3.4.

SPECIFIC TEACHING-LEARNING TECHNIQUES

Penny Ur (1988) studies the factors that contribute to success in grammar teaching and learning.
We can summarise them as follows:

- Pre-learning. We saw in themes 3, 7 and 8 how new language elements are taught-
learnt along three stages: presentation, controlled practice and free practice.
Students must only be asked to practise or produce language after the presentation
stage, when they have already been taught it.

- Volume and repetition. A variable that contributes to learning success is the

amount of language that students are in contact with: the more they are exposed to
or produce, the better.

- Success-orientation. Students are more likely to learn when they experience

success in their experiments with the foreign language

- Heterogeneity. It refers to the possibility of performing an exercise at different

levels of proficiency, which contributes towards dealing with diversity within the
classroom.

- Teacher assistance. In addition to preparing communicative contexts within the

classroom, and creating communicative needs for students, one of the teacher’s
main roles is to support and assist the students, rather than assess or correct them.

- The students’ interest towards what they are doing is a necessary condition in well
designed activities. This condition is deeply connected with the above mentioned
teacher’s role of creating communicative needs.

In order to explain how to organise the process of teaching and learning grammar successfully,
it is very important to take into account the need of creating a suitable context in which to apply
a grammatical structure the teacher wants their students to practise.

We can identify three communication principles that the classroom activities should comply
with in order to promote grammar (or any) learning:

- Communicative principle. Activities should involve real communication. If we

want our students to communicate in our classrooms, we will have to provide
them with the opportunities to do so.

- Task-based principle. Activities should promote the use of language for carrying
out meaningful tasks.

- Meaningful language. Students must understand the language involved in the

activity. The language used must be meaningful to the learners.

Bearing these principles in mind will unavoidably drive classroom situations and activities
towards processes in which the students will have the need to communicate in order to do
something, using a language that they can understand, even if they make mistakes, a language
that will be real in the sense that it will include a variety of functions and structures, and whose
aim will be reaching the students’ objective more than accuracy.

Apart from these general guides, we have to mention that students will infer the grammar rules
through the principles and activities we have commented in other themes (T. 14 and 25,
especially). Drills, project works, games, songs, drama techniques... they all can be useful tools
to enhance grammar learning. We might classify these and other activities along a continuum
which ranges from the extreme of non-communicative to its opposite.

Drills are at the non-communicative pole. A drill is a repetitious exercise prepared in order for
students to automate some specific linguistic item, conducted and paced by the teacher. The
students’ task in a drill usually consists of producing quick, short oral or written answers
according to certain grammatical models. Drills give the learners practice at making sentences
and structures automatically, and also serve to review the theoretical explanations that the
teacher may have given the learners concerning certain aspects of grammar.

Games are another very common activity in grammar learning. There are many games that can
be used to practise parts of speech and to improve oral and written production, such as word
games, linking games and puzzle chains. Further reading on this topic can be found in theme 18.

The use of songs deserves a special mention. They are appropriate because of their motivating
effect, not only for teaching-learning grammar, but any other linguistic and cultural aspects.
There are plenty of possibilities to apply them in the language classroom with grammatical
purposes. The grammatical aspects involved depend on the song chosen, that can be authentic
ones, or specially prepared for language learning.

Not only songs, but other repetitive texts such as poems, are useful for learning grammar
structures. Not only do they add variety as well as enjoyment to language learning, they are an
effective vehicle for practising a particular grammar structure because its very nature demands
that we speak or sing it, repeat it; and with each repetition the structure becomes more deeply
internalised. A poem, or a song, goes home with the students, and it keeps coming back in their
heads.

There are plenty of other activities that can be useful for grammar learning, such as role-
playing, project work, etc. In all those ones that can be communicative, the grammar elements
involved will depend on the situations proposed, such as the topic of the work or conversation,
the context, etc. Controlling these variables is one of the teacher’s role, that can make up very
varied activities for practising different linguistic aspects.