Strand 3: Learning about grammar

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice
Donny Miller

You arrived here because you agreed partially or fully with

I avoid teaching grammar because I don't know enough about it.

The chances are good that you are a native English speaker of some sort because non-native speakers who have learned enough English to be able to teach it have also learned grammar (probably rather too much of it).

The chances are even better that your initial training in English Language Teaching happened on a course which insisted on a communicative approach to language teaching which focused on functional use rather than structure and saw the effort to communicate authentically as the way to learn a language.
Nothing said here is intended to disparage a communicative approach because it is very arguably A Very Good Thing in language teaching (for any language) and certainly an improvement on courses in which people learnt grammar rather than English.
The unfortunate spin-off from the approach, however, is that many teachers (and some teacher trainers) know embarrassingly little about the grammar of their own or anyone else's language.
You can speak the language, of course, and you can immediately spot when an utterance is malformed or grammatically flawed so you actually 'know' all the grammar in that sense. What you don't have is what is called declarative knowledge and that is what prevents you from being able clearly to explain grammar to learners or to plan and teach the grammar input they need.

Just how embarrassing is your lack of knowledge?

To see how embarrassing your lack of knowledge of grammar is, try a 20-item test. There are no prizes and you don't need to advertise your score but you should make a note of it after the last question, before you hit the 'Back' button.

Click here to do the test.

Now click here to go on.

Below 60%

That's pretty poor. You need to do three things very soon:

Get hold of two types of reference books:
1. a grammar for students such as Michael Swan's Practical English Usage
2. a reference grammar for you to learn more than your students need to know
  There is a list of both of these sorts of grammars on this site.
  You also need to read them, of course. Not all at once; a chapter at a time.
Go through the grammar guides on this site, starting with those for initial training courses and then going on to the ones for teachers on in-service courses.
Start making it a rule to research, plan and teach a lesson focusing on a grammar point relevant to your learners at least once a week.

If you don't know the difference between a subject and an object or your complement from your elbow, it may be wise to follow the basic ELT training course grammar section which introduces some fundamental concepts.
There is also a slightly more difficult course in language analysis designed for people to acquire the basics of English grammar.

60 to 80%

That's not awful – some of the questions were quite hard – but not really good enough, either. You need to get hold of a good reference grammar, rather than one designed for your students.
There is a list of these sorts of grammars on this site.
You could usefully go to the guides for teachers on in-service courses on this site and select areas you don't know much about, plan a lesson in that area and teach it.

Over 80%

That's a pretty good score. There are probably some areas of grammar you need to learn about (cleft sentences, perhaps?) so you could usefully go to the guides for teachers on in-service courses on this site and select areas you don't know much about, plan a lesson in that area and teach it.

The right answers

If you are intrigued about the right answers to the questions, here they are with links to the relevant guides on this site.

No.	Question and right answer	Link
1	In this sentence: "I'd like two coffees, please.", the word coffees is a mass noun made countable	Go here
2	In this sentence: "They'll have been driving all night.", the tense is future perfect progressive	Go here
3	In this sentence: "I think it's dead easy.", the word dead is an intensifying adverbial	Go here
4	In this sentence, "I seldom enjoy his company.", the word seldom is an adverb of time	Go here
5	In this sentence, "Technically, it's called a grommet.", the word technically is a viewpoint adjunct	Go here
6	In this sentence, "He looks exhausted.", the word looks is a copular verb	Go here
7	This sentence, "The hotel was what she enjoyed most." is a reversed wh-cleft	Go here
8	This sentence, "Mary didn't believe him although he seemed very sure." is a complex sentence	Go here
9	In this sentence, "Mary didn't believe him although he seemed very sure.", the word although is a subordinating conjunction	Go here
10	In this sentence, "It was important that he be there.", the word be is subjunctive	Go here
11	This phrase, "the government's policy" is an example of a descriptive genitive	Go here
12	In this sentence, "She daren't phone her mother.", the word dare is a semi-modal auxiliary verb	Go here
13	In this sentence, "She needs to phone her mother.", the word need is a lexical or main verb	Go here
14	Prepositions can be described as a closed class of function words	Go here
15	In this sentence, "I am loving this.", the word love is a perception verb used dynamically	Go here
16	This sentence, "At the first meeting, which was held yesterday, the chair invited comments from everyone." contains a non-defining relative clause	Go here
17	This sentence, "She liked the car he arrived in." contains a relative clause with omitted relative pronoun because it stands for the object	Go here
18	In this sentence, "I thought long and hard about not telling you.", the word telling is a gerund	Go here
19	In "I gave it to him." we have three types of pronoun: nominative, accusative and dative	Go here
20	In "The old house with a thatched roof", the words old and thatched are, respectively one epithet and one classifier	Go here

Researching grammar online

You need to be careful and sceptical when you are tempted to use online resources to find out about structure and grammar.

Look beyond websites designed for learners of English.
Be aware that many websites are written by well-meaning people who don't know very much about grammar.
Look for sites which are:
1. not hooks to get people to sign up for courses
2. not blogs where anyone, however ignorant, can supply answers to questions
3. written by people in further or higher education who actually know what they are talking about

On this site, there is a short guide to whom to trust when you are researching language online.
Open it in a new tab by clicking here.

Gauging progress

There's a separate guide in this section of the site to gauging and measuring progress in your development. Go there for more ideas. This area, however, is a rather special case.

One easy way to gauge your progress in this area is to come back here and re-take the test. When you score 100%, you have made some progress.

Another suggestion is that you keep a teaching diary specifically relevant to teaching grammar. In that you can record what you taught, what the problems were and how you felt the lessons went. Over time, you should be able to perceive real progress.