Teaching Grammar - Week 7 - Functional Approaches to Grammar Teaching

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 7 of the course Teaching Grammar for the Licenciatura in English Teaching at ULACIT. In this class we will do several activities to explore the topic of functional approaches to grammar teaching. We will also consider the importance of the concept of genre in language teaching and we will participate in a demo lesson following the Teaching-Learning Cycle. Finally, we will begin working on your Grammar Syllabus Proposal project.

Today's Goals:

• Discuss the principle features of a functional approach to grammar teaching.
• Follow the Teaching-Learning Cycle to discover the features of a text genre.
• Review the stages of the Grammar Syllabus Proposal project.

Guiding Questions:

• What are the features of a functional approach to grammar teaching?
• What is the Teaching-Learning Cycle and how can it help your students develop their genre competence?
• What grammatical forms can help my students achieve a communicative aim?

Warm Up: Movie Preferences

Click the link below, find your name in the document, and answer the questions.

• Group Document: CLICK HERE

Task 1: Group Discussion

Take 7 minutes to discuss the following questions with your partners related to reading your did for this week.

• What do you understand to be the difference between structural and functional approaches to grammar?

• The chapter introduced to important concepts with confusingly similar names. What did you understand was the difference between:

• Focus on Form (FonF)
• Focus on Forms (FonFS)

• The chapter introduced the concept of Communicative Competence, which itself is composed of four related ideas. What can you say about the following ideas?

• Grammatical Competence
• Sociolinguistic Competence
• Discourse Competence
• Strategic Competence

• What does the term genre refer to? How is it related to the concept of discourse?

• Look at the graphic below that describes the steps in the Teaching-Learning Cycle for teaching genre. What are the steps of the cycle and how does it work?

The Teaching-Learning Cycle

Click to view full size image.

Task 2: Teaching-Learning Cycle Demo

In this chapter you read about functional approaches to teaching grammar. Functional approaches a focused on purposeful and effective use of the language to accomplish different communicative acts. This means that teachers need to be aware of the interaction between grammar and discourse conventions according to genre and context. Burns suggests the use of the Teaching-Learning Cycle as a method for helping students develop genre awareness and competence.

Activity 1: Discuss these questions with your partner. Then move on to the next activity. 

• Have you ever received a rejection letter or email? 
• If so, what did it say? If not, what do you think a letter like this should contain?
• Who would probably send a rejection letter?
• When would the letter be sent?
• What should the tone of the letter be?
• How does the writer probably want the reader to feel?
• What is its purpose? What details does it need to express and why?

Activity 2: Click your group link below and following the instructions in the document.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Grammar Syllabus Proposal Project

For one of your group projects this term you will create a proposal for a syllabus for a conversational English course. You will generate the language content for this syllabus by following a step by step process to select grammar, vocabulary, and learning tasks related to Can Do descriptors from the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Then you will make decisions about how to sequence your content into units and you will write a brief synthesis paper describing the design choices you made.

• Assignment Guidelines: CLICK HERE

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE

References:

Burns, A. (2016). Functional Approaches to Teaching Grammar in the Second Langauge Classroom. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Teaching English Grammar to Speakers of Other Languages (pp.84-105). Routeledge.