Teaching Grammar to high CL/CH/CJ

It’s possible to use articles/stories/texts to present grammar to students. Doing this can be more engaging and easier on teachers.

Here are a few guidelines when using a text to bring out a language point.

1. generate interest - get the students thinking about where you are ‘leading’ them in a lesson
2. pre teach vocabulary - choose a few important chunks of language the students do not know and pre-teach them
3. gist task - open to the text and task students with sequencing/matching/ordering some aspect of the text. This is getting the students to get a ‘gist’ scan of the text.
4. students compare with each other - check the answers of the gist task and elicit language
5. detailed task - give the students a more detailed task, like answering focus questions about the text
6. students compare with each other - check the answers of the detailed task and elicit language
7. present meaning - present the specific meaning of the grammar/target language that is ‘modeled’ in the text
8. check understanding - ask yes/no questions that make sure the students understand what the grammar means
9. model,drill - model the phonetic oral form and drill the students to speak it aloud with your modeled phonology
10. teach/elicit forms - this is where you can complete book based grammar tasks - substitutions, fill in the blanks, re-arranging, etc.
11. personalized task - get the students to create examples of the target/grammar in full questions/sentences etc, these examples should be personal to them
12. speaking/writing activity - consolidate the lesson with an interactive speaking activity which focuses on full participation and student talk time

This whole segment might take 45 minutes