How to teach grammar?
钟彩顺
江西师范大学外国语学院
Tel: 13699529035
Email: hokmdj@163.com
QQ: 641911103
I. Let’s elaborate on the question!
1. What is grammar?
 2. What is the function of grammar in
language learning? Should grammar be
taught?
 3. How can grammar be acquired/learned?
 4. How to teach grammar?

1. What is grammar?




Grammar is the structure of a language or rules
which determines how words fit together in
meaningful constructions.
A property of brain
a specific description, study or analysis of rules
for language use
Grammar of language vs. language of grammar
2. What is the function of grammar
in language learning?

Read the following two reflective
comments and discuss your opinions
Reflection

(四) 教学模式与方法
根据小学生学习的特点，小学英语教学要创建活动课为主
的教学模式，教学重点是培养学生用语言进行交流的能力。
小学英语教学不讲解语法概念。要充分利用教学资源，采
用听、做、说、唱、玩、演的方式，鼓励学生积极参与、
大胆表达，侧重提高明小学生对语言的感受和初步用英语
进行听、说、唱、演的能力。
小学五、六年级的英语教学，在进一步加强学生听说能力
的同时，发展初步的读写能力，为进一步学习打好基础。
《小学英语课程标准》

A language is learned through practice. It
is merely perfected through grammar.
3. How can grammar be acquired
or learned?
Implicit or explicit
 Inductive or deductive

4. How to teach grammar?
Syllabus
 Selection:
what to be included? (usefulness)
 Grading: what order are the selected items to
be dealt with (frequency, complexity,
learnability, teachability)
 Approach: how to incorporate it into teaching
and learning activities?

Successful grammar instruction involves
matching instruction to expected outcomes
and then assessing whether the instruction
was effective. (Williams 2005)
II. The pendulum swing
The historical trajectory of theories on
language teaching and learning
 The grammar-based approaches
 The communicative approaches
 The integrative approaches
Grammar-based approaches

Language teaching was equated with
grammar teaching and grammar was used
as content as well as organizing principles
for developing curriculum and language
teaching materials (Celce-Murcia, 2001a).

Grammar Translation Method

Based on categories of Greek and Latin grammar, the target
language was segmented into various parts of speech (e.g.,
nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, articles, participles,
conjunctions, and prepositions), which were taught deductively
through an explicit explanation of rules, with memorization and
translations of texts from the L2 to the L1. With a focus on written
language, other purposes of this method included exploring the
literature of the target language, preparing learners to develop
an understanding of the first language, and training learners’
academic capacities.
Audio-Lingual Method


The focus of this method was still on learning grammatical structures, and not on the
development of real-life communication skills. Theoretically, this method was greatly
influenced by behaviorist psychology that viewed learning as a process of habit
formation and conditioning; thus, it considered memorization of structural patterns
essential for L2 learning. It was believed that such memorization formed and
reinforced language habits. The Audio-Lingual Method was also influenced by the
American school of descriptive and structural linguistics that shifted the focus from
studying grammar in terms of parts of speech to a description of its structural and
phonological components.
As such, lessons in Audio-Lingual teaching consisted mainly of grammatical
structures sequenced in a linear manner, usually beginning with an easy structure
and ending with more complex forms, with little attention to meaning or context.
However, rules were taught inductively through examples and repetition of sentencelevel patterns. The emphasis was mainly on developing abilities in oral skills rather
than written skills. Instructional units typically began with a conversational dialogue,
followed by some pattern drills.
the Reading Approach
 the Oral and Situational Method
 the Silent Way
 Total Physical Response

Presentation-Practice-Production
(PPP) Models

a structured three-stage sequence:

a presentation stage


a practice stage


In the presentation stage, the new grammar rule or structure is introduced,
usually through a text, a dialogue, or a story that includes the structure. The
students listen to the text or read it out loud. The main purpose of this stage
is to help students become familiar with the new grammatical structure and
keep it in their short-term memory (Ur, 1988).
In this stage, students are given various kinds of written and spoken
exercises to repeat, manipulate, or reproduce the new forms. The practice
stage usually begins with controlled practices that focus learners’ attention
on specific structures and then moves to less controlled practices with more
open-ended activities. The aim of the practice stage is to help students gain
control of the knowledge introduced in the presentation stage, to take it in,
and to move it from their short-term memory to their long-term memory (Ur,
1988).
and a production stage

In the production stage, learners are encouraged to use the rules they have
learned in the presentation and practice stages more freely and in more
communicative activities. The aim of this last stage is to fully master the new
form by enabling learners to internalize the rules and use them automatically
and spontaneously.
PPP

Presentation
 Present
continuous
Can any body tell me what Jim is doing?
 What is Mary doing?


