MATERIALS FOR THE

TEACHING OF
GRAMMAR

1 Gülsüm Filiz
Muhammet Kahveci
Yunusemre Altıparmak
 Still Important!!!

 The development of grammatical competence has an

important role in second or foreign language learning.
 Despite the advent of the so-called Communicative
Approach over the recent years, the dominance of
grammar in teaching materials remains high, to the point
of obsession.
 Examination of materials reveals that concern with
grammatical from continues to take precedence over
meaning considerations.
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 Henry Widdowson

 He argued that restricting

attention to grammatical
form is insufficient.

“Learners need to realize the functions of the device as

a way of mediating between words and contexts, as a
powerful resource for the purposeful achievement of
meaning. A communicative approach, properly
conceived, does not involve the rejection of grammar.
On the contrary, it involves a recognition of its central
mediating role in the use and learning of language.”
(Widdowson, 1990: 97-8) 3
 If one looks at the majority of practice material offered
to learners, it is hard not to conclude that the realizations
and recognitions to which Widdowson refers are mostly
left to the learners themselves to come to.

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 For Example:

 The common practice of teaching and practicing “short

forms” such as “Yes, I am. / No, I’m not.” as response to
open-ended questions or that of asking learners to
transform sentences in active voice into passive voice (or
vise versa).

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 Discrete or Integrated?

 The current situation with regard to grammar in the

profession is subject and in particular there is criticism
of the way in which the grammar of the language is
taught through focusing on a sequence of individual and
discrete grammatical items, to which Thornburry (2000)
refers as the delivery of “grammar McNuggets”.

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 Long and Robinson propose an approach which asks
learners to notice language forms as they occur in the
data learners are exposed to, and to consider how the
forms are used to establish meanings.

 If you think about that approach carefully, you can see

that it is a part of Task-Based Learning (TBL).

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 Why not discrete grammar materials?
 The effort to break up the grammar of a language into
discrete chunks for pedagogic purposes brings many
difficulties with it and the effort to involve learners in
productions activities which are as controlled as possible
to avoid learners attempting to use language which they
have not learned yet.

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 The McNuggets Effect
 Nonetheless, the reality for most writers of grammar
materials is exactly that. Classroom teachers producing
their own materials for use with their own students
perhaps have the greatest chance of innovating, and
certainly have the best opportunity to take into account
the learners themselves.

 Once material is for publication, pressures to conform

the writer to work within the “grammar to current norms
will frequently require McNuggets” framework.

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 How to avoid being a McNugget?

 The writer of materials for the teaching and learning of

grammar has a number of considerations to take into
account. These include:

a) The age and level of the learners

b) The extent to which any adopted methodology meets
the expectations of learners, teachers and the
educational culture
c) To what extent any contexts and co-texts which are
used to present grammar areas will be of interest to
learners.
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d) The nature of grammatical areas (in terms of their
form and meaning) and how they are used in
normally occurring spoken and written discourse.
e) To what extent any language offered to the learners
for them to examine the grammar used represents
realistic use of language and the extent to which
activities for learners to produce language containing
the target grammar will result in meaningful
utterances and utterances which the learners would
like to produce in their own, non-classroom
discourse.
f) Any difficulties that learners can face, especially
with regard to any similarities and differences
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between the target language and their mother tongue.
 The first three listed here are important for anyone designing
materials for classroom.

We will consider the last three;

 if grammar materials accurately reflect the language and
learners’ linguistic needs,
 if they encourage and allow learners to produce language,

 if there is any difficulty that students may have due to the

relations between the target language and the mother tongue.
since their absence in a work may produce a material with
low pedagogic value.

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 It is clear that most material writers think grammatical form
is more important than the presentation of naturally occurring
language.

 An example is “short answers”: Yes I am/ No I am not. etc.

This is normally treated as a stand-alone area. Learners are
given practice exercises which involve simply question and
response. Unfortunately no reference is made or indication
given to learners as to when such responses may or may not
be appropriate.

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 Getting learners to produce only these “short answers” is presumable based
on the belief that they do not have the linguistic armory to say more.
 These misnamed “short answers” need to be taught and practiced
- in contexts such as disagreeing or correcting
- with appropriate follow-up to the short answers
such as
A: You are late!
B: No, i’m not. It’s only eight-thirty.
 Writers wish to get learners to produce “short answers” would need to
develop possible conversational exchanges which begin with statements
that learners can either disagree with or else to which they can give a
contrary opinion.

