«Grammar-to-go» With Humpty’s Song

 Teaching grammar in the EFL classroom is a challenging task which has earned quite the reputation for its many difficult aspects. The need for grammatical knowledge within a language is not debatable to me. It serves as the rules of a language and main ground for extensive language learning. “Grammar-to-go” is a possible solution to the important and difficult task. This method revolves around a subtle internalization of grammatical terms which traditionally creates dislike and poor motivation within the pupils. Short texts like songs or poems are optimal to carry out this method. Tim, Maja and me had been given several lessons and the complete control of the class to carry out this method. We decided that word classes would be our focus because it’s not too difficult and it suited the English level of the class as a whole. Naturally this blog post will be about how we planned it to go, how it actually went and my own thoughts on this method of teaching.

Planning and introduction

During planning and preparations we looked at all the different words and their respective classes.  This proved useful because it was easier for us to see the specifics on how to use it in class. The class as a whole was nearly 30 pupils and they’re proficiency varied considerably. They were using the “Stairs books” and were accordingly split in to the three separate stages where one is the weakest and three the strongest. I had chosen stage three which had eight pupils. Before splitting them into to three we introduced the poem to the whole class. Reading the first two stanzas together seemed motivating and most of the class participated. We decided to repeat this reading at the start of every lesson to help them get acquainted to the poem. The idea was also to memorize it to a certain extent, however it became clear that this was too enthusiastic.

First try

The idea I had for my teaching scheme was firstly to let them identify the adjectives in the poem. Afterwards I went through each of the pupils’ individual effort and recognized the common mistakes. They were much faster than I anticipated and they had very few mistakes. I was intentionally dragging time because I realized that my teaching scheme weren’t properly adjusted to their proficiency. As the final task I made them replace the located adjectives with new ones, the challenge in this task is maintaining sense in the text. They didn’t seem motivated and finished rather quickly. As the class was coming to an end I let them draw something from the poem including adjectives like: “green, large, small, round etc.” They made little effort on making nice drawings and I knew they were rather displeased with the lesson.
Here are is an example of how adjective replacement went:

Second try

Our evaluation of the first lesson was unanimously; we had prepared poorly. Disappointment and some guidance proved to particularly motivating for me. I prepared an entertaining and challenging exercise based on the classical child game memory. The next lesson I had the same stage and we started the lesson reading the poem aloud. This time I shifted the focus to nouns as there was a wide specter of nouns. After a repeating the recognition exercise from my failed lesson, we started playing memory.
Memory is the game were the players take turns trying to pick out pairs from notes or pictures lying upside-down. This game revolved around translating nouns from the poem and some new nouns to challenge them. I included irregular nouns like “teeth” and “shelves”. When they didn’t understand they simply asked me in English and continued. I also made sure to stop and explain the difference between regular and irregular nouns. It proved as a great exercise because all of the pupils were familiar with the game. After the introduction and some short explanation of the rules they started playing.
They enjoyed the game however they seemed to struggle to progress. I saw that I had included too many notes, making the probability of finding pairs less. This forced me to activate them in an oral exercise where they read to each other in pairs. While they read I removed pairs from the pool of notes and re-engaged them when I was done. This little break gave them further motivation and they seemed to forget that they were learning about nouns.

The evaluation

After the lesson was finished I asked them if they enjoyed it and the feedback was positive. I engaged them in conversation about nouns and irregular nouns. Then I showed them some conjugations of the irregular versus the regular nouns.
I like the idea of a more subtle way of learning something you maybe don’t appreciate so much. However I dislike the fact that this method presupposes that grammar is something of distaste. I think the traditional view that teaching grammar is difficult is one of the main causes as to why it actually becomes this way. Of course this varies between classes but I don’t believe methods like “Grammar-to-go” are necessary. Many pupils are engaged in learning a new language and I would rather go with a more traditional approach with creative tasks and solutions.
I do believe this method could work well for classes above seventh grade and it is best suited for the demotivated learners. However in fifth grade they’re still relatively new to grammar and complicating things would work against it’s purpose. Learning about grammar without using grammatical terms is like being taught to paint with a hammer.

Sigve Guttormsen