Practice
 Repetition

in chorus or individually
Production
 Describe
an ongoing activity
criticism



While there is substantial evidence that grammar instruction results
in learning as measured by discrete-point language tests (e.g., the
grammar test in the TOEFL), there is much less evidence to show
that it leads to the kind of learning that enables learners to perform
the targeted form in free oral production (e.g., in a communicative
task).
Where syntax is concerned, research has demonstrated that
learners rarely, if ever, move from zero to targetlike mastery of new
items in one step. Both naturalistic and classroom learners pass
through fixed developmental sequences in word order, negation,
questions, relative clauses, and so on—sequences which have to
include often quite lengthy stages of nontargetlike use of forms as
well as use of nontargetlike forms.
Besides practice, language acquisition processes appear to be
governed by many psychological constraints (Pienemann, 1998).
Communicative approaches

the aim of language learning as acquiring
communicative ability, that is, the ability to
use and interpret meaning in real-life
communication (Widdowson, 1978), not
simply learning formal grammatical rules
and structures
Integrative approach

This approach tries to strike a balance
between form and meaning in language
teaching.
Empirical and theoretical
foundations
First, the hypothesis that language can be learned without some
degree of consciousness has been found to be theoretically
problematic (e.g., Schmidt, 1993, 1995, 2001; Sharwood Smith,
1993).
Second, there is ample empirical evidence that teaching approaches
that focus primarily on meaning with no focus on grammar are
inadequate (Harley & Swain, 1984; Lapkin, Hart, & Swain, 1991;
Swain, 1985).
Third, recent SLA research has demonstrated that instructed language
learning has major effects on both the rate and the ultimate level of
L2 acquisition. In particular, research has shown that form-focused
instruction is especially effective when it is incorporated into a
meaningful communicative context.
Focus on form (Long 1991)
Long distinguished a focus on form from a focus on
forms (FonFs) and a focus on meaning. FonFs is the
traditional approach. It represents an analytic syllabus,
and is based on the assumption that language consists
of a series of grammatical forms that can be acquired
sequentially and additively. Focus on meaning is
synthetic and is based on the assumption that learners
are able to analyze language inductively and arrive at its
underlying grammar. Thus, it emphasizes pure meaningbased activities with no attention to form. FonF,
conversely, is as a kind of instruction that draws the
learner’s attention to linguistic forms in the context of
meaningful communication.


Doughty and Williams (1998), for example, suggested that FonF can
occur both reactively, by responding to errors, and proactively by
addressing possible target language problems before they occur,
and that both are reasonable and effective depending on the
classroom context.
R. Ellis (2001b) took a broad perspective on FonF, dividing FonF
into planned and incidental. He argued that in both types attention to
form occurs while learners’ primary focus is on meaning. However,
planned FonF differs from incidental FonF in that the former involves
drawing learners’ attention to pre-selected forms while the latter
involves no pre-selection of forms.

Larsen-Freeman (2001) proposed a communicative
model of grammar teaching that included three
dimensions: form/structure, meaning/semantics, and
use/pragmatics. The form/structure dimension refers to
the development of knowledge about the formal structure
of a language including its syntactic, morphological, and
phonological structures. The meaning dimension refers
to knowledge about meaning of a language form, and
the pragmatic dimension refers to knowledge about
when, where and how to use that form.