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 Another example might be “reported speech”.
 Willis (1990) among others has argued that it is unnecessary to
treat this as an area of language with its own separate existence
and set of rules.
 If we look at what a speaker needs to do in order to produce an
utterance in “reported speech”, we will find things such as:

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 The first three need not be left until the area of reported speech
crops up in the syllabus. These verbs are of the verbs
themselves, not of reported speech, and need to be taught as the
verbs occur during a course just like time phrases,
demonstrative pronouns etc.

 Thus, an approach can be developed which provides learners

with enough information they need in order to report speech,
without teaching them “reported speech” as such at all.

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 About the fourth point speakers focus on tense selection rather
than transformation although such selection is not at a very
conscious level, native speakers of English will be aware of the
effects of different choices.

 Swan (2001: 182) states that;

“…There are deeper underlying patterns which help native
speakers’ instinctive choices. If we can tease out these patterns
and convey them to our students, everything fall into place and
the relevant structures will cease to be problematic.

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 What alternatives are there to
transformation exercises?

 Lewis (1993: 153) points a possible way, an emphasis on grammar as a

receptive skill.
 “Awareness raising” is a term which has recently acquired currency in
language teaching terminology.
 It is the students’ ability to observe accurately and perceive similarity and
difference within target language data which is most likely to aid the
acquisition of the grammatical system. Within this theoretical framework,
grammar as a receptive skill has an important role to play.
 This approach emphasizes input processing for comprehension rather than
output processing for production. (Ellis 1995: 88)
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 A Suggested Framework for
Language Awareness Activities

 The first step is giving students a language data of some

kind. Authentic texts, textbook extracts, constructs about
language etc.
 The next step is the exploitation of data through tasks.

 Cognitive processes; analyzing, analogizing, applying

existing knowledge to new contexts etc.
 It should lend itself to all modes of work. Pair work, in
and out of class etc.

Many language activities are open-ended. That means that

there is no right “answer”. 19
 So what can be done?

 With the goal of helping learners see what choices are

available with regard to tense selection in reported speech, one
might design a receptive grammar activity which encourages
learners to look at examples of utterances containing reported
speech and to find criteria for categorizing them. Such exercise
could take the following form:

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 Such an exercise will only alert that some reported speech
operates with past tense and others with present. For them to
begin to perceive why this is so, a further exercise will most
likely be required again. Such as:

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 It requires the teacher to be aware of such things as the use of
past tense not only a device for temporal distancing, but also
for psychological distancing (Lewis, 1986) and the use of
present tenses for temporal and psychological proximity, in
order to help learners perceive this.
 Willis (1990: 115) stated that;

“Most of these exercises are consciousness raising activities…

We can offer no prescriptions. All we can do is outline the
elements and encourage learners to examine their experience
of the language.”

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 What about practice which requires learners
to produce language?
 Rather than asking learners to produce utterances involving
reported speech, ask them first to make selections as for
example in the following exercise (Stranks, 2001: 28) :

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 There is no right/wrong in a language!

 The exercise in the previous slide moves away from the

“right/wrong” syndrome. However, asking learners to consider
which is more likely or appropriate allows them to perceive
that choices are available.

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 Some alternatives…

 If we really want to give them a free activity to report

speeches. We might ask them to;
 think about a sentence that actually was said to them

 report the sentence

 While doing it, you should do any correction or modification

possible.

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 We all know it is hard, right?
 It is hard to write exercises where the language produced is
consistently relevant to learners’ linguistic capabilities and is
faithful to actual language use.
 The existence and availability of language corpora make it
possible to see what language users actually do rather than
what we think or hope they do.
 “Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language” (Biber
et al., 1999) is a great example of how a grammar material
should be.

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 FINALLY!!!

 All in all, grammar may be necessary but let it be seen and

acted upon as part of language, not a separate feature to be
learned for its own sake.
 The grammar materials should reflect grammar’s “central
mediating” role in the use and learning of language.

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 References
 Widdowson, H. G. (1990) Aspects of Language Teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
 Thornbury, S. (2000) 'Deconstructing grammar', in A. Pulverness
(ed.) IATEFI, 2000 Dublin Conference Selections.
 Swan, M. (1994) 'Design criteria for pedagogic language Rule',

 Lewis, M. (1986) The. English yetb. Hove: Language Teaching

Publications.
 Lewis, M. (1993) The Lacical Approach. Hove: Language
Teaching Publications.
 Biber, D., Johanson, S., Leech G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E.
(1999) Longman
Grammar of Spoken and Written Language 29
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