How do Different Groups of Students Learn Grammar?
One may be keen to know what grammar is. Why do we need to learn grammar in our lives? How can I learn grammar?
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Why is it so important for my students to learn grammar?
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This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Mbalenhle S. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.
The Definition of Grammar
Grammar is the set of rules that we follow when we speak to express our thoughts and to have a sound and meaningful conversation. It serves as an umbrella that comprises several things including part of speech, phrases, clauses and sentence diagrams which we normally use on our daily talks to be grammatically correct concise. Part of speech refers to a noun, pronoun, verbs, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, and interjection, they cover all words that we use in our daily talks. For example, Tom quickly drove the car to the garage and she accidentally drove over the cat and it's died instantly.
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Ways to Transfer Grammar
To speak something that will make sense you must put words together and make a sentence. This rule turns out to be a problem for my students because they are second-language speakers.to help my students understand better and retain the information that they have to learn and be able to put words together and make a sentence, I always use sentence diagrams. my teaching experience also taught me that during my teaching I have to start with simple sentences, for my students to gain confidence. For example, Josh sang. And then move to more complex sentences to cater to all levels of students in my classroom, which is the differentiating style of learning that follows Bloom's taxonomy. For example, Tom quickly drove the car to the garage and she accidentally drove over the cat and it's died instantly. Phrases: they are a group of words, which they come together to act as one part of speech. For example: after church, the boys rode their bikes to the park. Clauses: they are a group of words that contain a subject and a verb. For example, Sheila swam at the beach.
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How can I learn grammar
People have different ways of learning grammar, some of the people learn better when they see things which are visually and some learn better through sound which is auditory, with my students as a teacher in my lesson I use these two skills because I acknowledge that people are different and they learn in different ways. For effective teaching and learning when I prepare my lessons, I include games so that students will be hands-on have fun while they are learning. I also use a lot of pictures, and if possible, I bring actual material in class, for instance, if our lesson is about fruits I'll bring several fruits in class, for those who learn better with pictures to increase interest and draw their attention.
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Why is it so important for my students to learn grammar?
We learn the grammar to be able to compete and communicate concisely in a foreign world, in terms of business, jobs, studying and tourism. It prepares them for the real world, it creates an element of independence and flexibility. For example, one day when they want to go to a foreign country for different reasons which might be tourism, relocation, studying or business opportunities, they will be able to communicate effectively without any translator. For our students to be able to cope in the real world we must structure our lessons in a way that will require them to speak a lot. And we speak less.
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In conclusion, grammar is something broad and we as teachers need to know that people learn grammar in different ways so that we will be flexible enough and adopt the differentiation style when we are doing our lesson plans. Also, teachers should promote this auditory and visual style of learning in their classrooms for effective teaching and learning. Lastly, as teachers in our classroom, we must let students talk a lot because practice makes perfect.
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