Section 5: Teaching Skills

Chapter 30: Teaching Grammar

When it comes to teaching grammar as an English teacher it is not as hard as people often say it is. In most situations and schools, you will not even be teaching direct grammar, you will just be working with students in a capacity to help them develop their grammar skills through mostly speaking. However, in the situations that you do teach actual grammar lessons there is a very simple and easy method to follow in order to achieve success in the classroom. The answer to that is to have a lot of examples and to keep things simple with your students. Start by using the grammar in a general talk with your students and try to ask an engaging question that will force them to use the targeted grammar. You can follow up from your question-and-answer discussion by explaining the general concept of the grammar point you are going to be teaching and pair it along with some reading exercises. The main goal is to show your students the situations in which ways the grammar is used and why it is used in that situation in order for them to learn how to use it themselves in conversation and natural context. Once you have gone through the grammar points and several examples you should look to pair it with an activity that will require the students to actually use the grammar that they have learned. This should be an activity such as making sentences or a worksheet where they can fill in the grammar point for each sentence on the worksheet they are given. Worksheets are one of the best tools in order for your students to have to read the grammar point and also use it in the proper context. Many teachers find that teaching grammar is one of the hardest subjects to teach to students, but with the proper preparation such as knowing the grammar point yourself, preparing the right articles and examples, and preparing worksheets you can easily teach the grammar point to your students without much hardship. Just remember that when it comes to grammar you will need to constantly reinforce it and work on it with your students over time. It is very important that you don’t just teach the grammar point for one day and then move on away from it, remember to use it as examples at the start of your class or the end of your class as a way to promote truly learning the grammar points that you have taught.