Citation 5:
Bruton, Anthony. (2009). Grammar in not only a liberating force, it is a communicative resource. ELT journal, 63(4), 383-386.
Summary:
The author is currently focusing on language teaching and research methods with his academic profession and also directing a group researching the learning of EFL in state secondary schools. From his professional backgrounds, he argues, in this article, his considerably different points from Richard Cullen’s on the essay of Widdowson (1988) ‘Grammar, and nonsense, and learning’, which may attractive enough to who are interested in communicative language teaching (CLT).
The author wants us to consider grammar as a meaning not as tedious rules or constraints, which indicates contrast between grammatical and lexical meaning. During a language acquisition process, the grammatical meaning will be expressed specifically with highly frequent rate of usage in real contextual or contextualizing situation by putting emphasis on formulating meaning choice into utterances to express meaning not based on a given lexical content or text, according to the author’s counteroffer against Cullen’s perspective.
With these obviously distinct opinions, the author really urges the readers to rethink about the slot-fillers or pattern practices emphasizing the forms or structures without appropriately contextualized communicative drills.
Review:
This article shows that how much inefficient effort Korean English teachers make to have their students successful in learning English. Even though the text is a little bit short of practical examples of implying his opinions to a real classroom, it will be very helpful for Korean English teachers to read this article for their better implementing with innovative thoughts about teaching English involving grammar, especially when they design a curriculum in the beginning.
Citation 6:
Scheffler, P. (2009). Rule Difficulty and the Usefulness of Instruction. ELT journa 6(1), 5-12.
Summary:
From the professional experience the author has had by writing books related to English grammar teaching and doing researches on modern English grammar, second language acquisition, and corpus linguistics, this article contains a refreshing approach to teaching grammar in regard to learners’ perception and expectations about L2 learning.
The author practiced a questionnaire-based study to find out how learners perceive relationship between rule difficulty and the usefulness of explicit instruction, on the basis of the assumption that implies adult L2 learners can be more successful with the structural syllabus and analytical procedures applying explicit code-focused instruction rather than mainly implementing meaning and communicative lessons because adult learners use the domain independent mechanism not like child L1 acquirers. The outcome of the questionnaire that was answered by two Polish adult learner groups with a college academic background shows that the degree of the candidates need for ‘usefulness of instruction’ is almost match with that of perception for ‘level of difficulty’ among the categories of English grammar, i.e., tenses, modal verbs, etc., if just two from eleven categories are excluded in the result.
The fact that the research was performed in limited conditions, including a geographically restricted area, participants’ background and age, and subjective notion to objective one is admitted by the author. However, the author asserts that the respondents requires explicit grammar teaching particularly in difficult grammar areas, and that teachers should take into account what learners feeling about the target language in general.
Review:
Even if the article has to be complemented with further researches and broader investigations, the result of this research indicates that the needs of learners cannot be disregarded when teachers design their lesson plan or syllabus to make the class fruitful. The over 20-yesr-old adults participants of L2 learners’ characteristics might be applied to, at least be helpful for understanding middle and high school L2 learners’ SLA process because adolescents, almost like adults, have already developed their L1 system in their brain.
I totally agree with the article Grammar in not only a liberating force, it is a communicative resource. I learned how to teach grammar from the irish teacher for my TESOL certificate. He teaught us the method what this article suggest. To learn the grammar for use in the right situation.
ReplyDeleteYour citation 5 highly attracts my attention because I have long thought that teaching grammar without context is much less effective and efficient than teaching grammar through meaningful and authentic context. As you know, in Korea, teaching grammar is being conducted too much fragmentarily with not being integrated to speaking, reading, and listening by delivering knowledge about grammar only. As a result, many students have difficulty in transferring their grammatical rules into forming the sentences to express their thought regarding real life or academic writing. In this sense, I absolutely agree with the author’s assertion that grammar should be viewed as a meaning not as tedious rules or constraints.
ReplyDeleteRight! Even I often make a mistake that I speak and write English ungrammatically even though I know the grammar exactly. It is because we Korean have learned English grammar separately from speaking and writing. The problem is that even though we know that way is not that effective and efficient, we've still taught and learned English grammar that way.
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