Teaching Grammar

anguage corpora are collections of authentic written and spoken texts, created in genuine communicative situations, and provide us with many real contexts.

Corpora allow students to see many examples of the word, phrase, or grammatical structure at the same time. They also notice patterns of usage and work out rules for themselves, and therefore remember them better.

for English there are the British National Corpus, and the COBUILD Bank of English corpus. It is also fairly easy to collect smaller corpora oneself, from texts available on the World Wide W

Only two such facilities will be covered here: frequency and concordance

Work in groups and think of four questions you might ask Janet to find out more about her holiday. Try to think of one question which none of the other groups will ask.

They will say things like How you will travel? You going in plane? and so on. They will not be too concerned with formal accuracy at this stage, they will be working at getting their ideas together in a small informal group. The last part of the task is designed to stretch them in terms of both their language and their imagination. In the past we have had suggestions like Will you take your cat? and Is your grandmother going with you?

Once the class has given a list of questions the teacher might encourage more discussion Which questions are most likely to be answered in the conversation? List the five most likely questions in order.

Yes that’s a good question: Are you going by plane? Are you going by plane?’ treating the question as a useful contribution to the discourse rather than as a sample of English to be corrected.

This provides an opportunity for repetition in a natural context. It also gives learners a reason to listen at the next stage when they listen to the conversation to see how many of their predicted questions have been answered. Here is a transcript:

he text is now familiar to learners. They have listened to it and understood it and are ready to use it for language study. The text is incredibly rich. Look at it for yourself and identify: phrases containing part of the verb GO phrases containing the word TO phrases with words ending in -ing ways of referring to the future expressions of time expressions of place

In some cases there are a large number of phrases so you might split the text and ask different groups to work with different parts. Once they have made a list of phrases you can work with them to show how these phrases exemplify features of the grammar.

As learners experience text we can draw their attention to phrases containing the most frequent words in the language – determiners, prepositions, pronouns and so on – and so begin to tease out their grammar. The text above provides a number of useful insights into the word to. These can be enlarged and recycled as learners experience the same word in future text

We have also shown how to draw attention to the basic grammar. The function of articles and pronouns is to provide cohesion in a text. We can draw

ow can you begin to apply the principles I have outlined in this paper? Perhaps the first thing to notice is that this kind of lesson is familiar to you as what is often called a skills lesson. There is a lot of speaking and listening as learners work out their questions. Some of the discussion is in groups and some of it is teacher led. Learners then go on to listen to a conversation or read a transcript to check whether or not their questions have been answered. This is followed by another teacher led discussion. Secondly there is a systematic focus on language. I have offered a number of possible language items. You would probably choose no more than two of these for a given lesson. Language focus requires learners to focus on the text for themselves. You can enable them to do this by asking them to identify phrases built round a particular word (TO; GO), part of a word (-ing) or a concept (the future; time; place). Once phrases have been identified this leads into a discussion or explanation of the grammar involved. This could be followed by a look at the grammar book to provide a summary of what has been covered.