Effective ways of teaching grammar at secondary school

1. Teaching grammar as the basis for forming four main skills

Grammar gains its prominence in language teaching, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL), inasmuch as without a good knowledge of grammar, learners’ language development will be severely constrained. Practically, in the teaching of grammar, learners are taught rules of language commonly known as sentence patterns.[5, pp. 75] The teaching of grammar should also ultimately centre attention on the way grammatical items or sentence patterns are correctly used. In other words, teaching grammar should encompass language structure or sentence patterns, meaning and use.

Further, grammar is thought to furnish the basis for a set of language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In listening and speaking, grammar plays a crucial part in grasping and expressing spoken language (e.g. expressions) since learning the grammar of a language is considered necessary to acquire the capability of producing grammatically acceptable utterances in the language.

In reading, grammar enables learners to comprehend sentence interrelationship in a paragraph, a passage and a text. In the context of writing, grammar allows the learners to put their ideas into intelligible sentences so that they can successfully communicate in a written form. Lastly, in the case of writing, grammar provides a pathway to learners how some lexical items should be combined into a good sentence so that meaningful and communicative statements or expressions can be formed.[6, pp. 227-275]

Many teachers think that teaching grammar separately is not favorable to learners since learners only learn the way language is constructed, and very often when they are given grammatical rules, the learners work well on such cases.[7] However, when they write or speak, the learners make grammatical mistakes or even unnecessary ones. Helping learners apply grammatical rules into communicative tasks (for example, writing and speaking) is very challenging. Therefore, teachers, especially in the context of EFL, could benefit from learning some alternative teaching approaches for teaching grammar so that they can integrate grammar or structure into other language skills in such a way that the goal of learning language is ultimately achieved.

The ultimate goal of teaching grammar is to provide the students with knowledge of the way language is constructed so that when they listen, speak, read and write, they have no trouble applying the language that they are learning. Language teachers are, therefore, challenged to use creative and innovative attempts to teach grammar so that such a goal can successfully be achieved. In other words, whatever exercises are given, the most crucial thing is that the teacher provide the students with an opportunity to be able to produce the grammatical item making use of syntactically and semantically correct examples of sentences comprised of appropriate and relevant vocabulary. [8,pp. 27-38]