Strand 3: Learning about grammar
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In the age of information, ignorance is a choice |
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.
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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. |
| Below 60% |
That's pretty poor. You need to do three things very
soon:
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. |
| 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 |
Go here |
| 13 |
In this sentence, "She needs to phone her mother.",
the word need is a lexical verb |
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| 14 |
Prepositions can be described as a closed-system 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, "This is the car he arrived in." contains a relative clause with omitted relative pronoun because it stands for the object |
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| 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 |
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.