This week I have had a taste of how overwhelming English grammar must be for ESL students. I consider myself to be a fairly competent writer of English, but it has been many years since I have had to recall rules of sentence structure, and define the words that make up our complicated language. Delving into the rules of grammar in Harmer (2007), has made me feel vastly incompetent at this point to teach an ESL class, especially at a more advanced level. While doing some volunteer teaching with a class, I asked the students what they would like to learn. One person asked about phrasal verbs. Very embarrassed, I had to ask what he meant. The lesson learned was that in order to be able to teach properly, we must fully understand the language of grammar, even though we may feel we are competent speakers and writers of English.
As babies and children we assimilate the language, slowly building on our grammar knowledge, testing new competencies, and correcting our errors. And then our formal grammar training begins in school, while our reading and writing catches up to our verbal skills. For many, our writing skills will continue to evolve up to high school and for some, beyond that. As ESL teachers, we must try and condense and concentrate this learning of grammar, often into just several years or less. So what's the best way to pack these grammar rules into our lessons without overwhelming our learners?
Through my observations as an ESL classroom volunteer, the best way to teach grammar, especially in lower levels of ESL, is to keep the lesson simple, only incorporating one new thing at a time, but constantly reviewing what the students should know. Correcting common errors is an ongoing part of every lesson. Students will also ask questions, but its often the teacher asking the students what might be wrong with a sentence. Their recognition of the errors is an important part of their learning process. Often, ESL students learn to speak English with many errors, probably for many reasons. So these errors are then incorporated into their writing. Correcting them, without embarrassment, and without interrupting the lesson too much, is a real skill that all ESL teachers need to learn.
Over the course of the next year, as my TESL training continues, I hope to review my English grammar, and build on my classroom skills for translating it into a useable form in the ESL classroom.
Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy
(4th ed. revised). Chapter 19 Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education.
Harmer, J. (2007) Describing Language in How to teach English (pp.59-80). Essex: Pearson
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