Should we be planning to teach grammar? If so, how?

Should we be planning to teach grammar? If so, how? Catherine Walker, 09.00-10.10, Tuesday 19th April

Within the new enthusiasm wave of "no-explicit grammar"in ELT, she emphasised the importance of grammar teaching in the class. Her talk was was a very enlightening one that contributed substantially to the never-ending debate of grammar teaching.

She proved her argument that was based on the Input-Interaction-Output theory which suggests that explicit teaching can help noticing, encourage comparison of noticed output with learners' own output and convert conscious knowledge into unconscious knowledge.

She recommends teaching grammar to all the students except young learners and those taking survival courses. Taking the scope and frequency of the rules into account before teaching them is an important issue, too!

She also indicates that teaching grammar inductively can lead to deeper processing. She gives a brief guide for inductive teaching and suggests "completing the rule, sorting, matching the rules and guided questions" as sample activities.

Her key points:

• Grammar is not everything, but it leads to language learning.
• Inductive teaching is more appealing and reasonable in some contexts.

She does not say that most of the time class time should be spent on grammar teaching, but she encourages teachers to think about the different ways and decide the best one according to their own contexts!