Teaching Grammar

After teaching for 15 years, I still feel overwhelmed everytime I teach grammar. Teaching grammar has been a topic of the debate among linguists concerning its place within the ESL/EFL curriculum. One of them, Scott Thornbury is against the grammar- based lessons which do not lead to oral fluency. It is oral fluency that most students want. He says language is acquired, rather than learnt. Therefore teaching grammar should be based on a process (Process Teaching) and should not be on the traditional hierarchiel model of transmision.

Thornbury lists 10 fudanmental rules that can be used as gudelines for Process Teaching :

1. The resources used for teaching are the teacher and students themselves
2. The teacher should only use the listening material which is recorded from the students doing pair work or group work activities for re-play and analysis
3. The teacher must sit down at all time the students are seated, except when monitoring group or pair work.
4. The questions must be real questions like "Did you read the newspaper yesterday ?" not "Is there a clock on the wall ?"
5. Slavish adherence to a method is unacceptable.
6. Pre-selected and graded grammar items is forbidden. Any grammar that is the focus of instruction should emerge from the lesson content, not dictate it.
7. The topics generated from the students should be prioritized.
8. Students should not be graded into different levels. Diversity of competence should be accomodated.
9. The criteria and administration of any test should be negotiated with the students.
10. Teachers will be evaluated according to only one criterion : that they are not boring.

When I learnt this lists, I was asking myself whether I can apply this teaching process in my class. As a teacher of a formal school, I am required to follow a set of syllabus which is designed by the institution and normally left to the coursebook in conventional teaching. However, I keep on experimenting with different methods of teaching because I believe that every teaching approach has something to offer. The teacher should seek the method suitable for students with different learning preferences and competence.

Lesson Planning

This semester I am assigned to supervise some students from the eight semester doing pratice teaching. They learned approaches in ELT, lesson planning, and teaching techniques last semester. They are 9 students participating in this program. Before they teach the real class, they are trained to do peer teaching. With this experience, they should be ready to teach the real class with real students.Then, I asked every student to prepare a lesson plan. Knowing that they already got the knowledge of preparing the lesson plan in the previous semester, I directly told them to choose a topic which is suitable for teaching children class.

Yesterday, we started the fisrt peer teaching. There were three students presenting their lesson plans. The first student was teaching some language expressions used in speaking activities. It ran well. I could see that this student learned a lot. However, I was dissapointed when the second and the third students did their micro teaching. The second student was supposed to teach a pre school class. The topic was writing a letter A. The presentation was done well but the practice stage was too unrealistic. He asked the student to discuss in group. The students were given a task to find things which starts with A. Then he asked the students to guess what things another group found. How could students aged 3 - 5 years old do this ? It shows that he didn't utilize the principle of teaching children, therefore, he couldn't demonstrate the appropriate instructional stategies for students.

Before the next student took his turn, I decided to explain the principle of lesson planning once again. I emphasized that the lesson plan should be visible or doable. If someone else is replacing them, she/he would know what to do. A good lesson plan ensures thet several things happen in your lesson :
1. A lesson plan should be based around one language point.
2. If you are going to use games and activities, they should be age/level appropriate.
3. A Lesson should keep building. The students will be lost if the lesson plan jumps from here to there as they won't be able to follow where you are going.
4. A lesson plan can help you overcome the problem the students usually encounter when learning a new language points.

I hope that next students' presentation will be a lot better.

Teaching English to Adult and to Children

After graduating from Universitas Negeri Jakarta (formerly IKIP Negeri Jakarta) in 1995, I feel that it's time for me to widen my horizon in English Language Teaching in a formal institution. I, therefore, decided to take the post graduate program (Linguistik Terapan Bahasa Inggris) Atma Jaya Catholic University. This will give me the opportunities to meet many experts in ELT and teachers from various regions and to learn the current teaching methodologies.

