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Experiential Skills for Future Grammar Teachers: Feedback from the ESL Classroom
2. Future Grammar Teachers (FGTs) must be aware of the relationships among the three dimensions of grammar use: form, meaning, and function.
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The ESL grammar teacher first of all needs to know English grammar,
and love it, to be aware that there are other grammars and that most of
your students probably don't love grammar as you do. But why the need
for love? Because it helps in being creative in presenting the lessons,
answering questions, and making good, interesting examples.
Then, you need to know ESL grammar, which is different from the
English grammar you know--as I think Keith Folse pointed out. When you
begin teaching, you begin to see that many of the students' questions are
about things you never thought about, never needed to think about, know
intuitively. So you have to start seeing things from their perspective,
and a lot of this you learn through experience--but that is not to say that
some of it can't be taught.
Finally, you have to know how to teach this grammar, not only how
to explain things, but how to present structures in ways that are
interesting to the students, and that focus efficiently on the important
teaching points, and what kinds of practice activities to choose.
You need to know simple things like the three-step structure of a
lesson: presentation, practice, and communicative activity. It's a
structure that can work under most conditions, and a handy tool.
Then, you need a tool like Larsen-Freeman's pie chart,
form/meaning/use, as a gauge in planning lessons and checking your teaching
style and assessing students' understanding. For planning, the chart helps
the teacher to analyze the structure: What is the form aspect, what is the
meaning, how is this structure used--and which of these aspects will be
challenging for my students? This pre-planning analysis gives a focus to
the lesson--helps the teacher to identify essentials, and also to choose
appropriate practice activities. It helps you balance explanation and
practice, accommodating a variety of styles. (-LD)
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A good example of the problem of students' misunderstanding the relationship of form,
meaning, and use concerns the passive voice in English. I remember that I as a new teacher
went home and studied the book's presentation of the passive, then presented it with very
little problem. The students seemed to understand it and make it correctly. But I had a
number of problems up the road -- my students' problem really was more OVERUSE of
the passive. For example, my Japanese students would use passive to communicate a
general concept that one couldn't help it, as in, "the accident was happened" or "I was
overslept." Being able to explain why we don't do this has been a very helpful skill,
but I didn't pick it up until maybe my third or fourth year of teaching. The fact is that
form, meaning, and use are elements of all structures in all languages, and that the
relationship between them is different in each language.
Novice teachers have two problems; first, they might stress one of the three elements at
the expense of the other, and second, they might simply overlook the way they are intertwined.
(-TL)
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3. FGTs must have a variety of communication skills that are unique to the grammar classroom:
I am a recent graduate of an MA TESOL program...the problem with the pedagogical grammar class that I took was that it didn't provide me with the experience I needed in 'talking about grammar' with others. The course focused on learning a variety of grammatical points which the instructor felt were important for us to know, but I found out very soon that knowing and teaching are completely different monsters. I can memorize all I want, but I need also to be creative in talking about the structure of a language, and this I think we will all admit is not easy. (recent MA grad*)
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In general, the above comment is one that most veteran teachers, when asked about their PG training, relate. They needed to learn how to talk about grammar. This is often referred to by some as "being in the trenches," being put on the spot by a difficult question that demands a complete, careful response that makes sense given the kinds of language situations our students are in every day.
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(New teachers) should know the kinds of problems our students have. They should realize that they may often misunderstand a student's question, simply because they don't share the student's world view. They should ask for clarification and feedback when answering a student's question in class, and then they should ask at the end, was that what you wanted to know?...also, they have to know how to ask questions. I guess this goes for any class. Know how to break questions down into the smallest steps when there is no response. (-LD)
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a. FGTs must be able to explain grammar points using vocabulary and language that students can understand.
I think the missing link is skill in explaining grammar to students and the awareness of grammars of other languages.
If you study formal linguistic theories, etc., can you explain why I use the present tense in this sentence?