However, there are still many questions
about how to teach grammar effectively,
and in particular, how to integrate most
effectively a focus on grammatical forms
and a focus on meaningful communication
in L2 classrooms. Richards (2002) has
referred to this question as “the central
dilemma,” in language teaching.
Here the key questions from the perspective of teachers are:
(1) how can grammar be brought back to L2 classrooms without
returning to the traditional models of grammar teaching that have
often been found to be ineffective?
(2) how can a focus on grammar be combined with a focus on
communication?
(3) what are the different ways of integrating grammar instruction and
communicative interaction?
and (4) more importantly, how can the opportunity for focus on
grammar be maximized without sacrificing opportunities for a focus
on meaning and communication?

III. Principles and methods for
grammar teaching

Principles
 Efficiency
(including economy, ease and
efficacy)
 Appropriacy
Teaching Methods
Processing instruction
 textual enhancement
 discourse-based grammar teaching
 Interactional feedback
 grammar-focused tasks
 collaborative output tasks.

Processing instruction


Input processing is defined as strategies that
learners use to link grammatical forms to their
meanings or functions.
Input can be defined as the language “that
learners hear or see to which they attend for its
propositional content (message)”
 Universal Grammar (triggering, parameter setting)
 Information processing (from controlled to automatic)
 Skill-acquisition theories (from declarative to
procedural)
(1) How does the learner process the input
to which he or she is exposed?;
 (2) What is it that makes some input more
difficult to process than other input?;
 and (3) What are the processes that
impede or delay the acquisition of input?


four main principles:




1 Learners process input for meaning before they process it for
form.
2 For learners to process form that is not meaningful, they must
be able to process informational or communicative content at no
or little cost to attention.
3 Learners possess a default strategy that assigns the role of
agent (or subject) to the first noun (phrase) they encounter in a
sentence/utterance. This is called the first noun strategy.
4 Learners first process elements in sentence/utterance initial
position.

The key components of processing instruction
as a pedagogical intervention are as follows:
1
Learners are provided with information about the
target linguistic form or structure.
 2 They are informed of the input processing strategies
that may negatively affect their processing of the
target structure.
 3 They carry out input-based activities that help them
understand and process the form during
comprehension.
An example: Teaching plural -s

“He has two cars.”

giving students some explicit information about
how plural forms are structured in English
 informing the learners of why they tend to
ignore the plural-s when they normally read or
listen to input that contains that form
 implementing some input-based activities that
are specifically designed to help learners to
process the plural-s correctly for meaning

Guidelines
 Keep
Meaning in Focus
 Present One Item at a Time
 Use Oral and Written Input
 Move from Individual Sentences to Connected
Discourse
 Have Learners Do Something with the Input
 Keep Learners’ Processing Strategies in Mind
Teaching past tense

Activity 1

Instruction: Listen to the following sentences and decide whether they
describe an action that was done before or is usually done.
Teaching participial adjectives

Instruction: Read the following sentences
and decide whether you agree with the
statement.
textual enhancement



The aim of this approach is to raise learners’ attention to
linguistic forms by rendering input perceptually more
salient. Textual enhancement aims to achieve this by
highlighting certain aspects of input by means of various
typographic devices, such as bolding, underlining, and
italicizing in written input, or acoustic devices such as
added stress or repetition in oral input. The assumption
is that such visual or phonological modifications of input
make grammatical forms more noticeable and
subsequently learnable.
noticing
three attentional processes: alertness, orientation, and
detection

Types of Input Enhancement


explicitness : the degree of directness in how attention is drawn
to form
Elaboration: the duration or intensity with which enhancement
procedures take place

positive and negative enhancement
 Positive
strategies make a correct form salient
 Negative input enhancement highlights “given
forms as incorrect, thus signaling to the
learner that they have violated the target
norms”

Different Forms of Textual Enhancement
 Textual
Enhancement in Written Text: underlining,
boldfacing, italicizing, capitalizing, color coding or a
combination of these





1 Select a particular grammar point that you think your
students need to attend to.
2 Highlight that feature in the text using one of the textual
enhancement techniques or their combination.
3 Make sure that you do not highlight many different forms as
it may distract learners’ attention from meaning.
4 Use strategies to keep learners’ attention on meaning.
5 Do not provide any additional metalinguistic explanation.

