Thursday 30 June 2016

Effective Strategies for Teaching Grammar

Adequate understandings of grammar are required for students to better their language skills. To master a language and learn to communicate effectively in later phase of your life in a working environment, students need to use proper grammar. Teaching English grammar involves few strategies if followed will help in learning grammar adequately.


Must include reading & writing:
The best grammar instruction is considered to be extensive reading and writing. It means simply the teacher reading aloud his instructions and clear in front of all students of different age groups. When students listen and see what is proper, they swiftly incorporate those in their own writing.  This means that the teachers must provide adequate opportunities to students to read and write in a classroom activity.  The writing process is a learning experience for students in terms of grammar improvement. Similarly, self assessment though proof reading, edit and revision of their own work, they learn about the proper use of grammar.
Self assessing ones work:
Students learn automatically when they are left to examine their own writings and identifying errors.  They must be given opportunities to read out their work to the class. Even students can read out to each other. This process helps them to identify their own mistakes and they learn grammar in the process.
Combining sentences:
Sentence combining activities are very effective in teaching sentence structure. In the due process they learn about the grammar principals: - parallelism and variety. They will soon learn how a sentence can simply change by the way clauses are put together.
Mini- lessons:
These are very effective in understanding sentence construction. How a simple comma placement can change the meaning of a document grabs their attention more than just making them memorizing comma rules. Another mini-lesson could be on dangling modifiers. Make a fun environment while putting simple exercises. Hereby the student remember the principal and recognize the errors when they self assess or read or listen to others writings.
Use of literature:
Take any sample literature text to teach students within the context of writing. Students now listen to it and analyse the sentence structure of the author and learn how to use words, punctuation and sentence structure contribute in the overall writing of the author. They often copy their favourite author’s style and improve their own writing.
From the above discussion we can conclude that if taught strategically then they can effectively learn proper English. But few things should be avoided:-
-    It is not a good idea to teach grammar as a subject in isolation from writing or reading.
-    Students do not learn anything about use of grammar by diagramming sentences.
-    Learning to identify parts of speech is not at all helpful in improving the writing of students.
-    Studying grammar in isolation is not helpful for students to avoid grammatical errors in their writing.
-    Teaching grammar in a grammar classroom schedule is not useful. Better the teacher spend in teaching and writing.
Read More: Phonetics is an Important Part of Language Learning
Thus it can be derived that teaching grammar by integrating it into actual writing process. The effective way to teach grammar is to encourage reading and writing. It is highly recommended to follow these strategies for effective delivering of English grammar and help the students to cope up with their weaker points and know the best way to read, speak and write English. Though, it has often been found by researchers that teaching grammar at school level is not at all useful. This is because they lack ability to imbibe complexities of the language learning.  This is partially true as if we do not start teaching at their early stage; students would never grow up with their basic understanding of grammar precisely.

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