Hello colleagues, We had a fantastic event with Will Linn this week focused on ways to teach grammar in effective, learner-centered ways. Will has taught ESOL since 2008 and currently serves as the ESOL Specialist & Coordinator of ESOL Certificate Programs at the Literacy Assistance Center in New York City. THANK YOU, WILL!
If anyone would like a copy of Will's slides, you can contact him through email willl@lacnyc.org
Like many of you, I love thinking about language and how it works. (I would say I consider myself kind of a grammar nerd.) At the same time, it is essential that the grammar I teach empowers learners to use the language to achieve their communication goals in English. In other words, the grammar I teach should not be a bunch of discrete rules. but rather it should be contextualized to ensure it is deeply meaningful and relevant to learners. During our live event this week, Will shared his discovery-based approach to grammar which is grounded in learners' experiences.
At the heart of Will's method is posing questions to learners that can generate the grammar point we want to teach. For example, to teach the past tense, we might ask learners, "What did you do on the weekend?" Beginners might share: I play soccer. I watch TV. I clean house. I work. etc. A question like this gives learners the opportunity to share many personal experiences using different verbs. Because these learners still need to learn the correct past tense form, the teacher now has the opportunity to teach the correct grammatical form using the learner's personally meaningful examples. The teacher can scribe the learners' responses on the board using the correct grammatical form. The next step is to draw the learners' attention to the past tense form by asking them what they notice about the verbs. Since each of these verbs is regular, the students will likely notice they all share the "-ed" ending. The teacher can ask additional questions about the sentences to give learners more practice with the past tense, e.g., "Who cleaned the house on the weekend? Who worked? Did Sara play soccer on the weekend?" etc.
By the way, I've always felt that beginners should be taught the past tense early on since they have a strong desire to talk about their previous experiences in their countries of origin.
Here are the resources, including Will's videos on YouTube and the Padlet we worked on collaboratively, that Will shared during the event.
- The Padlet:
- LINCS FREE Self-Paced Online English Language Acquisition Courses
https://courses.lincs.ed.gov/static/about.html#english
- Will's YouTube Teaching Tip Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7ox-8HS2QhXa31PbGr0rWjFrLnlBOjiF&si=XVH46FWAO9EOVyER
- Will's Good presentation on the present perfect
https://www.newamericanhorizons.org/training-videos
- Will's Video on inductive grammar presentations with examples
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnuyLu5ZjJs
Please share your own experiences with teaching grammar here in our community. Questions are always welcome, too!
Cheers, Susan Finn Miller
Moderator, English Language Acquisition Group
Comments
Hi all,
I really like the part in Susan's prompt about not just teaching grammar, but teaching grammar so that learners can achieve their goals. A few years ago, I really got inspired by the question, what are we teaching English for? It's a silly counter-example, but if we were just teaching English, we could start at the front of the dictionary and go word by word from there - it's all English after all. But of course we don't do that because we're teaching English for some other goal, which means that in our ESOL classes, English itself is more the means than the end.
This made me broaden the scope of my teaching to include more things that aren't exactly language-focused, but are important for students' lives. One example from a few years ago, was teaching the learners about the Census. They learned English in these classes, but a main goal was also for them to learn about the census so that their districts could be properly represented.
This question has also focused my teaching to include more vocabulary/grammar that is directly relevant to students' goals, and to have less focus on parts of English that may be linguistically interesting, but are less likely to come up in day to day life.
Reframing my teaching goal to be about more than just language but also about students having a better life in some way was a really nice and energizing shift, and it's certainly informed my approach to grammar.