Post #9: Teaching Grammar and Fostering Language Awareness

Brown chapter 22 talked about form-focused instruction. The teaching of grammar is such a debatable part of language teaching. The chapter questions whether grammar should even be taught or not.  When I was learning Spanish, grammar was the main focus of the class since that’s what the textbook mostly talked about. Even today most of the language classrooms I observe in continue putting grammar in the L2 as the first priority. In my opinion, grammar needs to be one of the most important and mostly focused on parts of an L2 classroom. Brown says that too much grammar focus at the beginning “runs the risk of blocking their acquisition of fluency skills” (Brown 422). I think that it’s necessary for beginning levels to put the main focus on grammar. In order for a learner to become fluent in the L2 they need to know grammar. This idea goes back to our discussion the other week about fluency versus accuracy. This chapter also talks about the deductive versus inductive approaches to grammar teaching. This is a topic we talk a lot about in our class foreign language teaching methods. I tend to favor the deductive approach mostly because I like the structure of it and that’s how I was taught grammar. I like having all of the grammar rules and steps laid out for me from the beginning of the lesson. Even though I like this approach better, I still think it’s important to use both deductive and inductive approaches to teaching grammar. The inductive approach incorporates whole and authentic texts which I think it very important to include.

 

Chapter 7 in Kumar discusses the importance of fostering language awareness. I found this chapter to be very interesting and entertaining. At the beginning, someone describes English as being a “zany logic-defying tongue” (Kumar 159). Another person goes on to say, “English is a language in which one drives on a parkway and parks on a driveway, plays at a recital and recites at a play” (Kumar 159). Many native speakers of English may not realize how odd things like that are since we are so used to saying them, whereas non-native speakers are more aware since they are trying to learn the language. Examples like this cited quote can help foster general language awareness among learners. The chapter also talks about how it’s necessary for teachers to have language awareness. Teachers who are native speakers of the language they teach “may know the underlying system of their language intuitively, but they may lack explicit knowledge needed to give a proper explanation” (Kumar 162). Since I’m not a native Spanish speaker, I have the explicit knowledge needed to teach the language. Since learning Spanish I have learned a lot more about the English language but I still don’t know if I have the explicit knowledge needed to fully explain grammar points. All parts of the language come naturally to me so sometimes I can’t explain why something should be said a certain way. An example of this is last week when we were critiquing the two students’ paragraphs they had written. Someone said that the student needs to put a “the” at the beginning of the sentence but couldn’t explain why it needs to be there since with it, it just sounds correct to us.    

 

Chapter 8 in Kumar is about heuristics, which refers to the process of self-discovery on the part of the learner” (Kumar 176). Heuristics is also a teaching method that allows students to learn by discovering things for themselves. I think that fostering language awareness in learners can help promote heuristics since by making students aware of the language, they become more interested in learning and therefore are more motivated to discover other aspects on their own.