Our low level students...are more worried about singular and plural and word order and word forms. From my own experience in a very good MA TESL program, I loved my linguistics classes but drawing trees didn't help me learn how to explain grammar in the IEP at any level. TRY learning how a typical grammar textbook is put together. Or TRY looking at a TOEFL to see what students need.
Can you explain why a particular answer to any question on Part Two (Structure and Written Expression) of the TOEFL is correct, and more importantly, why the other three distractor answers are incorrect???
IF you knew how to explain those types of grammar points, you would be an asset to an IEP grammar class.(...ESL employer*)
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First, teachers need to use terms that students understand, when they are explaining a point. This is basically an extension of the old maxim that good teachers have empathy for the learner. In the field of grammar, empathy includes understanding of the kind of grammar that the student has that will help him/her understand a point. My best example of this one is that I recently saw a grammar class in which the teacher was trying to explain "so...that," as in, 'Native speakers speak so quickly that I can't understand them.' Unfortunately he set up the sentences by using 'Native speakers speak very quickly, so I can't understand them' and a series of similar sentences using 'so' as a conjunction introducing a result clause. He failed to explain carefully that the second sentence in all cases was a result of the first; this was supposed to follow from the setup of the sentences, and students were supposed to understand what he was doing. But what he did was to use 'so' in both the original sentence and in the new sentence, but use it in different ways, and all the while expect students to follow him into the new use of 'so'...to make a long story short, it didn't happen. I could see that they had trouble following him, and I could see why. The secret of explaining grammar is to see it through THEIR eyes, so you can see how they might trip up, see where they could be led astray, and avoid these situations.
A similar example occurred in a listening class in which a new teacher was presenting a reading about Romulus in which Romulus 'was plotting to kill his brother.' A student asked him what 'plot' meant, and he explained that it meant 'plan.' Then, hoping to fill in the gap created by students' silence, he added that a plot of a story, for example, is a plan of a story. Now students were totally confused. In the back of the room one quickly referred to his electronic dictionary. I'm not sure if it helped...the point is that a teacher can't use nouns to describe verbs; students, when trying to figure out something with the tools that they have, are not going to be able to jump this gap. When an explanation creates confusion, a teacher should be prepared to see its source and unravel it. The plot of a story is in no way similar to plotting to kill someone, though the words with their meanings may have similar roots; in any case, students were unable to understand what he was saying, because he was jumping grammatical categories, and they were low-level students.
One new grammar teacher that I was observing was presenting little/a little. He wrote "I have a little money on the board." He said, 'does everyone know what this means?' Then he erased 'a' and said, "Now I have even less money!" Though this was clearly understandable to the student, in the end, it misrepresented the meaning of the two structures. The teacher implied that the difference in the structure is in meaning, in expressing the quantity of the material, in this case, money; however, the difference is in speaker's attitude. While his native intuition was right in a sense, he was clearly poorly equipped to convey the elements of the structure to the students.
More commonly, student questions are misunderstood by the teacher. One of the most common experiences I've had as a teacher is that students routinely get stuck on words or grammatical items that are exceptional, yet not obviously so to the native speaker. For example, the words "hardly" and "lately" are exceptional, in that they look like "hard" and "late," yet they are different, with completely different characteristics and grammatical properties. But a student's question about these can take the form of "What means hardly?" or even a quizzical look...they are stuck on the irregularity of the word, which is only apparent when looking at English from the outside, or from their perspective. I've found that getting to the root of the confusion allows for a simple but complete and fast presentation that clear up the confusion; otherwise, the problem doesn't go away. I find this hard to teach to new teachers, though, except to point out when and how they missed an opportunity to teach a key point. Once again, new teachers generally learn by doing, but it should be possible to give new teachers practice finding the root of a problem, getting it out in the open, and addressing the point of confusion. (-TL)
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b. FGTs should be able to conjure up examples extemporaneously to explain grammar problems.
