Renuka Dhakal, KU
renudhakal@gmail.com
Celce- Murcia and Hilles (1988) define language as “a type of
rule-governed behavior and it is a subset of those rules which govern
the configuration that the morphology and syntax of a language assume”.
It is obvious that grammar is the clusters of rules which govern and
which shape the language. It is well known to all that grammar is one
element that gives a shape to language. In this article, I am reflecting
on the strategies that I used while learning grammar in school and
current pedagogical practice I adopt as an EFL teacher. It expresses my
understanding of grammar teaching and learning from my school days to
the present professional life as a teacher and a university student.
Teaching grammar communicatively in the EFL setting like ours is an
interesting topic. I would like to reflect on it as it is associated
with my academic and professional endeavor. Learning grammar struck me
from my school days. In school I couldn’t perform well in grammar in
Nepali and English both. I, therefore, would hesitate to speak and write
in English. Even after so many years when I as a teacher look at my
students’ performance there has been little improvement in this area.
In school grammar teaching was based on rote learning: drilling and
memorization. My teacher taught us grammar through the use of the
deductive method. He would write a set of rules on the blackboard and we
were expected to memorize all patterns at all cost. Let’s imagine how
horrible it might have been! Despite being able to produce almost all
grammatical rules, I was unable to produce sentences. When I compare the
way we were taught with the way we are trained to teach these days, I
feel that this practice of imitation, repetition and memorization has
become outdated, especially in this globalized context where learning
English for communication has got the top priority .
It is still fresh in my memory how puzzled and confused I was when I
could not produce meaningful sentences out of the practiced structures.
My teacher once asked all the students to make sentences using the
present perfect tense. I came up with a sentence like, “I have writing a
letter”. It was one of the common mistakes other friends also made.
Later I realized that students pick up the progressive form more quickly
than the perfect form. The errors like this can also be attributed to
the lack of adequate exposure, and practice and production
opportunities.
The question can be raised, “Why students often have the habit of
using the progressive form where the perfect is required?” As my
understanding says, the progressive form is easier to make since it
implies
+-ing and more flexible than the perfect form. The
perfect tense involves more complex grammatical operation. I think our
teaching should be informed by the most commonly committed errors like
this. Only correcting them on the surface level without reaching the
root cause fails to yield any fruitful result.
I am teaching English to lower secondary students. I have been
facing the same problems on the part of my students too. Recently I
spent 10 days to teach the different forms of tense and its use in
sentences. I found that my students were making the errors similar to
those I would make in school. They could produce correct structures but
when it came to their use in speaking and writing, their sentences were
replete with errors. The insights that I have got from this is that the
problem lies in our traditional concept of teaching grammar, that is,
teaching grammar means to have students learn the rules rather than use
them in their speech and writing. If we use the same methods, problems
are never solved. Teachers and students both should realize the fact
that grammar is more than a set of formal rules. It is inseparable from
meaning, function and context.
No doubt, there are different ways of teaching and learning grammar.
Among them the communicative way can be the best one. Therefore, these
days my main concern is how the communicative method can be best
employed to teach and learn grammar. I find the similar concern in
Master and Liu (2003) who conclude that the need to teach grammar has
not really been a question for most teacher educators, how to teach
grammar has been a great challenge due to the complexities of the
subject matter and the difficulties in approaching it. As an English
language teacher, I also feel that grammar teaching is a daunting task
because I was taught grammar through traditional way but I have been
studying that it should be taught through the approaches such as
Communicative Approach and Task Based Approach.
In the EFL setting like ours, grammar should be taught for and
through communication. As a result, learners can develop all components
of communicative competence in a balanced way. Grammar teaching should
value the role of games, songs, stories and dialogs, realia,
problem-solving activities, and communicative techniques such as
role-play, simulation, and strip stories and so on. While doing so, such
resources and techniques provide learners with opportunities to
integrate grammar with vocabulary and all language skills.
