Teaching Grammar

As an English learner, I have a lot of experiences of learning grammar, most of which are negative. I spent many years learning English in China. For at least half of the time, if not more, the teachers taught grammars in a dry and deductive way. This method of teaching grammar is also what I naturally inherited and used in my teaching Mandarin. After I learned Communicative Language Learning method, I have changed my teaching approach from deductive to an inductive: instead of giving an abstract grammar rule first, I list a series of sample sentences, and let the students figure out what the grammatical rule is by asking them to write down the structure on board. I have noticed the latter approach is much more engaging than my old method.

The other good thing I have learned about teaching grammar is to teach it in context – not just any context but a meaningful context. So what I do is that I incorporate the grammar into interrogative questions associated with content of the lesson and students’ daily lives for the students to answer in every class. I have found that this approach is also quite engaging.

Grammar is only a tool for language learning, not the goal. The goal of learning a language is to acquire communicational skills. I remember that a few years ago, I went for a Mandarin teacher’s job interview. The first question that the head teacher asked was, “do you have a grammar book?” I said no and it upset her very much. I could not come up with a theory to reject her obsession on getting a grammar book. But I felt by instinct that I would not read it even if I had one. I hate to read dry grammar rules. I guess many students are the same as me. A few years have elapsed, I still do not have a grammar book and I am getting along well with teaching Mandarin. In fact, I have found that the students do not even read the grammar notes in a textbook. Human nature just rejects monotonous and isolated grammar that is disconnected from an authentic and interesting language context, just as we reject anything that is unnatural and stiff.