Teaching Grammar and Writing - Week 6 - Functional Approaches to Teaching Grammar

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 6 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 explore functional approaches to the teaching of grammar. In this view, grammar is a communicative resource that is used to perform specific social functions. We'll also look at your discourse frames activity design and consider the Teaching-Learning Cycle as as a technique for discourse level grammar and writing instruction.

Today's Goals:

• Demonstrate the features of your original discourse frames activity.
• Discuss the principle concerns of a functional approach to grammar instruction.
• Examine the concept of genre and an instructional strategy to teach it.

Guiding Questions:

• How can I provide effective scaffolding to help students express their ideas?
• How does a functional approach to grammar instruction help students use grammar as a communicative resource?
• How can the Teaching-Learning Cycle help students develop genre competence?

Task 1: Activity Type Demo - Discourse Frames 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 discourse frames activity?
• Example: What activity did you create?
• Strengths: In what ways are discourse frames potentially beneficial in grammar instruction?
• Challenges: What potential limitations or challenges are associated with discourse frames?

• Additional Considerations: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Reading Response - Functional Approaches to Teaching Grammar

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

• A Fundamental Divide: One of the controversies in language teaching regarding the role of grammar is whether or not to teach it at all. In your opinion, what are some potential arguments in favor of and against the explicit teaching of grammar?

• Quote: "The assumption is that it is our job to create the natural conditions of acquisition present in the external environment ... [I]nstead what we want to do as a language teacher is ... to improve upon natural acquisition, not emulate it ... [and to] accelerate natural learning."

• Two Approaches: Having taken the position that grammar instruction does have a role in language teaching, there are two major approaches common in language classrooms today. What does each mean and which is most similar to your approach to teaching?

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

• Competence: Changes in language teaching methodology, in particular in its treatment to grammar instruction, changed radically in the late 70's and early 80's as a result of research in applied linguistics that led to the proposal of the concept of Communicative Competence. What do the subcompetencies involve? How does defining communicative ability in this way broaden the goals of language instruction?

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• Functional Grammar: The author ends the chapter with the following quote. How does this quote help provide perspective regarding the overall purpose of grammar for users of a language and inform the approach to grammar instruction that teachers should follow? 

• "Adupting a functional approach to teaching grammar enables teachers to use a whole text perspective and to view language as a communicative resource whose goal is to create meaning. A functional perspective sees language as a set of interelated systems through which useres of the language draw on different types of grammatical resources to express ideas about a topic, to negotiate interpersonal aspects of language use and to produce streteches of language (text) that are cohesive and coherent within the context (Burns, 2016, p. 103)."

Task 3: The Teaching Learning Cycle

Last week we considered structured output activities to help students produce grammar at the discourse level. This week we will look at and an instructional sequence that can be used to help raise students' awareness of the genre features of written and spoken texts.

• 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 on your group worksheet below and follow the instructions in the document.

• Group Worksheet: 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.

Celce-Murcia, M. (2016). The Importance of the Discourse Level in Understanding and Teaching English Grammar. In E. Hinkel (Ed.) Teaching English Grammar to Speakers of Other Languages. Routledge.