how we teach grammar

taken from "SpeakYourMind: an Introduction and Practical Teaching Guide."

"You can’t communicate successfully without grammar but you certainly can without knowing about it. Everyone probably knows instinctively (but possibly doesn’t believe) that mistakes in grammar are much less serious than mistakes in words. Which mistake is ‘worse’: ‘Your husband look great!’, or, ‘Your husband looks gross!’?
Nonetheless, grammar is an integral part of communicative competence, and an inadequate grasp will often leave learners stranded in their attempts to communicate. With communicative competence as the overall aim of the course, teaching grammar has a fundamental role in SyM. Learning major grammatical structures is set as a prime general objective of the course and more specific grammatical accuracy is a constant aim and as such, the presentation of ‘correct’ target language and correction of mistakes are among the teacher’s priorities in the classroom.
Learners approach learning a language with a range of preconceptions, worries and beliefs about grammar. Some may hate its very mention and switch off the moment they hear something like ‘preposition’, ‘article’ or ‘past tense’. Others are convinced that a clear and complete knowledge of a set of abstract rules, together with the specialised terminology, are indispensable. Many people are in awe of ‘grammar’ even if they know or remember very little about it. It’s also true that many learners arrive in the classroom with their heads full of wrong or half-remembered ‘rules’ that often cause a real obstacle to learning."

"Just as words are always presented in context, new grammar is presented in easy-to-grasp contexts and is usually contrasted with existing related structures or notions in order to allow learners further opportunities to recognise and understand when and how to use it.
Grammar, like vocabulary, is not mastered as it is met, but is incorporated into the learner’s own English over time. Whereas memorising vocabulary can be, in many cases, a relatively straightforward process, the learning of grammar is far more unpredictable.
Although many learners memorise rules or memorise examples, ‘grammar’ is not memorisable in the same way that words (‘blue’, ‘book’, ‘big’) or lexical chunks (‘by the way’, ‘at the moment’, ‘knife and fork’) can be, even though memorised chunks can be useful indicators or clues as to how underlying grammar works, (‘I don’t know’, ‘I’ll see you later’, ‘How do you say?’)‘.
Grammar is usually less translatable than ‘words’. While it’s possible for learners to find a roughly direct translation in their own language for words like ‘shoe’, ‘write’, ‘tomorrow’ or ‘slowly’, or, less directly, for chunks (which is often more useful) ‘strong wind’, ‘hang on a moment’ or ‘have you got a light?’, learners who look for equivalents in their own grammar may make wrong assumptions."

"SyM adopts a mixed approach when dealing with grammar and structures. While many structures are learnt implicitly through frequent contextualised use, other grammatical features are presented explicitly, in terms of ‘guidelines’ (‘we usually say’), or where applicable, ‘rules’ (‘we have to say this when ……’)."
"Some learners may benefit from grammatical instruction but all learners benefit from regular exposure and use. Whenever grammar is taught explicitly, the syllabus is designed to place new grammar in a rich learning-opportunity environment. Preceding material may anticipate the need or usefulness of new grammar and, since 'words’ more than ‘grammar’ make language interesting to learners, the following sections that present new vocabulary will provide plenty of scope for relevant practice.

thoughts on authenticity

taken from "SpeakYourMind: an introduction and practical teaching guide."

"CLT has appropriated the good words. The word ‘communicative’ itself is a good example; one implication somehow being that any other method either doesn’t aim to, or fails to, teach people how to communicate. ‘Authentic’ is another powerfully persuasive word. It is another ‘good’ word. If you go to a Moroccan restaurant you’d expect ‘authentic’ Moroccan food and if you spend a lot of money on an antique chair you want to be sure it is ‘authentic’. In our own experience of the world, if something is not ‘authentic’ it is ‘fake’ or ‘pretend’, in other words ‘bad’.
The notion of ‘authenticity’ in EFL has gained a considerable and enthusiastic following. The goals of many CLT teachers are to teach ‘authentic’ language, to foster ‘authentic’ relationships and, in lessons and replicate ‘authentic’ situations.
This all sounds reassuringly good: let’s face it who would want to learn or teach ‘unauthentic’ language? But there are objections.
Firstly, the value of authenticity is in proportion to its availability. You can’t find authentic Moroccan cooking on every street corner (outside Morocco) and authentic antique chairs are hard to find and are set to become harder to find as time passes. Language is different: you don’t need to be a trained cook or a long-dead craftsman to produce it. All of us produce and are exposed to authentic language in authentic situations almost constantly. ‘Authentic language’ is not a rare commodity and we are all experienced experts in the authentic communication field.
There was a recent thread on an internet ESL forum by a teacher who was asking for help and advice: he was having trouble finding useful samples of ‘authentic language’ that he could use in classes at beginner and elementary levels. He could find samples of authentic language that contained elementary structures but in term of lexis and/or style were too inaccessible to low-level learners. What could he do? The reasoning behind this search was that the materials and texts used in published course-books are not ‘authentic’: it all is specially written for a specific teaching situation. Being ‘unauthentic’ they lose their value and their use in teaching is therefore illegitimate."

some thoughts on 'reality' in the classroom.

"The extent to which L1 acquisition resembles and differs from L2 acquisition is not wholly understood. One obvious difference is that when we learn a foreign language we already have another language to refer back to and make comparisons with – something that is inevitable and which can be both helpful (when this heightens awareness of language or triggers ‘ring bells’, especially in recalling lexis) and distracting (when this leads to word-for-word translation, especially with grammar).
One other fundamental difference is clear: for most people (the ones that interest us), the fact of learning a second language is a conscious decision and effort, and the process of learning is conscious as well as unconscious. Students do not need to be immersed in a ‘real English world’ for effective learning to occur. Learners know they are in an "artificial" environment once they enter the classroom and they often have expectations about how learning should take place, but although they will normally prefer to learn language that they really need and prefer to learn language in a way that they will really use, they are prepared for and equipped to deal with the strategies (and constraints) they encounter in a real classroom environment."

"No matter how ‘natural’ lessons are in terms of recreating the conditions and processes where acquisition occurs, there is always a filter –and however much what happens in the classroom can resemble ‘real’ communication it remains essentially pseudo-communication. Would that group of people meet through spontaneous and free choice? Would they really to choose to talk about this rather than that? Would they defer to the person who happens to be the teacher? Would they even speak in English?"