EFL / ESL Teaching Tip: Teaching Grammar

Noga, Academic Director of Rennert, tells you how to expose your students to grammar!

Hi everyone, my name is Noga Laor and I’m the Academic Director here at Rennert in New York City and what I’d like to talk to you about today is a set of steps that you can use when you're planning on teaching a grammar point or a grammar structure to your students and the different steps that you can take in order to make sure that your lesson is structured accordingly and that your students are being exposed to the grammar properly and are getting enough practice using it. So, there are really four steps that we follow, and the first step is exposure. You have to expose the students to the grammar structure. This could be in written form, right, you can give the students some sort of a story or a dialogue that they can look at it and the grammar is there. It could be in a spoken form. You could tell the students a story. It could be in listening so the students have to listen to a dialogue and basically listen to that grammar structure. So the students are exposed to the grammar structure. Easy enough right? Well after the students are exposed to the grammar structure, you have to give them some exercises that allow them to notice and select the grammar pattern the pattern of the grammar structure. So, for example you give them some sort of an exercise. It could be a controlled exercise where the students have to maybe answer some questions look at the structure and the questions basically lead the students to notice the pattern for the structure. So, the students are really doing this through guided learning. You’re guiding them to do this. After you’ve given them those exercises, the students have been exposed to the grammar, then you've given them some exercises to notice and select the grammar pattern, then you allow them to execute the structure on their own. So these are basically practice activities. So you give the students a lot of activities that will allow them to practice using the grammar structure. Now, you have to really really think about the exposure step as well. How did you expose the students to the grammar structure? Was it through an essay? I’m sorry, was it through written form, let’s say a story? Was it a listening? Was it a speaking exercise because the practice stage or this execution stage for the students should really mirror the exposure stage. So, if you’ve exposed the students to the grammar through a written text, have them practice through a written text and then practice with other forms as well. If you’ve exposed the students to the grammar through a dialogue, have them practice by writing their own dialogue. There really should be a mirror between the execution stage and the exposure stage, but you can incorporate other skills in there as well. Just make sure that there’s some sort of a mirroring. For example, don't expose the students to the grammar structure through a written text and then not have them practice at all through a written text. You know, you wanna have some sort of a mirroring and after the execution stage, after the practice stage, then comes homework and assessment. So you give the students some homework which will allow them to practice the grammar at home on their own. And then finally, some sort of an assessment, right, some sort of a quiz which can be done outside of class or the next day in class that allows you to evaluate how the students how well the students have understood the grammar structure and how well they can use it. Now, remember that we said that the execution stage, the practice stage should in some way mirror the exposure stage, well, in this case the assessment stage when you're assessing your students- basically giving your students a quiz on what they’ve learned, the assessment should absolutely mirror the exposure stage. So if you have exposed the students to the grammar through spoken form, through a dialogue, then the assessment stage should be some sort of spoken assessment. Maybe a presentation or a dialogue. If you’ve exposed the students to the grammar structure through a written text, then the assessment has to be a written text as well. You know, the students have to write some sort of a paragraph, something like that. So make sure that you always have this balance, this sort of a mirroring between the exposure stage and the assessment stage. So, some easy steps to follow when you are presenting a grammar structure or planning your lesson to present a grammar structure to your students, make sure that you follow these four steps. You have exposure, notice and select execution, and then homework and assessment.