Page 15 - HOW TO TEACH GRAMMAR

We all know what involves riding a bike: keeping your balance, pedaling, steering by means of
the handlebars and so on. This does not mean to say that we might know how to ride a bike. The same
analogy applies to language learning. It can be view as a body of knowledge – such as vocabulary and
grammar. Or it can be viewed as a skill (or a complex set of skills). If I you take the language-is-skill
point of view, then it follows that, like bike riding, you learn by doing it, not by studying it. Learning-by-
doing is what is called experimental learning.

The communication argument

There is more to knowing a language than knowing its grammar. It is one thing to that Do you
drink? is a present simple question. It is another thing to know that it can function as an offer. This
simple observation is at heart of what is now called the Communicative approach, or Communicative
Language Teaching (CLT). Communicative competence involves knowing how to use the grammar
and vocabulary of the language to achieve communicative goals and knowing how to do this in a
socially appropriate way.

Two schools of thought emerged as to the best means of achieving the objectives of this
communicative approach. The first – or shallow- end approach – might be summed up the view that
you learn a language in order to use it. That is: learn the rules and then apply them in life-like
communication. The more radical line, however, is that you use a language in order to learn it.
Proponents of this deep-end approach take an experiential view of learning: you learn to communicate
by communicating. They argue that, by means of activities that engage the learner in life-like
communication, the grammar will be acquired virtually unconsciously. Studying the rules of grammar
is simply a waste of valuable time.

The acquisition argument.
The fact that we all learn our first language without being, taught grammar has not escaped
theorist. Learning, according to Krashen, results from formal instruction, typically in grammar, and is of
limited use for real communication. Acquisition, however, is natural process: it is the process by which
the first language is picked up, and by which other languages are picked up solely through contact with
speakers of those languages. Success in a second language is due to acquisition, not learning, he
argues. Moreover, he claims that learned knowledge can never become acquired knowledge.
The natural order argument.

This view derives partly from the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argues that
humans are “hard-wired” to learn languages: that is, there are universal principles of grammar that we
are born with. The idea of an innate universal grammar helps explain similarities in the developmental
order in first language acquisition as well as in second language acquisition. It explains why English
children, Thai teenagers and Saudi adults all go through a “I no like fish stage” before progressing to “I
don‟t like fish”. In short, the natural order argument insists that a textbook grammar is not, nor can ever
become, a mental grammar.

For you to read some more: https://www.britannica.com/topic/universal-grammar

15