Textual Enhancement in Oral Texts
 added
stress, intonation, repetitions of the
targeted form, even through gestures, body
movement, facial expressions.

Input Flood

Learners are provided with numerous examples of a certain
target form in the input (either oral or written)
discourse-based grammar teaching

grammar is regarded as a complex
process of making context-based choices,
not only of syntax or vocabulary, but also
considering social and psychological
factors determined by the grammatical
links between discourse and meaning
(Halliday, 1978).





Teaching the four language skills through discourse:
1 Reading extended texts rather than sentences and answering
comprehension questions.
2 Listening to extended speech and often requiring the learner to
“shadow” the speaker’s voice, complete a cloze test afterwards,
reconstruct the text (see Swain & Lapkin, 1998) and answer
comprehension questions.
3 Writing at the essay level, producing an introduction, a body and a
conclusion (see for example, Fotos & Hinkel, 2007).
4 Speaking activities such as presenting speeches, either prepared
or impromptu, or making discourse-length responses to questions.
Activity 1. Teachers Exploring Authentic
and Non-authentic Language Use
(simplified)
 Activity 2. Teachers Using Discourse-level
Input and Output

Teaching discourse grammar

Contents






1 Salient features of context (setting, scene, the predicted state of knowledge and
expectations of the reader/hearer).
2 The means whereby a speaker or writer projects himself or herself as a certain kind of
person, “a different kind in different circumstances” (Gee, 1999, p. 13).
3 Function (communicative goals); the “socially situated activity that the utterance helps to
constitute” (Gee, 1999, p. 13).
4 Appropriate instrumentalities (features of register and genre).
5 Development of effective communication strategies appropriate to the mode of
communication (Trappes-Lomax, 2004, p. 155).
activities





1 Activating appropriate knowledge structures (schemata), both formal (genre) and content
(knowledge of the topic) through pre-listening/reading activities.
2 Foregrounding contextually relevant shared knowledge to help in predicting topic
development and guessing speaker/writer intentions.
3 Devising tasks which promote appropriate use of top-down processing (from macro-context
to clause, phrase, and lexical item) and bottom-up practicing.
4 Processing (from lexical item, phrase and clause to macro-context).
5 Focusing on meta-discoursal signaling devices.

Activity 3. Having Students Write Discourse for Authentic Purposes


E.g. journal, email
Activity 4. Using Discourse-based Activity Templates








1 A warm-up session consisting of instructions which the learners must act out,
similar to Total Physical Response.
2 Schemata activation, in which the teacher asks the learners what the most
useful thing would be to give a widowed mother in Africa, then asks the learners
to discuss this in groups.
3 The first reading of the text, where the learners read the text silently using their
dictionaries.
4 Learner response to text by establishing the discourse function of the text and
discussing the idea.
5 Questions from the teacher requiring learner scanning of the text.
6 Reconstructing the text by completing a text-based cloze activity.
7 A language focus section in which the learners are made aware of target
structures in the text, such as articles and verb forms, through cloze activities
and substitution exercises.
8 Learner pair work to write their own text. This and similar activities can be
modified according to the level of the learners.

Activity 6. Discourse-based
Comprehension Activities
 questions

based on extended discourse
Activity 7. Using Corpora to Encourage
Learners to Focus on Grammar

Activity 8. Teachers Conducting Discourse
Analysis of their Own Output
3.4 Interactional feedback
reformulations and elicitation
 input providing and output prompting
strategies




Recasts
Recasts refer to utterances that reformulate the whole or
part of the learner’s erroneous utterance into a correct
form while maintaining the overall focus on meaning
(Nicholas, Lightbown, & Spada, 2001)
Example (1)




STUDENT: And they found out the one woman run away.
TEACHER: OK, the woman was running away. [Recast]
STUDENT: Running away.
(Nassaji, 2009, p. 429)
Clarification Requests
 Example (6)

 STUDENT:
I want practice today, today.
 TEACHER: I’m sorry? [Clarification request]
 (Panova & Lyster, 2002, p. 583)
Repetition
 Example (7)

 STUDENT:
Oh my God, it is too expensive, I
pay only 10 dollars.
 TEACHER: I pay? [Repetition with rising
intonation]
 STUDENT 2: Okay let’s go.

