Teaching Grammar and Writing - Week 4 - Principles of Grammar Instruction

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 4 of the course Teaching Grammar and Writing for the Master's in English Teaching at ULACIT in term IC 2023. In this class we will discuss principles for effective grammar instruction, analyze your structured input activity design, and consider the value of communicative tasks an activity type in grammar instruction.

Today's Goals:

• Articulate principles that underlie effective grammar instruction.
• Demonstrate the features of your original structured output activity.
• Analyze several communicative task types for grammar instruction to identify their key features. 

Guiding Questions:

• What principles can I use to guide my choices in grammar instruction?
• How can students develop grammar awareness through input focused practice? 
• How can students' output contribute to the development of their grammar knowledge?

Task 1: Activity Type Demo - Structured Input Activity

In this course you will be asked to create sample grammar activities in order to compile a portfolio of grammar activitiy types that describes their basic features, strengths, and challenges. 

• Characteristics: What are the features of a structured input activity?
• Example: What activity did you create?
• Strengths: In what ways is structured input potentially beneficial?
• Challenges: What potential limitations or challegnes are associated with structured input?

• Additional Considerations: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Reading Response - 12 Principles for Grammar Instruction

Let's take a moment to discuss these questions related to your assigned reading for this week.

• Your Principles: In general terms, what principles (guiding beliefs) inform your approach to grammar teaching? You don't have to mention specific concepts from the reading. Simply make a few statements like, "I think effective grammar teaching involves... because ..." or "When I teach grammar I usually try to... because ..."

• Important Contrast: The chapter begins by describing the difference between to related concepts. What do they refer to? How are they taught/acquired? Which one gets the most attention in traditional grammar instructio?

• Grammar Knowledge
• Grammar Ability

• Teach what Students Need: Principle 1 says that teachers should teach the grammar that students actually need and they can do this by working backwards to analyze the kinds of texts or tasks students need to be able to perform and then identifying the language they need to perform these tasks. What did you write in your study guide in this section? Do you consider this to be a better approach to course design than starting with grammar structures and trying to decide which texts or tasks can be used with them?  

• Text/Task Type
• Purpose
• Structure
• Major Language Features

• Teach Text Awareness: Principle 2 says that teachers need to move beyond analysis of single sentences in grammar instruction and also show students how grammar is used in discourse (extended texts). What are some of the benefits of discourse-level analyis in grammar instruction? Why do you think that sentence-level analysis continues to be the dominant focus of grammar instruction in classrooms, textbooks, and practice exercises?

• Variety is Key: Principle 5 argues for the importance of teaching grammar in a variety of ways. What is your understanding of the differences between these two approaches to grammar teaching? Which one do you use more often in your teaching?

• Deductive Approach
• Inductive Approach

• Other Thoughts: Take a look at the list of 12 principles you read in the article. Choose three of them and share something that stood out to you about this principle. It can be something you thought was interesting, a new idea you hadn't thought about before, something you disagreed with or felt confused about. 

• Principle 1: Identify the Grammatical Resources the Learners Need
• Principle 2: Teach Awareness of the Nature of Texts
• Principle 3: Develop Awareness of Differences Between Spoken and Written English
• Principle 4: Use Corpora to Explore Texts
• Principle 5: Use a Variety of Teaching Approaches
• Principle 6: Provide Opportunities for Guided Noticing
• Principle 7: Provide Opportunities for Meaningful Communicative Practice
• Principle 8: Provide Opportunities for Students to Produce Stretched Output
• Principle 9: Make Links between Grammar and Vocabulary
• Principle 10: Use Student Errors to Inform Instruction
• Principle 11: Integrate Grammar with the Four Skills
• Principle 12: Use the Resources of the Internet and Technology

Task 3: Task Based Options in Grammar Instruction

Last week we considered input based options for grammar practice activities based on VanPatton's Input Processing model. This week we will look at output focused activities using tasks for grammar instruction.

• Exploring Communicative Task Gap Types: CLICK HERE
• Sample Structured Grammar Focused Tasks: CLICK HERE
• Sample Collaborative Output Tasks for Grammar: CLICK HERE

References:

Nassaji, H. & Fotos, S. (2011). Teaching Grammar in Second Language Classrooms. Routledge.

Richards, J., & Reppen, R. (2016). 12 Principles of Grammar Instruction. In E. Hinkel (Ed.) Teaching English Grammar to Speakers of Other Languages. Routledge.