Monday, January 4, 2016
New Method of Teaching Grammar
An Integrated Method to Teaching Grammar
By Ossama M. Sayed
English Lecturer at Shinas College of Technology, Oman
The latest
method to teaching grammar aims at striking a balance and drawing benefits from
both methods of teaching grammar: direct instruction and discovery learning. It
mixes guidance with exploration as needed because discovery and direct
instruction have something to learn from one another.
The Introduce,
Discover, Study, Produce Method (IDSP) includes four stages as follows:
1. Introduction: set the stage for learning
This Introduction
Stage includes the following activities:
Ø Engagement: the teacher’s
effort is to awake the students’ interest, arouse their curiosity, and engage
their emotions, employing numerous means, such as games, pictures, audio or
video recordings, or dramatic stories.
Ø Pre-teach vocabulary: The teacher presents unfamiliar words that
will appear in the reading passage.
Ø
Reading Tasks: Students
read a passage which contains the target grammar items. This is to
familiarize them with the passage information as well as the grammatical items.
Give them reading tasks (global task and detailed reading tasks).
2. Discover the grammar item
Teacher’s Roles
|
Students’ Roles
|
Format of Activities
|
ØTeachers direct the students’
responses using induction and/or deduction to refine and focus
generalizations.
ØThey present sets of stimuli and
students are asked to find out relations and draw conclusions.
For example, they make conclusions and generalizations
or to find pattern of relationships.
ØThey plan extra time. They must
understand that discovery takes time.
Ø After an activity is completed,
they promote and moderate discussion to firm up and extend generalizations,
and give feedback.
ØThey might have students repeat
the activity if necessary and give assistance and guidance as appropriate.
|
ØThe students must have perquisite
knowledge related to the target grammar item.
ØThe students construct their own
knowledge by experimenting, and inferring rules from the results of these experiments
ØThey work in small groups to
discover the target grammar items.
ØThey participate in the discovery
process by observing relations, experimenting, inferring, generalizing,
concluding and solving problems.
ØThey reflect on their previous
knowledge to learn new information.
|
ØThe well- prepared discovery
activities help the students to observe the grammar item in context, provide them
with the overall picture and enable them to integrate new knowledge into
their existing knowledge base.
ØActivities must be constructive,
inductive and/or deductive.
ØActivities begin with the students
observe of a specific grammar item and end with a conclusion about how the
grammar item takes place.
ØThe process of learning is inquiry
(using questions to guide discovery), the result is discovery, and the
learning context is a problem.
ØAll activities must be
learner-centered.
|
3. Study the grammar item
The Study Stage activities focus on explanation, guided practice, personalization and feedback on the grammar items. Although the teacher explains
the grammar item, they can choose student-cantered activities that help
students learn the grammar items and get them engaged.
First,
the teacher gives an explanation of a grammatical item or
employs student centred activities .The teacher is supposed to provide the students with a wise blend of interesting activities that
lead to conscious and subconscious learning of the grammar items. Then, students practice the grammar items under the
guidance of the teacher. After that, they use the grammar items to talk about
themselves. Finally, the teacher gives feedback.
For example, the teacher explains the form of the Present Continuous Tense and then encourages the
students to describe various pictures using
this tense. By
choosing appropriate pictures, the teacher is able to achieve the goal of
presenting the Present Continuous Tense without the students having an
unpleasant feeling that they are being controlled by the teacher or forced to
learn the particular grammar item.
4.
Production
The objective in the Production Stage is to use “the target language communicatively. In this way,
students get chances to try out real language use with little or no restriction
– a kind of rehearsal for the real life.”
At this stage, exercises and activities are designed to
make students use the target language
communicatively and enable them to use their full language knowledge in the
selected situation or task.
Activities may include writing paragraphs, role playing, discussions,
advertisement design, debate, describing and drawing, story and poem
writing/reading/telling, and group writing.etc.
For more details about the new method, click on the link below:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6Wrm3i1dC0cYk16RXB5NExsWEE
To check one model lesson, click on the link below:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6Wrm3i1dC0cNnZ1NVZTRnRTWGc
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