Teaching English Grammar to Speakers of Other Languages

Eli Hinkel, Eli Hinkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317442455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Lingua inglese

This practical and research-based introduction to current and effective English grammar instruction gives pre-service and in-service teachers and teacher educators a strong foundation for teaching second language grammar and helps them develop their professional knowledge and skills. Written in a highly readable style for an international audience, it provides a thorough and rounded overview of the principles, strategies, techniques, and applications currently dominant in teaching L2 grammar in a range of instructional settings around the world. Chapter authors are world-class authorities in grammar and grammar teaching and learning. All chapters are based on theoretical frameworks and/or research foundations with a strong emphasis on practical applications and implications for classroom teaching, and highlight teaching methods, key concepts, and terminology associated with grammar instruction.

Illuminating the options and choices in grammar teaching from a contemporary perspective, Teaching English Grammar to Speakers of Other Languages is ideal as key text for students in undergraduate and graduate MA-TESOL programs and as a resource for practicing ESL/EFL teachers, teacher educators, and teaching faculty.

PART I Principles and Foundations of Grammar Teaching

DOI: 10.4324/9781315695273-1

1 The Importance of the Discourse Level in Understanding and Teaching English Grammar¹

Marianne Celce-Murcia

DOI: 10.4324/9781315695273-2

Introduction

In the past, English grammar instruction focused primarily on the sentence level. Sentence-based drills were used to teach tenses, articles, negation, question formation, passive voice, and many other construction types. The problem with this narrow approach was that learning sentence-level grammar did not result in learners being able to use the English language for communication. There are in fact only a few local rules of English grammar that can be usefully taught and practiced as strictly context-free, sentence-level phenomena:

Reflexive pronoun objects: Mary accidentally cut herself.

Gerund verbals after prepositions: They were prevented from leaving the party. Determiner-noun agreement: This book/These books might interest you.

All other rules of grammar require some context in order for learners to understand when and why they are used. ²

By artificially creating contexts through the use of adverbials, many verb tenses can be elicited and practiced at the sentence level:

Present tense: She rides her bicycle for 30 minutes every day.

Past tense: I sent my brother an email yesterday.

Present progressive tense-aspect: We are practicing English now.

Such sentence-level examples and exercises can raise learners’ awareness of grammatical resources that exist in English; however, they do not lead learners to being able to communicate their ideas effectively using these forms in speech and writing. This is because communication occurs at the discourse level, not at the sentence level. A sentence requires a subject and a verb. Discourse requires a communicative context and can consist of a word (e.g., Stop!), a phrase (e.g., No smoking), or any extended example of speech or writing that constitutes comprehensible communication (e.g., a conversation, an email message, a lecture, a news article, a research report, a short story or novel, etc.).

In communicative language teaching (CLT), the crucial linguistic level is discourse. CLT requires bottom-up resources (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, orthography/phonology) for the realization of discourse, but it also requires top-down context and information of various types (e.g., audience, purpose, content schemata, formal schemata, ³ politeness conventions, pragmatics, etc.) to ensure appropriate production and comprehension.

Getting Started

With beginning-level language learners, teachers often feel that it is not possible to use discourse-level strategies from the outset. Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) make several suggestions indicating that this is not only possible but highly desirable. Early on, learners can be taught to express information about themselves at the discourse level based on models provided by the teacher. In one such exercise the teacher draws a basic, simple family tree on the board (Figure 1.1) and asks the students to do the same at their desks.

FIGURE 1.1 Illustration of a Family Tree

This requires the teaching and learning of some basic kinship vocabulary (family, mother, father, sister(s), brother(s)), three forms of the verb be (am, is, are), the conjunction and, the demonstrative pronoun this, and the possessive determiner my. Much of this vocabulary and grammar can be learned in context as a result of doing the activity. The teacher can provide a model of a simple discourse based on the family tree:

This is my family. I am ________________. My mother is ______________, and my father is ______________. My sister is __________, and my brother is__________.

This discourse should be practiced orally by each student in front of the class after the teacher models contractions in speech (I’m, mother’s, father’s, sister’s, brother’s) but uses full forms in the written model. One other sentence can be taught as an eliciting device so that students can practice telling the class about their families (Tell me/us about your family). This should allow the teacher to point out differences between singular and plural forms for siblings, depending on any given student’s family tree: my sister is/my sisters are; my brother is/my brothers are. Once the model is well established, students can practice sharing information about their families in small groups while the teacher circulates to assist as needed. Finally, by writing up what they have first drawn and then reported orally, they carry out a useful reinforcement activity.

The follow-up activity provides practice with discussing the families just introduced in the third person. The students can use several classmates’ family trees and practice describing them by referring to a model and making the appropriate choices. The elicitation utterance could be Tell us about _________’s family. The students will also learn the possessive ’s inflection and his and her as possessive determiners.

This is ______________’s family. His/her mother is __________, and his/her father is ______________. His/her sister(s) is/are ___________________, and his/her brother(s) is/are _________________________.

As written reinforcement, each student selects the family tree of a classmate and writes up the short discourse-based description.

Another discourse-based activity for beginners has each member of the class prepare a list of three or four things that s/he does every day with the help of the teacher as needed:

ANITA	HYUN
I go to school.	I go to school.
I ride my bicycle.	I play baseball/soccer.
I do the dishes.	I walk my dog.

This information can then be used to practice simple present tense narratives and to recycle and expand knowledge of personal pronouns. They should first each describe their personal everyday activities:

I am Anita. Every day I go to school, (I) ride my bicycle, and (I) do the dishes.

The teacher points out that the I does not have to be repeated in the second and third activities. Then the same information can be used to practice third person simple present tense forms to describe the everyday activities of several different students, both male and female:

Every day Hyun goes to school, he plays baseball and (he) walks his dog.

These constructions can then be used again at the discourse level to compare what Anita and Hyun do every day in an expansion of the preceding activity:

Every day Anita and Hyun go to school. Anita rides her bicycle and does the dishes. Hyun plays baseball and walks his dog.

The same information can be used to learn and practice the past tense (and other tenses) at the discourse level with the teacher’s help with irregular verb forms, etc.:

Question: What did you do yesterday?

Anita: Yesterday I went to school, rode my bicycle, and did the dishes.

Once all students have practiced their personal narratives in the past tense, the class can move on to practicing the third person forms in this tense:

Question: What did Hyun do yesterday?

Response: Yesterday Hyun (he) went to school, played baseball, and walked his dog.

Again, it is a good idea to have students write out some of these informal narratives to reinforce the grammar and vocabulary. Such short, simple, and meaningful discourse segments, while not very long, are more authentic and complex than typical sentence-level drills taught to beginners in most ESL/EFL textbooks.

A bit later in the course, beginners can be given a short discourse frame to contrast past and current activities or states:

I used to ______________, but I don’t anymore. Now I ________________.

Anita: I used to (usta) go to school in Mexico, but I don’t anymore. Now I go to school in California.

They can also be given a short discourse frame to talk about their goals and plans for the future:

I’m going to (gonna) _________________, so I can _________________.

Hyun: I’m gonna learn English, so I can study engineering.

Once again, after the class has practiced making first person descriptions, they can be asked to paraphrase these multi-clause statements with third person forms, followed by written reinforcement as part of the learning process. Starting to learn and produce language in discourse episodes longer than one-clause sentences from the outset, with content that focuses on their own lives, brings beginners closer to learning language as a system for communication rather than as an abstract system of decontextualized rules to be memorized. Grammar and vocabulary are acquired in the process of communicating at the discourse lev...