Contextualized Grammar

Instruction
What is contextualized grammar instruction?
• Contextualized grammar instruction uses authentic and
longer texts to teach grammatical rules and sentence
structure.

• The rationale for teaching grammar in context is that

because students have difficulty transferring what they learn
in drills to their writing, grammar should be taught through
the writing itself.
How is grammar contextualized?
• There are many approaches to teaching grammar in context.

• Some approaches involve teaching the skills and then

showing how they can be applied in the context of writing,
while others use essays written by the teacher or students to
help students discover and learn grammatical concepts.

• It is useful to categorize the various approaches according

to the level of contextualization that is involved:
1. Somewhat Contextualized Grammar
Instruction: Learning Grammar through Rules and Diagrams
• Questioning:  Students can be taught to transform
sequences of words into yes-or-no questions or “tag
questions” to determine if the sequence is a complete
sentence.

Example:
The sequence “Jim and Sue can dance the tango.”
Transformed into the yes-or-no question:
 “Can Jim and Sue dance the tango?”
Tag Question:
 “Jim and Sue can dance the tango, can’t they?”
• Frames:  Students can also be taught to locate main verbs
by writing sentences into frames such as:

“They somehow got _______ to ________” where the first

blank is filled with the subject in an appropriate pronoun
form and the second blank is filled with the rest of the
sentence .

For example:

“Jim and Sue can dance the tango” becomes…

 “They somehow got them to dance the tango.”

2. Mostly Contextualized Grammar Instruction: Learning
Grammar through Contextualized Sentence Practice
• Sentence Combining: Students practice working with a
variety of grammatical concepts such as subordination,
infinitives, and prepositional phrases. Some activities involve
combining sentences with the use of cues, such
as apostrophe-s plus –ing. 

For example, consider the sentences I was worried about

SOMETHING and My brother had disappeared
mysteriously.
 “I was worried about my brother’s mysterious
disappearance.”
• Transformational Exercises:  Students practice
correct usage by choosing sentences from their
compositions and rewriting them. They are asked to
change present-tense verbs to past tense or to change first-
person pronouns to third-person, and so on.

• Sentence Expansion: Students write their own subject

and verb and then are instructed to add various syntactical
structures like modifiers. Eventually, students are asked to
add to the subject and then to add to the predicate in a
variety of sentence patterns. 
3. Entirely Contextualized Grammar Instruction: Learning
Grammar through Whole Compositions
• Grammar-Specific Topics: To practice verb tenses,
students can be given topics that specifically address certain
grammatical concepts, like writing an account of a past
experience that might affect a future choice that they will
make.

• Essay Editing Models: Using student papers or a piece

of the teacher’s writing as the basis of an editing exercise
can help students develop editing skills, making the
composing and revising process more productive in
improving writing ability.
SYNONYMS AND ANTONYMS
DEFINITION
• A synonym is a word that means exactly the same
as, or very nearly the same as, another word in
the same language.

For example, “close” is a synonym of “shut”.

• An antonym is a word that means the opposite of

another word.

For example, "bad" is an antonym of "good".

ACTIVITY
Give a word that is a synonym for the
underlined word in each sentence.
1. I really do abhor Brussels sprouts.

2. The water on the lake was so placid that it looked like a mirror.

3. Elizabeth tried to appear graceful, but the high-heeled shoes

hampered her efforts.

4. I think that adding curtains to the windows will really enhance

our classroom.

5. I explained to Mr. Harris about my missing homework, but he

said my story wasn’t credible.
6. During the football game, Kelvin suffered a laceration to his
elbow.

7. If you want to pass the class, you should heed my advice to

study.

• Give a word that is an antonym for the given word.

1. Blatant
2. Oblivious
3. Tentative
4. Accolade
5. Pliable
6. Abstain
7. Hasten
Vocabulary
 Professions and Trades
DEFINITIONS
• A job is the work that a person does regularly in
order to earn money.

• A profession is a job that requires special training,

often a university education.

• An occupation is a job or profession.

• A trade is a job, that needs special skill, that involves

working with your hands.
People of different trades and professions..

• People who drive our motorcars - Chauffeurs or

drivers
• People who make law for us - Legislators
• People who keep our streets and drains clean -
Scavengers
• People who sell us vegetables - Green grocers
• People who cell us spices, sugar, dried fruits etc. -
Grocers
• People who sell us cloth/garments - Drapers/
clothiers/ outfitters
• People who sell us sweets - Confectioners
• People who sell us tobacco - Tobacconists
• People who mend shoes - Cobblers
• People who deal in and prescribe glasses - Opticians
• People who sell us writing materials, pens, pencils,
notebooks etc. - Stationers
• People who dig up coal and iron - Miners
• People who take us across a stream or river in a boat
- Ferrymen
VOCABULARY
Subject-specific vocabulary
What is subject-specific vocabulary?
• Each subject has words which are either used specifically in
that subject area (and not in general English), or common
words which are used with special meaning in that subject
area. Such words are known as technical, domain-
specific or subject-specific words.
The following are two examples of non-general words
used in the subject area of genetics:

haploid: an organism or cell having only one

complete set of chromosomes;

diploid: an organism or cell having two sets of

chromosomes or twice the haploid number.

Words such as these can be difficult even for native speakers to learn,
though native speakers may have some advantage in being able to
recognize prefixes, suffixes or roots which give the word meaning, e.g.
'di-' in diploid, meaning 'two‘.
• The second type of subject-specific vocabulary, i.e. common
words used with special meaning, are similar to the type of
academic vocabulary in which 
general words have a special meaning in academic contexts. In
this case, though, such words take on a special meaning
according to the subject they are being used in, as shown in the
following examples.

class
 general:  a group of students who are taught together
 biology:  taxonomic group containing one or more orders

family
 general:  a social unit living together
 biology:  a taxonomic group containing one or more genera,
e.g. 'sharks belong to the fish family'
cohesion
• general:  the state of cohering or sticking together
• botany:  the process in some plants of parts growing together
that are usually separate (e.g. petals)
• physics:  the intermolecular force that holds together the
molecules in a solid or liquid
• language:  how parts of a text are connected together (see the
writing section on cohension for more details)
FIN.