Of the four language skills, the one that is always neglected in grammar instruction is definitely Listening. In the typical grammar lesson, the target grammar structure is hardly ever practised through the aural medium.
This may not only negatively impact acquisition of that structure, but also listening proficiency development at large. The answer refers to the so-called parsing phase of listening comprehension. The parsing phase is the stage in the comprehension of aural input in which the listener recognizes a grammar pattern in a string of words and fits the latter to the linguistic context surrounding it.
In this post I intend to show how grammar can be modelled and practised aurally through highly impactful L. Listening As Modelling activities requiring relatively little preparation which I use regularly in my lessons. Sentence puzzles like the one in Figure 1 below are a very effective way to teach grammar and syntax through listening.
The students are provided a set of jumbled-up sentences to unscramble whilst the teacher utters them in the correct order. After completing the transcribing task, the students are charged with inductively working out the rule.
Whilst writing the words under each heading in the table the students build an awareness of how word order works, at the same time learning what word class each item belongs in, and all this through the aural medium, thereby combining three skills listening, reading and writing together.
When the meaning of each word is provided in brackets, new vocabulary is also learnt. Sentence builders take a bit more time to make, but they can be exploited in so many ways that their surrender value is more than worth the effort. The teacher makes and utters sentences using the various chunks of language in the table to demonstrate how the target structure works. Whilst the teacher models the sentences the students write down their meaning on mini whiteboards. As a follow-up, the students are tasked with working out the rule inductively.
As they listen, the students are tasked with categorizing the structure using a grid or table. In the first example provided in Figure 3, below, the task requires the students to identify four of the tenses employed in the five sentences by the teacher the fifth tense is a distractor.
Students enjoy sorting tasks; I do them in every single lesson of mine, often exploiting songs. In listening hunts the teacher reads a short narrative and the students are asked to spot and write down as many instances as possible of the target structure s contained in the text.
I usually tell the students in advance the number of occurrences of the target items in order to enhance their focus. This technique is particularly effective when the word order in which the target structure is deployed in the L2 is markedly different from the L1.
As the example in Figure 5 below shows, erroneous versions of target structure use are provided resulting from word-for-word translation from L1 to L2. The teacher will dictate the correct version of each sentence which will be written right under the flawed version.
The students are then charged with figuring out the differences between L1 and L2 usage and inductively work out the rule. This activity serves two purposes.
Firstly, to practise decoding skills and pronunciation; secondly, aural processing of the target structure. The students are provided with cards containing simple sentences featuring the target structure s. Each card contains four pieces of information about a person; each piece information on the cards has a match in four of the other cards.
The best way to teach grammar is through exemplary literature. This is where grammar is real. This is where we understand the ways in which we can play with language to achieve our intentions. In great writing we can notice how the author uses their language knowledge and how they organise their words and sentences to make us notice, feel, see or imagine something. Many great writers probably have little explicit knowledge of how the language works, but intuitively they play with grammar all the time.
They can dip into a broad repertoire of implicit language knowledge, and make deliberate choices in their writing. For example, they know when they start their sentence with words about where adverbial phrases rather than who, that their reader will be pulled into the setting rather than focused immediately on the character. They know that describing a character through their actions adverbials can sometimes be more evocative than describing their appearance adjectivals.
So whilst great writers can get by with an intuitive understanding of English grammar, teachers need an explicit knowledge. They need to able to understand how effective writing works, so they can notice language and teach it to their students. What is required is carefully considered pre-service and in-service professional learning for teachers where language knowledge is built inside great teaching - rather than some disconnected sideshow.
For most school children, however, change came slowly. Forty years later, in the early sixties, they had changed little. These books and others like them provided pupils with an education in traditional school grammar which embraced all the practices and assumptions discussed above. While scholarly, and no doubt comprehensible to the ablest pupils, they created a detestation and fear of English for many generations of adults.
This doctrine clearly ran counter to the traditional approaches to grammar outlined above, although they did survive within O-level examinations in England and Wales. Two other approaches to language teaching which developed in the s became more prominent during the s and s. The first was associated with the work of Britton, Barnes, Dixon and Rosen. Its proponents saw literature and language study as equally important in this process but they took a stance against the explicit and systematic use of terminology from linguistics.
They concentrated instead on developing their own eclectic approaches to how meanings are made in talk and writing. Such discussion, though it necessarily refers to particular features in texts, need not demand that pupils first master an extensive generalised system for describing those features.
A more explicit approach had its genesis in the Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching , directed by M. Halliday at University College London, from to This drew directly upon the insights of linguistics and considered their implications for mother-tongue teaching.
The Language in Use materials which emerged involve pupils in investigations into a wide range of aspects of language as it is used in society: the relations between spoken and written language; language in social situations; patterning in language, and so on. Thus Language in Use instituted the broad approach which has become the Knowledge about Language aspect of both the Scottish Guidelines and the National Curriculum in England.
Throughout the s and s there was considerable discussion of the methodology of teaching grammar, as opposed to the actual form of grammar taught. This put forward a view of the role of grammar in language teaching which was essentially to be advocated by all the Language reports of the next twenty years Bullock, Kingman, and Cox , at least up until the revisions of English in the National Curriculum by the Department of Education and Science from onwards.
The vital point is that grammatical terminology should be produced only in response to need. The grammar to be taught should be limited only to what pupil and teacher require. Grammatical concepts and terminology may be drawn upon by teachers as they discuss with pupils what meaning is being created in written texts, and how it is being created, but this is not the same as teaching grammar on the assumption that the pupil has to be taught the forms in order to be able to use them.
In fact, they potentially know most of the grammar already. What they have to be taught is how to utilise this knowledge appropriately. In such teaching it may be beneficial for teachers to draw upon grammatical terminology, if they consider it appropriate. The Bullock Committee, perhaps surprisingly, took a broadly similar stance to the Scottish Central Committee on English on explicit rules and facts about language, saying that these have direct practical value to pupils when they solve particular problems in the tasks they are engaged on, or when pupils are able to reconstruct for themselves the analysis that led to the rule:.
What we are suggesting then, is that children should learn about language by experiencing it and experimenting with its use. There will be occasions when the whole class might receive specific instruction in some aspect of language.
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