I’m currently teaching an English course whose main learning objective is to improve written and oral communication skills of international students. Basically this translates into ESL instruction. In fact, the school puts tremendous emphasis on ‘correctness.’ I try to incorporate a grammar component into almost every written and oral assignment. At this point, despite the fact that we have spent the first 4 weeks on most fundamental topics – subject verb agreement, run-ons, fragments, and sentence structure – my students are making egregious numbers of mistakes in their papers. I certainly understand that they’re grappling with lots of new issues on both compositional and grammatical levels, and, as the semester progresses, they’ll gradually become better equipped to discern their errors. But I wonder what can I do as an instructor to help them get to this place sooner?
So far, I have tried to vary our contexts for discussing grammar. I select sentences from their papers and we correct them as a big group; sometimes they do the same in small groups. The traditional technique of giving a lecture/presentation followed by in-class exercises is another method I tried, especially because I know that many of these students are used to this type of instruction. So, I try to make it easier for them to process new information in this familiar way. I have also assigned an error log, and of course they’re responding to each other’s writing, paying particular attention to grammar and usage.
I still wonder if there are other effective ways to teach grammar. Suggestions would be much appreciated.
It is a constant question; how to do the same material in different ways. Or even in a more effective way, though that seems to depend on each particular student.
In my basic speech classes, I used to have students re-script a speech by re-writing the grammar to give different oral emphasis. For Example, Mark Anthony’s speech in Julius Caesar,” Friends, Romans…” A student can make it sound and express something completely different simply by changing the grammar and punctuation. Or one activity the students always seem to love is taking a current political speech and correct the grammar or change the punctuation and see not only what it sounds like but what has happened to the main message of the speech.
It is fun way to get students to think about sentence structure and grammar in a way that can also help them when they come back to their own writing.
I would also add the old theatrical way of teaching almost everything, have students read their work out loud. This can also work wonders on students’ ability to hear the difference out loud.
Reply to Suzanne
Suzanne’s suggestion about having students read their work out loud is one that I often rely on. This semester, we read the assigned reading aloud almost every day not only to keep us all thinking about the material, but also to hear what grammatical writing sounds like, and I’ve realized how inaccurate students’ readings are. I don’t expect every reading to be flawless, but I’ve begun to wonder if the inability to read aloud a grammatical sentence should tell me something about the students’ ears for grammar in their own writing.
Reply to Jody Rosen
Hi, I tried having students read each others work instead. It is harder to miss errors that way.
Reply to Agnieszka Kajrukszto