to help you make the best of your ESL grammar lessons:

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

To teach grammar, you have to understand grammar.  Generally speaking, I meet a lot of first-time
ESL teachers that are able to identify different parts of a sentence, but don’t have a clue about
grammar tenses and specific grammar rules beyond the basics taught in high school. All too often, I
see teachers go into a classroom and wing it by simply going through a bunch of exercises and
answers. Moreover, there’s no way to make grammar fun if you don’t have a clear understanding of
what you are teaching.

Your active understanding of what grammar is and how it works will allow you to better understand
the errors and challenges that your students face. ESL students don’t learn grammar the same way
that native English speakers do. It’s not enough to look at something that a student has written and
say that you can’t explain why it’s wrong. Your job is to help students understand where they’ve
made mistakes, when to use specific grammar forms, and the difference between written grammar
and spoken grammar.

Learn How to Give Overt Grammar Instruction

Overt grammar instruction helps students acquire the target language more efficiently, but you
should also incorporate as many communicative activities into your lesson plan as possible to
strengthen what you are teaching. Remember: Most people learn from learning, observation, and
practice.

Break your class time down into manageable sections, and make sure that you are introducing and
explaining the grammar lesson, demonstrate how it is used in contextual situations, put it to practical
use in the classroom, and play an engaging game that reinforces your lesson.

Try the following ideas in this order during your next grammar lesson and see what happens. The
following should take no more than 15 minutes to accomplish in class. I cannot stress the importance
of planning your grammar lesson and the examples you will use to reinforce your lessons in advance.
Winging it in class can often lead to examples with exceptions, and believe me, you don’t want to
introduce an example and then realize that there is an exception to the rule.

1. Write the target grammar rule on the whiteboard.

2. Introduce your target grammar rule/tense and explain when to use the grammar point and
why.

3. Go over the rule again. Present the grammar point in written and oral examples to bring the
lesson into context and to address the needs of students with different learning styles.

4. Providing examples is an important part of grammar instruction. Plan your examples around

5. Once you’ve run through your examples, ask your students if they can come up with some
simple ideas or sentences that match the rule you are teaching.

6. Conclude this portion of the lesson by teaching any exceptions to the rule.

How To Reinforce Your Lesson

Now you’re ready to move on to guided oral practice. I like to do this by handing out a simple
question and answer lesson that the class completes together as a class. The focus here is not to
provide the answers for students to write down. Therefore, I suggest telling your students that no
writing is allowed during this portion of class. I like to make sure that the questions on the activity
sheet are similar to what I assign for homework.

Go through all of the answers on the paper together as a class, or if you think your students can
handle it, have a student answer a question and have the class repeat after the student.
  Don’t focus on making sure that your students have mastered every aspect of each grammar
point that you teach. Instead, focus on the points that are relevant to immediate
communication tasks.

 Don’t focus too much on error correction.

Don’t Bore Your Students to Death

Grammar involves a lot of rules and forms, but there are ways to make teaching grammar fun. Your
goal in class is to enable your students to carry out the grammar point that you are teaching for
communicative purposes.

Start the game off by using a few questions and answers from the textbook or from the guided oral
practice section that I talked about in the last section. Once students understand how the game
works, you can move start introducing different examples for the grammar point or have the
students come up with their own examples.

Taken from: http://www.myseveralworlds.com/2011/02/19/esl-educators%E2%80%99-guide-teach-

Date: 28.05.2013