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Slide Notes

Most people tend to think of grammar as being extremely tedious and boring; I view grammar as an opportunity for interactive, multi-modal, and entertaining instruction.

I'm here to share some ideas about how you can make free your grammar teaching from textbooks and end up providing the kind of effective pedagogy that our students deserve. Abandoning books allows you to adapt your grammar instruction quickly and have it correspond with other themes you may be teaching.

I personally love to create materials and use them to teach to my personality, but I'll also show you other resources that you can use in your classroom.
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Textbooks? Who Needs 'Em

Published on Nov 18, 2015

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Textbooks? Who Needs 'Em

Teaching grammar without text books
Most people tend to think of grammar as being extremely tedious and boring; I view grammar as an opportunity for interactive, multi-modal, and entertaining instruction.

I'm here to share some ideas about how you can make free your grammar teaching from textbooks and end up providing the kind of effective pedagogy that our students deserve. Abandoning books allows you to adapt your grammar instruction quickly and have it correspond with other themes you may be teaching.

I personally love to create materials and use them to teach to my personality, but I'll also show you other resources that you can use in your classroom.
Photo by pmccormi

Laying out a Lesson

  • Guided Discovery
  • Charts & Explanations
  • Highly-Structured Activities
  • Less-Structured Activities
  • Unstructured Activities
Each one of these steps is an important aspect of any grammar activity, moving from introduction of the targeted structure, to providing review of the structure, to scaffolding practice by moving from highly-structured to unstructured activities.
Photo by Caro's Lines

Guided Discovery

  • Engaged rather than passive learning
  • Develops problem-solving skills
  • Adjusted to student levels
  • Requires competence and metalanguage
  • Teacher-generated or Trouble with Verbs
Guided discovery allows you to introduce a grammar structure in a way that engages students rather than having them be passive receptacles of instruction.

It also forces them to practice problem-solving because they have to use information to deduce the form, meaning, and use of the structure.

You can also adapt your materials to your students levels, whether you are introducing something new or reviewing a structure that they have already learned.

These activities do require some basic competence and knowledge of grammar metalanguage, so they may not be appropriate for all levels.

Most textbooks do not include this component, so you'll either have to make them yourself or purchase a book like "Trouble with Verbs?"
Photo by concretecandy

Charts and Explanations

  • Easy to create
  • Adjustable to your students' levels
  • Tons of materials on the Internet
  • OSU created materials
Charts and direct instruction are familiar aspects of classrooms, so you don't have to abandon them. You don't need a textbook for this either.

You can create your own and then adapt them to your own teaching style or your students needs. I love to use charts and explanations to bring humor into the classroom.

There are also tons of materials on the Internet, ranging from your standard textual explanations to engaging audio materials.

You can find CC materials on our websites or on YouTube and all your students to review outside of class. Some of these materials add things to your class that are outside of your repertoire. Like rapping.
Photo by xavi talleda

Highly-Structured Activities

  • Important first step
  • Teacher-generated
  • Online & Open Source
  • Fair Use
These highly-structured activities are what we often think of when we think of grammar class. They do have a very important, if limited role to play in your grammar class.

As I've said I love creating materials, so if you're like me, you can always create your own.

There are also websites all over the place that will allow you to find these kinds of activities.

"Trouble with Verbs?" is reproducible, so you can scan and distribute the materials to your classes however you see fit.

Finally, Fair use says that you can use copyrighted materials during face-to-face instruction as long as you limit the amount you use. Structured activities like these don't make up a huge part of what I do, so you can easily get under the less-than-10% requirement.

Less-Structured Activities

  • 700 Classroom Activities
  • Grammar Practice Activities
  • Infects your teaching
  • Great for Games
These types of activities are where you can have a lot of fun. These activities are semi-structured and can be highly-interactive and allow your students to work collaboratively and competitively.

I started by getting ideas from these two books, Grammar Practice Activities and 700 Classroom Activities. They provide great, easy to use activities. They take little effort to set up, they're well-explained, and they can be used in a moment's notice. They can be used to practice grammar in all language modes.

What's better is that after you familiarize yourself with this approach, you start to create activities on your own. It really infects your teaching and leads to a more fluid and interactive classroom.

Unstructured Activities

  • Authentic and Meaningful
  • Best for summative assessment
  • Letters, stories, role playing
The final type of activity that you want to use is unstructured activities. These include writing letters or short stories, creating role plays and dialogues, and matching the grammar to whatever theme you are teaching. They allow for meaningful, authentic, and even entertaining language use. I typically use this for summative assessment of their learning.

I hope you've found this part of the presentation informative and leave with some ideas on how to free yourself from the strictures of textbooks. In the spirit of going digital and creating open resources like we are looking for in our program, I've attached a link to the website that will allow you to access every grammar material I have ever created. I hope you have as much fun with them as I do.

BENEFITS

  • No paper use in 3 semesters
  • Easy access to materials before, during, after class
  • Customize class
  • Time consuming at first, but easy to adapt
  • FREE