(upbeat music)
- Hello TEFL trainees, welcome back.
In this video I'm gonna give you some quick
and practical tips for grammar instruction.
Here we go.
Okay, I'm gonna start off with giving you
three pieces of advice before you teach grammar.
Advice number one would be to consider
observing your peers, oops!
Observing,
observing peers.
Doesn't have to mean that you observe
the extremely experienced teacher,
even watching another nervous teacher teach grammar
or anything can be very telling and informative for you.
So if you have that opportunity to observe other people,
it'd be even great if they were using the same book
that you are, you could go and then
present information and present.
How do they present that grammar point, for example.
Number two, if number one it's not a possibility
or in addition to number one,
you can consider looking online
at such things as like YouTube videos.
This has been a great resource for me.
Make sure you watch a couple of different
teachers presented that information.
Think about how they take that grammar point
and put it in context,
and how they relate it to the students in different ways
that they present that grammar information.
Those two things have really been useful to me,
perhaps if I'm nervous or uncertain about how to present
certain grammar points.
And the third point of advice I wanna give you is resources.
I don't know a teacher that doesn't have their preference
for certain types of grammar resources
that they use time and time again.
You can use resources that are digital,
or book.
Everyone has their own preference.
Think about where you're going
and which one will be more useful to you.
Everybody is gonna have their own biases
in terms of what books to look for.
I personally have a bias for Betty Azar, grammar series,
simply because I think the information is easy
to understand, other teachers might not care for it.
And your textbook provides other example
textbooks you could use.
And having those resources ready for you
so that you have somewhere to go.
Those are three pieces of before teaching advice,
let's move on to the during teaching.
Advice number one, I'm gonna talk about,
I'm gonna call it, oops!
Rules
versus use.
What am I talking about?
I'll never forget one of my very first advanced classes.
And there was a reading I had to address a grammar point
and I was very nervous
and I researched online long to be able to answer
any unknown questions.
And I got to class and actually my students
already knew all of the grammar rules.
I soon learned that they knew
far more grammar rules than I did.
They knew the rules.
They didn't know how to use, that was rules.
They didn't know how to properly use it,
when to use it,
who to use it with,
in what context, at what time,
all that was something we really needed to practice.
So just because your students know the rules to grammar
does not mean they can use them.
Which also refers to why we must teach grammar in context.
Teaching the rules alone will not create good
second language speakers for the most part, very important.
Advice I wanna give you number two,
is to admit unknown information.
All of us as teachers you're doing this over 10 years
are going to get questions
that you quite frankly just can't answer.
It still happens to me all the time.
That's fine, I'm not gonna let it disrupt my class.
I have activities planned,
I say, that's a great question
I don't know the answer to it.
I'll look it up and we'll address it later and we move on
Many times that is my best way to deal
with some of those questions I don't know
or questions that are quite related
to what we're covering that day.
I'm not gonna stop and feel panic.
I'm gonna address it later and save my credibility
and make sure you come back to it at a later date.
That's my advice.
And my final point for during teaching
would be trying to consider the effect you need to adjust
to level.
I had a really great friend when I was teaching
in South Korea, who was a grammar a dictionary,
but that guy knew every rule in the book.
And he was a great presenter,
very entertaining, very charismatic,
but he was not yet practice in adjusting to ESL levels.
That does take time.
If you're teaching something like the simple present
to your beginning level students,
you cannot use complicated contexts.
You cannot use high level vocabulary.
You need to consider what level your students are at
and appropriately address.
And just the way that you talk to them
and the materials you give them
when presenting grammar or when presenting anything.
But these are three things I want you to think about
as you begin or maybe you're a seasoned teacher
but as you think about when you're teaching grammar.
Thanks for listening.
Bye for now.