(Y. Sheen, 2004, p. 279)


Metalinguistic Feedback
Example (8)
 STUDENT:
I see him in the office yesterday.
 TEACHER: You need a past tense. [Metalinguistic
clue]

Example (9)
 STUDENT:
He catch the fish.
 TEACHER: Caught is the past tense. [Metalinguistic
feedback with correction]


Direct Elicitation
Example (10)
 STUDENT: And
when the young girl arrive, ah, beside
the old woman.
 TEACHER: When the young girl … ?

Example (11)
 STUDENT:
She easily catched the girl.
 TEACHER: She catched the girl? I’m sorry, say that
again
Direct Correction
 Example (12)

 STUDENT:
He has catch a cold.
 TEACHER: Not catch, caught. [Direct
correction]
 STUDENT: Oh, ok.
Nonverbal Feedback
 Example (13)

 STUDENT:
My mom cooks always good food.
 TEACHER: [Crosses over arms in front of the
body to indicate word order]

Example (14): limited negotiation
 STUDENT:
It’s cheaper than Canadian’s one.
[Erroneous utterance]
 TEACHER: It’s cheaper than Canadian’s one?
 STUDENT: Canadians.
 TEACHER: The Canadian. The s is in the wrong
place. A pack of cigarettes is cheaper than Canadian
ones.
 (Nassaji, 2007c, p. 124)

Example (15): extended negotiation














STUDENT: Teachers in class like our friend … [Erroneous utterance]
TEACHER: So who can make a correction? Who’s got an idea to correct this? Mitny what
would you do to correct this? Any idea?
STUDENT: I don’t know. I don’t know.
TEACHER: Just try. Just try. Just try your best.
STUDENT: Okay, okay. Their.
TEACHER: OK so there is “their”?
STUDENT: Their teachers?
TEACHER: How about I’ll help here. How about “our teachers”?
STUDENT: Our teachers?
TEACHER: Can you start with that?
STUDENT: Our teachers?
TEACHER: Yeah.
STUDENT: Hm. Hm. They are?
TEACHER: OK. So we have “teachers,” so we don’t need “their.” We just need “teachers
are.”
Which Errors Should be Corrected?
Error vs. mistake
 Errors occur because of a lack of
knowledge but mistakes are simply
performance errors.

Suggestions for interactional
feedback






1 Teachers should make sure that the feedback is salient enough to
be noticed.
2 Teachers should select specific types of errors and target them in
each lesson (R. Ellis, 2009).
3 Recasts are potentially ambiguous, as learners may perceive them
as feedback on content rather than on form. Recasts may become
more effective if disambiguated with additional, more explicit, verbal
and phonological prompts (i.e., added stress, repetition, etc.).
4 When providing feedback, it might be advisable to begin with an
elicitation. If the strategy fails to lead to self-correction, recasts can
then be provided.
5 Elicitations lead to self-correction only if learners already have
some knowledge of the targeted form.
6 Learners learn best when they are developmentally ready..



7 Teachers should use more feedback moves
that provide opportunities for uptake and
modified output.
8 Teachers should be aware of the differences in
classroom contexts and adjust the feedback
strategies they use to suit the situations in which
they teach.
9 Teachers should be aware of individual learner
differences and use their feedback strategies
accordingly.
grammar-focused tasks

structure-based focused tasks
 aiming
at making grammar forms obvious to
the learner through consciousness-raising
activities
 (1) structure-based production tasks;
 (2) comprehension (interpretation) tasks;
 (3) consciousness-raising tasks
Implicit vs. explicit
 two factors that are important to consider
when selecting target structures for
structured grammar-focused tasks:

 problematicity
 learnability
Activity 1. Different Forms of the Past
Tense
 In this task, pairs or groups of learners are
asked to work together to reconstruct a
past event that they have participated in
and then present to the rest of the class.

collaborative output tasks

dictogloss




Reconstruction Cloze Tasks
Text-editing Tasks
Collaborative jigsaw


Dictogloss is a kind of output task that encourages students to
work together and produce language forms collaboratively by
reconstructing a text presented to them orally.
Jigsaw tasks are a kind of two-way information gap task in which
students hold different portions of the information related to a
task. Students should then share and exchange the different
pieces of information to complete the task.
text reconstruction tasks

drawing activity targeting locative
prepositions.
 Without
showing their partners, the learners
draw a picture of different shapes inside a
picture frame. When they are done, they give
their partners instruction on how to draw the
same picture. Then they compare their
pictures.