It seemed that the length of teaching rather than the content of course work made for a more knowledgeable 'grammar' explainer. Those coming right out of a TESL program seemed to give a memorized spiel taken from the one book that they had read rather than being able to conjure up examples extemporaneously.(...ESL employer*)
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c. FGTs should be skillful in contextualizing grammar points; that is, finding contexts in which students would encounter or need grammatical structures.
Putting lessons in interesting contexts is also something to study
in pedagogical grammar, and to get practice doing. Structures are best
presented in contexts. Teachers need to be taught ways to do it. It
doesn't just come naturally, because you understand how clauses are formed,
for example. No. It's another operation, to know how to bring up a short,
interesting conversation at the beginning of class in which you ask the
students questions that will elicit those clauses, or sentences that you
can convert to them on the blackboard as they talk.
These things take thinking and planning, and are separate skills,
and can be taught, and should be taught, and practiced.
Again I invoke Larsen-Freeman and Celce-Murcia and their big white
book (I hear there's a new edition, which I hear is blue). It does
everything, as well as anything I've seen. (Tell me if you know something
better.) It teaches these things. The lucky teacher is the one who gets a
grammar textbook containing more than enough activities geared precisely to
the lesson at hand. But often the teacher is given a grammar text with
structures to cover. The teacher's challenge is to find practice
activities and exercises. Some preparation in classes is useful, then, and
would also provide the future grammar teacher with a small bag of tricks to
which he/she could add, over the years. I envy the younger teachers who
come into our program knowing lots of ways to make grammar fun. (One of
our grad students here said that what is needed is a grammar practicum
class, where students could be exposed to and try out a variety of
methods.)
Ideally, I do think grammar texts for ESL should provide these
activities. Not only that, but I think they should provide the teacher
with plans and instructions for each lesson. I have seen some teachers'
guides that do this, but not enough. Most of them outline a general
philosophy and method in the introduction, then fill the rest of the pages
with the answers to the exercises and tests.
I wonder, is there a perception that it is somehow demeaning to the
teacher of adult ESL students to provide him/her with a detailed teacher's
guide? Why?
Is it similarly demeaning to students in a pedagogical grammar
class to give them explicit instruction in teaching the structures their
students will need, and will be challenged by? To give them information
about the kinds of questions students might ask, and the kinds of practice
activities that might be useful, and fun for them? These lessons are
necessary. I know that you can know the grammar and be very clear in your
instruction about it, but have people going into comas before your very
eyes because you don't know a game or puzzle that presents the grammar in
a way that they would enjoy and appreciate--and that would further give
them speaking practice.
It's good if teachers know the grammar and have the skill to choose
what to tell the students out of that body of knowledge and what to hold
back.
(To quote Kenny Rogers: "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know
when to fold 'em.) And it's good to have a sense of what language to use
at what level, and good listening skills, so that you hear the question
they are asking, and answer just that, and don't give them extra stuff they
didn't want and don't care about.
(Dr. Spock, "The Facts of Life," in Baby and Child Care: "Try to
answer the questions as simply as they ask." )
And I especially think it's good, since I went to school a while
ago and my classes were even more theoretical than the ones graduate
programs offer now, to learn how to present structures in ways other than
linguistic, with pictures and simple games, for example.
(Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady echoes the sentiments of some of
our grammar students, I'm sure, when she sings, "Words, words, words, I'm
so sick of words!") We need to learn that sure, at the higher levels we
can talk about grammar, but at the lower, maybe we need to teach with
pictures, maps, cartoons, physical actions, stories.
And then I think teachers need to realize that learning grammar is
a kind of recycling process, that a structure to which a student is
introduced at an intermediate level will not, can not be mastered fully at
that time. It will be woven in and out of his/her experience with the
language; it will be practiced in writing, where feedback on errors will be
given. It will be encountered in reading, where it can be pulled out of a
text and analyzed for further understanding of how it is used. It will
come back on a TOEFL practice, where it will be embedded in a more complex
structure, and clothed in more difficult vocabulary, but it will be the
same basic structure, and some other teacher will point it out, will remind
the student where this was first encountered. And that will be a
continuation of the process that began in the grammar class.
