Teaching grammar TEFL

• Grammar acquired subconsciously and mainly through exposure to comprehensible input
• Grammar is learned implicitly in a foreign language (like in native language)

• Explicit focus on discrete grammatical items (tenses, relative clauses, adverbs...)
• Direct focus (PPP) or indirect (FonF)
• Dominant in foreign language education
• Proactive grammar teaching: -Planned instruction of specific grammatical phenomena
• Reactive grammar teaching: -Unplanned instances of grammar teaching
• New grammar learned incidentally

Presentation :

• New language item is presented to learners
• Underlying rule is explained to learners

Practice:

• Gap-filling exercises/ `pattern drill´

Production:

• (semi-)free use of new form in communicative activity

Meaning-focused communicative task:

• lexical chunks including new grammatical structure are provided to learners

Discovery of underlying rule (inductive approach):

• Learners try to make up new grammatical rule

• Not artificially separated
• Grammatical aspects of lexis: attention to grammatical content of a word (e.g. past forms of a word)
• Grammar is meaningful (e.g. difference in meaning if we use progressive or simple forms)

• Be able to communicate and convey meaning
• knowing words is more important than knowing underlying structures
• Formal correctness is still important for accurate communication
• Attention to formal aspects of new lexical items important (especially when differences btw. L1 and L2)

• Development of interlanguage
• Interlanguage evolves as learners learn new words and grammatical rules
• Learners make hypotheses about how language works and discover or explicitly learn new rules
• Teacher support process by giving opportunities to discover or explore
• Inductively derive underlying rules in a given text=noticing

• Students introduced to new topic/new words
• prior knowledge is activated
• Task assigned by teacher
• Students plan and work on task & prepare report
• Students report on task
• Language focus/ FonF
• Shift from meaning to form

19th century until mid 20th century

• Curriculum organized according to grammatical sub-system
• Modern languages taught like classical languages via translation of texts and with a clear focus on words and grammar

last third of 19th century in wake of educational reform movement

• Focus on language education on usability, practicality and functionality
• shift from focus on accuracy to fluency
• Shift from language as form to language as function
• More attention to spoken language, less attention on grammatical forms

1950s/60s

• Even stronger focus on spoken language
• Grammar progression: curriculum organized according to linguistic system
• Teaching language all based on pattern drill

1980s

• Song focus on fluency & communicative activities
• Grammar/accuracy neglected
• Language as function rather than form

From 1990s to present day

• student-centered
• Process/action-orientated methods
• Language learning based on real-world communicative tasks
• Long-term goal: learner autonomy
• Grammar included as focus on form

• great deal of interaction between grammar and lexis
• every word has its own grammar
• words have specific grammatical relationships with others
• each word contains substantial amount of grammatical information&has its own grammatical profile(word class, tense, person, ...)

• traditional separation between teaching/learning vocabulary is misleading, since there is much greater closeness between both domains than often is perceived
• the better words are organized in the learners mental lexicon, the easier it will be to access and retrieve them

• receptive learning=recognizing meaning and form
• Productive learning=being able to say or write a word with its correct meaning and form in appropriate context
• Not just single words nut also lexical chunks