Learning comparative forms of English
adjectives and adverbs.
 Groups
of three or four EFL learners were
requested to present the features of cities
they knew well to the other members of their
group. The learners were then requested to
combine their information by writing a number
of English sentences comparing two cities.
Grammar activities and games









Find someone activities
Bingo activities
Jigsaw reading activities
Asking and answering questions activities
Information gap activities
Find the differences activities
Questionnaires and surveys
Giving and receiving instructions activities
Board and cards activities

二级对语法的要求：

1.知道名词有单复数形式。

2.知道主要人称代词的区别；

3.知道动词在不同的情况下会有形式上的变化；

4.了解表示时间、地点和位置的介词。

5.了解英语简单句的基本形式和表意功能。
基数词和序数词；
 名词所有格；
 形容词比较级；
 定冠词the与不定冠词a, an的用法；
 基本句式如特殊疑问句，陈述句，一般疑
问句，祈使句


特殊句式如There be句型，be going to等
教学案例A（显性语法教学）
1、出示句子，让学生进行比较，找出句型结构。
I’m going to do some shopping.
I’m going to have a picnic.
I’m going to play football.
be going to
一般将来时
2、板书句型，让学生模仿例句说话。
此方法忽视了语言的真实运用。
教学案例B（隐性语法教学）
Step1：歌谣热身
Step2：在情境中感知
Step3：在情境中操练
Step4：在情境中运用
Step5：课文学习
Step6：在拓展中运用归纳
Step1 歌谣热身
I am going to buy a book.
I am going to take a look.
I am going to bake a cake.
I am going to walk near a lake.
We are going to take a trip.
We are going to take a sip.
I am going outside to play.
I am going to have a good day!
Step2
在情境中感知
教师通过调闹钟、翻日历等方法呈现学习be
going to do 结构的语言情境，引导学生感知。
T：I am giving a class now. (9:52)
I am going to have lunch at 12:00.
T：I often play football on Saturdays.
I am going to play ping-pong tomorrow.
(Tomorrow is Saturday.)
Step3 在情境中操练
做“旅游转盘”游戏：教师向学生呈现标有各
地名胜的大转盘，引导学生操练目标语。
T: What are you going to do?
S1: I am going to visit the Great Wall.
Ss: What are you going to do?
S2: I am going to visit Yunnan.
…
Step4
在情境中运用
调查同学周末计划
S1: What are you going to do on the weekend?
S2: I am going to…
Name
He/She is going to…
Step5
课文学习
在调查汇报中导入：
T: xxx is going to …on the weekend.
What is John going to do on the weekend?
Now listen and tell us.
通过课文学习进一步理解和巩固be
going to表示将来的用法及其形式。
Step6
在情境中运用归纳
1、教师创设“北京之旅”的情境，让学生在
“旅游项目图”上选择自己喜欢的项目，并用结
构be going to do 填空，然后互相了解彼此打算
在北京做什么。
Step6
在情境中运用归纳
2、学生运用所学语言了解同学的打算，然后
写下自己和同学打算做的项目, 在情境中运用
语言和归纳语言规则。
An example: teaching could
How to test grammar

Discrete-item tests
 Gap
filling
Yesterday we__ to the cinema and __ a film
with Richard Gere in it.
 Multiple choice
Yesterday we __ (go/ went/ have gone) to the
cinema and __ (see/ saw/ have seen) a film
with Richard Gere in it.
Testing grammar in oral
performance test
Role plays
 Simulation
 Discussion
 Casual chat

Test description of place and
present perfect
Resources for grammar teaching
A comprehensive grammar of modern
English
 英语惯用法大词典
 牛津同义词词典
 牛津搭配词典

Conclusion
Thank
you very much!