College Global TEFL

Learning grammarLearning grammar of any language is very important part of learning any language. How sentences are constructed and how they should be structured to be able to speak properly. If one does not learn grammar, all he/she can do is to learn individual words and phrases. Language teachers who adopt this definition focus on grammar as a set of forms and rules. They teach grammar by explaining the forms and rules and then drilling students on them. This results in unmotivated students who can produce correct forms on exercises and tests, but consistently make errors when they try to use the language. My research shows that other language teachers, influenced by recent theoretical work on the difference between language learning and language acquisition, tend not to teach grammar at all. Believing that children acquire their first language without overt grammar instruction, they expect students to learn their second language the same way. They assume that students will absorb grammar rules as they hear, read, and use the language in communication activities. This approach does not allow students to use one of the major tools they have as learners: their active understanding of what grammar is and how it works in the language they already know. The model that balances these extremes is a communicative model. The model recognizes that obvious grammar instruction helps students acquire the language more efficiently, but it incorporates grammar teaching and learning into the larger context of teaching students to use the language. Instructors that are using this model to teach students the grammar will need to know to accomplish defined communication tasks. Learning to arrange the words in the correct order is probably one of the most important and useful things after pronunciation and vocabulary. If a person manages to use the right words in the right order he/she should be understood even if you cannot remember all the necessary grammatical endings. In many languages nouns, adjectives and other words can change in various ways to indicate their role in a sentence. Verbs can change to determine who is performing the action (person), how many people are included (number) and when the action is taking place (tense). Instructors that teach foreign languages also often find it disconnect between knowing the rules of grammar and being able to apply those rules in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This disconnect comes from declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. ?Declarative knowledge is about something. Declarative knowledge enables a student to describe a rule of grammar and apply it in pattern practice drills. Procedural knowledge is knowledge of how to do something. Procedural knowledge enables a student to apply a rule of grammar in communication.? To apply, teachers can develop some strategies: ? The relationship between declarative and procedural knowledge needs to be identified. students using the language primarily for reading articles need to focus more on the declarative knowledge of grammar and not to focus on structures that will help them understand those texts. ? To know that declarative knowledge can proceed to procedural knowledge. ? To understand that students can receive both procedural and declarative knowledge. ? To use predicting skills. In summary, ?grammar is central to the teaching and learning of languages. It is also one of the more difficult aspects of language to teach well. Many language teachers, hear the word ?grammar? and think of a fixed set of word forms and rules of usage. They associate ?good? grammar with the prestige forms of the language, such as those used in writing and in formal oral presentations, and ?bad? or ?no? grammar with the language used in everyday conversation or used by common speakers.?