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Date Posted: 16:44:02 05/02/07 Wed
Author: Marina
Subject: Task 2 - Marina

Teaching grammar through different manners

Teaching grammar is a current topic nowadays. Due to the importance of grammar in a second language learning, most of teachers discusses what are the best techniques and activities to teach and practice it. Those activities help students to acquire grammar and communicate appropriately, meaningfully and accurately. Activities to teach grammar can be classified according to two kinds of grammar teaching: covert and overt.

The first kind of grammar teaching is covert that according to Jeremy Harmer, in the book Teaching and Learning Grammar, is where grammatical facts are hidden from the students, that is, when the attention of the activity is drawn to the activity itself and not to the grammar form. In this kind of grammar teaching, the students learn the grammar implicitly and unconsciously. This way, the teachers help the students to learn and practice the language without a formal teaching. An excellent example of this kind of activity is text comparison. Teachers get students to discover new grammar by asking them to compare different genres of texts, for instance, newspaper articles, poetry, and advertisements. So, students will concentrate on the use of grammar in each text and they will discover for themselves what grammar is, and what it means. Besides, learners will see language in its authentic context and then they will understand how it works. Another example of covert grammar teaching is information gap activity, which is a kind of interaction between students where they need to ask each other for information in order to have the task completed. Thus, those activities could be classified as covert since students do not have the focus on form, but on the language and on its function itself.

The second kind of grammar teaching is overt, where the teacher provides rules and explicit explanations for the students. In other words, unlike the covert, the focus is on form and not on the use and/or function. According to Jeremy Harmer, it is when the information is openly presented. A good example of an overt activity is that activity where students need to find the mistake in a given sentence. In this kind of activity, the focus is completely on form since the students are dealing with rules and structures. Another example is when the teacher gives the same sentence in different forms (verb tense) in order to the students compare and explain the differences among them. Those activities can be classified as overt because of the attention is given to form and how explicit is the teaching of grammar on them.

In conclusion, there are two types of grammar teaching: covert and overt. The former is an implicit teaching of grammar and the latter is an explicit and conscious learning of it. Each activity developed in the teaching of grammar can belong to one of these two types, which have their own peculiarities and importance.


References:

HARMER, Jeremy. Teaching and Learning Grammar. Longman, 1986.

CELCE-MURCIA, M. (Ed.) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. 3ed. Thomson, 2001 – p251-266

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