I was required to do three kinds of tests, which are writing an essay, TOEFL, and interview. In the writing test, I was asked to write a 1000 word essay on the similarities and differences between teaching English to adult and to children. It's quite a difficult task. I need to synthesize my knowledge and my teaching experience on this particular topic in an essay so the reader can see that I have known some ELT theories. While writing the essay, I was unable to quote all theories. What I did was writing the basic principles of how adult and children learn foreign language and showing my own experience of teaching those two groups of learners.Then, at home I was trying to browse some articles for the above topic to make sure that what I had written was not beyond the theories. The findings are as follows :

The acquisition of the foreign language by adult learners is slow, discouraging and often frustrating. All learners want to use a foreign language with confidence and spontaneity, in the same way as they use their mother tongue. The major complaint that teachers hear is ‘I can’t say anything off the top of my head’ (Rivers, 1992). Moreover, ‘none of learners can talk on unrehearsed topics without constant and painful hesitation’. The latter point is also applicable to young learners. It is noteworthy to examine how adult learners differ from young learners.

Adult learners are notable for a number of special characteristics (Harmer, 2000): “They can engage with abstract thought, have a range of life experiences, definite expectations about the learning process, their own set patterns of learning, and are more disciplined than children. On the other hand, adult learners have a number of characteristics which can make learning and teaching problematic: can be critical of teaching methods, anxious and under-confident because of previous failure and worry about diminishing learning power with age”. They more often than young learners face certain linguistic problems like ‘fossilized’ errors – persistent deviations from the L2 norm, language transfer - negative influence of the mother tongue on the productive skills.

Research in error analysis shows that over half the errors are interference errors. Adult learners are believed to be focused on form or correctness: “they are particularly conscious of deviations from the established networks, and seek to understand the nature of the rule system” (Rivers, 1992).

In one respect, however, adult learners are similar to young learners. All may be grouped according to their preferred learning styles. Differences in cognitive styles influence learners’ priorities for particular approach to learning. Learners employ different learning strategies, i.e. “specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, and more transferable to new situations” (Oxford, 1990). The common learning styles for each type of learners are (Richards & Lockhart, 1996):

- concrete - learners use active means of processing information;

- analytical - learners prefer logical and systematic presentation of new material;

- communicative - learners prefer social approach;

- authority-oriented - learners prefer the teacher’s authority.

While children learn English much faster than the adults. They imitate the teacher’s pronunciation, sentences, phrases, and words more easily. They do not ask for explicit rules which explain how sentences are put together, produced, and pronounced. They may ask for the meanings of words, but they are able to intuitively identify salient features of the meanings of a word and use the word more or less correctly.

An important prerequisite for effective learning and retention appears to be that instruction should be activity-based, rather than explanation- or theory-oriented. The activities should be of an engaging nature. The teacher should be pleasant and sweet-natured, able to communicate at the level of the children. She should not be a terror! Use of audio-visuals is more important than the printed text. The printed text should be colorful, full of pictures, and should have only few language elements such as words, phrases, and sentences.

Language learning should be encouraged in all the classes and in all the environments. Children have a natural curiosity to investigate the environment in greater detail. When they go to the bazaar, the see a lot of signboards and they start reading the same. They start reading the road signs with great interest. The teacher can create a bazaar inside the classroom for reading and conversation purposes. Pretend situations are greatly enjoyed by children, and they do actively participate in such game.

“This language is meaningful and understandable, because the activities are meaningful and understandable. Children are taught in English; children are not introduced to English language in an artificially pre-determined sequence of grammatical structures or functions; the input from the teacher, and their learning about their world, is in English” (Vale and Feunteun 1995). They
suggest the following orientation when we teach English to children:

- build confidence;
- provide the motivation to learn English;
- encourage ownership of language;
- encourage children to communicate with whatever language they have at their disposal (mime, gesture, key word, drawings, etc.);
- encourage children to treat English as a communication tool not as an end product;
- show children that English is fun;
- establish a trusting relationship with the children, and encouraging them to do the same with their classmates;
- give children an experience of a wide range of English language in a non-threatening environment.

