Writing Presentation

Teaching grammar

Grammar is the system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence.

Organizational competence is necessary for communication to takeplace, but no sufficient to account for all production and reception in language. Grammar gives us the form or structure of language, but those forms are literally meaningless without a seconddimension that the semantics (meaning), and the third dimension, pragmatics. In other words, grammar tells us how to construct a sentence (word order, verb and noun system, modifiers, phrases, clauses, etc)and discourse rules tells us how to string those together. Semantic tells us something about the meaning(s) of words and strings of words. Then pragmatics tells us about which of several meanings toassign giving the context of an utterance or written text.

Reason valance and the experience of teachers tell us that judicious of grammar form in the adult classrooms is not only helpful, ifappropriate techniques are used, but essential to a speedy learning process. Appropriate grammar-focusing techniques:


Are embedded in meaningful, communicative context
Contribute positively tocommunicative goals
Promote accuracy within fluent, communicative language
Do not overwhelm students with linguistic terminology
Are as lively and intrinsically motivating as possible



Rules forgrammatical explanations

Keep your explanations brief and simple. Use the mother tong if students cannot follow an explanation in English.
Use charts and other visuals whenever possible tographically depict grammatical relationship.
Illustrate with clear, ambiguous examples.
Try to account for varying cognitive styles amount your students.
Do not get yourself (and students) tied up in knotsover so-call “exception” to rules.
If you do not know how to explain something (for instance, if a student ask you about a point of grammar and you are not sure about the rule) do not risk giving...