New teachers need to realize this. Do your best to present these
structures clearly, and in context. Listen to the questions, and be
prepared to answer as well as you can. But don't expect performance, in
speaking and writing, to now be perfect with these structures. Don't think
you can work that kind of magic. It's not up to you. The student has to
internalize it.
To teach grammar, you need a lot of materials and skills. (-LD)
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I have anecdotes from my first class ever. I hadn't taken a class, but I got Marcela Frank's companion book to Modern English and got up at 5:30 AM to read it and create lectures. Of course, Marcela Frank was less than accessible, so then I had to get up at 4, read, and then figure out how to translate all the boring advanced grammar (50 pages on noun clauses...) into something I could SHOW in class and then I had to think of a way to get folks to practice beyond Marcela's ever so traditional, decontextualized activities. I can only imagine the same thing happens to new teachers fresh out of a grammar instead of practicum grammar class...in fact, I learned a lot on the job and it would have been nice to have been given some ideas in a class to help with that translation process. (-MW)
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Some communication problems are purely pedagogical. One persistent problem for the new teacher is unresponsive students. What do you do when students don't answer? When they answer in one-word sentences and let you do the work? When they make mistakes that are not the focus of the lesson? In short, the new teacher needs to be able to handle these situations, and has to have experience in handling these situations. Perhaps this can only come from the classroom, but I'd like to at least see new teachers forewarned.
For the first problem, I have learned that an unresponsive student generally has nothing to talk about that he/she feels personally invested in. In other words, it is quite easy for a student to drift into a purely analytical mode, or simply a non-connected mode (sometimes referred to as "driving in neutral" when he/she feels he can get away with it, or when all that is demanded is a purely rote, mechanical operation. The traditional complaint against the ALM system was that it allowed this. Contextualization forces the student to say real things about real life, and presents the constant challenge: how can we make this student use this structure to express something he/she really needs to say? The other side of the coin, of course, is that students get so caught up in saying things, that they fail to be concerned about accuracy or about choosing the appropriate grammatical forms; teachers need practice in balancing these goals in the classroom.
To the teacher who allows one-word responses, and gets angry at the disconnected snippets of language that students tend to produce when allowed, I've always maintained that you get what you allow; thus, it's my own fault when I have this problem. And in fact, like other teachers, I have that problem whenever I fail to be vigilant against it. I'm sure other teachers have methods of dealing with it. I'm sure there's literature dealing with the problem, but do people get practice managing the varieties of challenges the daily classroom offers? It's the law of the lowest common denominator: that while students can travel thousands of miles to be surrounded by English, sometimes paying big money to be in a program where they are taught English and surrounded by English, when given the chance, they will say as little as possible, taking no chances, getting away with silence until the bell rings. This may be a universal problem of teaching, or at least language teaching, but it's one that bears examination in a class whose focus is pedagogical.
Last but not least is the problem of tangential questions. What happens when a student asks a question that is not directly related to the lesson? One must balance the value of the answer to the entire class against the need to fill the gaps of students' individual knowledge, keeping in mind that sometimes students ask questions because they urgently need to know something, and are in fact ready to learn it, and other times they ask questions as a kind of mental contest, a stump the teacher contest. Some questions are best brushed off and dealt with in office hours are between classes, or better yet, after consultation in the teacher's lounge. Such snap judgements ultimately determine whether a teacher is an effective user of students' class time. (-TL)
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The above page is in progress. Contributions are welcome (click here).
*Comments of graduate students, novice and veteran teachers, and employers are collected in full on their own page and are anonymous here.
Major contributors to this page:
TL-Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIU-Carbondale, Carbondale IL USA.
LD- Lynne Davis, Grammar Coordinator, CESL, SIU-Carbondale.
MW-Margi Wald, Student Learning Center, UC-Berkeley, Berkeley CA.
Page made and maintained by
Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
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