Physical activities help in learning the words and sentences. An actitvity-based approach is always better than mere classroom teaching mode with repetition, imitation drills, etc.

Teaching both groups is interesting. It's rewarding when I observe that they can show their improvement after a series of teaching. In the mean time, I keep on reading more articles on ELT methodology to improve my teaching techniques. Eventually, I feel that teaching has enlightened my mind.

Teaching large classes

The new semester has just started. All lecturers in our institution including me are busy preparing the lesson, designing teaching aids, writing handouts and quizzes. Before doing these, they usually look at the attendance list. How many students are they in my class ? When they see more than 25 students in the class, they start to complain "How can I teach Public Speaking with 27 students ?" "How am I supposed to correct students' essays if I have more than 25 students ?"

Well, I do really understand those complaints. Indeed, teaching large classes is not easy but it doesn't mean that it is impossible. As a lecturer who happens to help the head of the department, I can understand the difficulty of accommodating lecturers' need to have classes with 'an ideal size'. The first reason is that there aren't enough rooms. Being less than ten years old, the institution doesn't have enough budget to build a new classroom let alone a new building. The second is the number of lecturers available to teach in particular hours decreases. The last one is to cut the operational expenses, which is usually determined by the management.

What should the lecturers do then ? Drop the class ? Of course not. They have to find some techniques which are suitable for teaching large class. Below is an example of a lesson plan proposed by Andi Hoodith from Saitama University in Japan :

Promoting Oral Fluency via Group & Pair Work

Andy Hoodith
Saitama University

Page 1 | Page 2

TIME: 60-90 Minutes AIM: To provide speaking practice for a class of 40 students

WARM-UP	Ask the class: "What will happen on December 31st 1999?" Elicit or teach the phrase "Turn of the century". Now ask, "Who is or was the most important person of the 20th century?" (alive or dead, any nationality: they needn't have been born this century, but must have been alive during some part of it). Then take 4 or 5 examples at random and write them on the blackboard, asking if other students have the same opinion.
ACTIVITY 1	Introduce your own example (unless one the students has named him), Albert Einstein. Write his name and then ask the following questions as you write them on the board: Who was Albert Einstein? Where was he from? What was his field? What did he do? Is he alive now? Was he important or just famous? Explain "field" if necessary (or use another word), and elicit answers. Make sure students understand the difference between questions with factual answers and those which require that they give an opinion.
ACTIVITY 2	Give students 10 minutes to write down the names of the 10 most important people to have lived this century. Stress that there is no moral judgment here, so that personalities seen in general as "bad", e.g. Hitler, can be included. Also make it clear that students must be able to provide some basic information about each of the people they choose, as you did with Einstein.
ACTIVITY 3	Now divide the class in to small groups. If possible, these should be of a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 5. Tell students to take it in turns to introduce the people they have selected, with the other students asking fact and opinion questions about them. Ask students to be open-minded: they should change their lists if other students in their group suggest more appropriate people, although they can stick to their original lists if they want to.
ACTIVITY 4	Depending on how the time is going, Activity 3 can be repeated by forming a set of different groups. Alternatively, you can ask students to find one new partner to discuss the choices with as a pair. This option might give the more shy students an opportunity to give his/her opinion. As the students do activities 3 and 4, go round and make a note of the names which seem to be coming up most often. You'll need these later to make the final activity more "doable".
ACTIVITY 5	To finish the class, conduct a rough survey to arrive at the whole class decision on the 10 most important people of this century. You may want to make the voting more strict, but this may take considerable more time. You could tell the class that there will be a formal vote at the beginning of the next lesson, and that they can change their opinions in the intervening period.
ALTERNATIVES Of course, there are several variations on this theme, both in terms of the initial question (you may choose the last millenium, for example), and the way the discussion is structured. You should always tailor the activity types and the items you wish to focus on on your students: you know them best!

My daughter learn computer

Amazing. My girl can play with computer.