“Do no longer study English, just learn it”

“Learn English as easily as you learnt mother tongue when being a child”

These sentences seem to be advertisement master pieces because of the number of students they draw to English courses. The fact is that these courses are economically successful, but academically a total failure. More than 60% of the students (see WSI statistics, March 2007) quit the course halfway, and those who after finishing face tests like TOEFL, ESOL, or IELTS, hardly get grades over 50%..

We study English as a foreign language, so, people need the language to get academic degrees, seminars or specialized courses abroad, but .they will not get high standards unless they learn grammar; listening approaches are not enough.

Why do people respond foolishly to this kind of advertisements? It is just because they are scared of grammar due to some misconceptions lying in the view that grammar is a collection of meaningless and boring rules about static structures in the language. Further questionable claims are that the structures do not have to be taught, learners will acquire them on their own. But it would happen in a very long period of time. Carol Chomsky (1969) showed that English speakers were still in the process of learning grammar structures well into adolescence. There is a difference between writing-reading skills and listening-speaking skills. Audio-visual memory plays the main roll on listening-speaking skills development, whereas writing- reading skills come from the particular aims the students have; it means by grammar, syntaxes and semantics, which accelerate the learning process. (see Larsen Freeman & Long, 1991)..

Teaching grammar plays a central role in every TESOL, EFL teacher’s classroom. The important questions that need to be answered are; how do we teach grammar? How do we help students learn the grammar they need? This question is deceptively easy to be answered. At first look most teachers might think that teaching grammar is just a matter of explaining rules. However teaching grammar effectively is a much more complicated matter. There are a number of questions that first need to be addressed for each class.

What are the objectives of this class? Is the class preparing for an examination or for business purposes? The answers to these questions are important as they will help you decide the method to follow, the scope of the program and strategic activities to match the objectives of each student. According to Hatch (1974), some learners approach the language learning task as rule formers. Others are called “data gatherers”. However in both cases students are able to learn grammar. If the students are preparing for a Cambridge exam, then grammar will play the most important role in lesson plans. On the other hand, if you are teaching a business class, the most important role will play linguistic formulas and standard formulas you may provide while prompting the students to put grammar knowledge into action.

The type of learning background the students have; the kinds of schools they have attended to, and the time they have spent in their studies also determine how familiar they are with grammar terminology. Adults who have not been attending school for a number of years are likely to find structure explanation confusing, difficult and boring, whereas those having been currently attending schools easily understand grammar charts, expressions and functions.

Learning material sources and the kind of language the students want to develop are also very important issues. The more learning resources you have, the easier it will be for you to satisfy any kind of requirements from the students you may have in the class.

Finally, if the teacher has the ability to adopt an inductive method in order for the students to discover grammar rules by themselves as working through-out contextual approaches, they will develop personal confidence and the myths dealing with bad feeling like scare, meaningfulness and boringness against grammar will also be dropped away. In support to this assertion is VanPatten and Cardierno’s (1993) finding that students’ experience with processing input data is more effective than giving students a grammatical explanation followed by output practice.

We just want to say that only by mastering grammar the students will get real bilingual balance using the languages they have learnt; will always maintain a very high performance and will reach success in every worthwhile project they undertake.

Cosme W. Vasquez & Sonia del Rocio Zurita