How to Improve the Teaching English Grammar in Pakistani Schools
Mastery of English grammar is important to enable you to construct simple, clear, correct sentences and to be understood by your speakers.
Indeed, if you don`t master grammatical rules, you will not be able to be able construct understandable sentences and will not be able to express your thought correctly.
Do you want to improve your level English, specially your grammar, but don`t know where to start?
There are several suggestions to improve the teaching of grammar in Pakistani schools. Some of these are as follows:
1. English Language Teaching in Pakistani schools can be improved by moving away from grammar-translation method, modifying the syllabus to meet modern needs, and evaluating all language skills.
2. We should start teaching formal grammar when the students have sufficient command over the language. The study of formal grammar has no place in the first two, three years of teaching English. The study of Grammar should follow, and not precede, the study of language.
For the first two, three years we should teach only functional grammar, that is, correct usage. Study of formal grammar should be taken up later on.
Rightly has A.W. Fishy observed, “Grammar must always be behind reading and writing? In learning his own language, a child is concerned only with the small amount of the language that he can use. He gradually learns to use sentence patterns and comes to notice that certain changes take place in words.
He doesn`t learn the latter automatically. He makes many mistakes until eventually he learns and follows the ‘rule’. Similarly, our students must not be rushed. Their study of words, word patterns and word changes must follow their acquaintance with these phenomena in speech and writing lessons when they can notice the behavior of these language units.
We teach the students how to say the plural of words he already knows: then we tell him, point to him to get him to ‘discover’ that something similar nearly always happens when plurals have to be spoken. This is the place of grammar”
3. Teaching of grammar should be integrated with that of the textbook. Examples should be taken up from the textbook itself.
4. Grammar should be taught inductively, that is examples should be presented to the students and the rules deduced with their help. Later on, the rules are applied to exercises.
5. Grammar should be taught as a means to an end and not as an end in itself.
6. Build up your own subject based information to teach grammar, you need explicit as well as implicit information, to be confident about using the correct terms and explaining these terms.
7. Give talk a high importance in your classroom to the students to be able to select a wardrobe of voices that include Standard English.
8. Teach English grammar in context by introducing students to grammatical features and language in context, you will be helping students to internalize these principles.
9. Teaching English Grammar can involve investigations; problem-solving and language play as part of developing students` awareness of and interest in how language works.
