A GOOD GRAMMAR PRESENTATION
For Teachers Of English As A Foreign Language


1. Is a surprise

As strange as it might seem, a disbelieving look, a "No, really??" or most of the class getting what you are trying to elicit wrong are all good signs in a grammar explanation- signs that you have really got their attention, that you are teaching them something they don`t know yet, and that it is something they are likely to be something they are still thinking about when they leave class and so remember for a longer time than usual. Ways to achieve this sense of surprise include contradicting their previous teacher or lower level textbook, contrasting with L1, contrasting spoken and written English grammar, and contrasting prescriptive grammar and how the language is really used nowadays. Something turning out to be much easier than they originally thought is also a nice surprise!

2. Is interactive

Ways of getting students involved in the grammar explanation stage include: getting them to give you example sentences from their imaginations, previous conversations or the textbook; eliciting the names of grammatical forms; getting them to match grammatical names, example sentences and meanings; getting students to prepare grammar presentations for the class for homework; using guided discovery tasks they work through in pairs; and deliberately making mistakes they can correct you on.

3. Is copied down

After a student has understood your grammar explanation, the next stage should be copying it down. You can ensure that everyone has a chance to copy it down accurately by having the pause for copying written into your lesson plan, making sure nobody copies before you want them to so that they join in the eliciting and don`t make others feel guilty for copying down later, and putting your OHP sheets etc somewhere students can see them after class to compare their own versions to.

4. Is easy to copy down

You can make this easier by putting all the text on the board into a table (e.g. 3 columns for tense, example sentence and meaning, and three rows for the three past tenses), using very simple time lines and sketches, limiting the amount of text, and giving them a gapped version of the grammar presentation to copy the important things off the board into.

5. Can be easily referred to

As well as something that is easy to understand and easy to copy down, you will want to make sure that the grammar explanation is something that the students and teacher can easily refer to during later grammar practice and error correction stages. To achieve this you will need to make sure that the grammar explained is exactly the same as is used later in the lesson. You can also make it easy to refer to by keeping it up on the board (in which case you will need to make sure when you write it that there is room around it to write other things that come up), saving it as an OHP slide you can put up when you need it, or by making students write it in a separate grammar part of their notebooks.

6. Is actually referred to

The easiest way of making sure that students actually do refer to the grammar presentation later in the lesson is to make some of the answers to the exercises you have given them exactly the same words as you used in the grammar explanation. The same thing can also be done with useful phrases for communicative activities, or for sentences from the homework. You can also encourage its use by getting students to refer back to it every time you do error correction on that grammar point in future lessons.

7. Stays up on the board

This point is mainly just one aspect of the points above, but you will also need to make sure that at least part of the grammar presentation can stay up on the board without giving too much away- for example by erasing key words from the example sentences so they can`t copy the whole of the next grammar exercise straight from the board or by briefly making it unavailable with paper stuck over it with magnets or sellotape or by turning off the OHP.

8. Is at the right time in the lesson

There are two parts to thinking about this- making sure the students are alert enough when the grammar explanation comes to understand it and remember it, and making sure that it fits in with the rest of the lesson. You can make sure they are alert by making the grammar explanation near the beginning of the lesson, perhaps after a quick warmer. The end of the lesson is the second most alert period, with the middle being the worst. You can add to this alertness by making them need the grammar by getting them used to a lesson structure where practice always follows a grammar explanation, or by asking them to do a task where the language could be useful first as in TTT and some versions of TBA.

9. Is at the right stage of the lesson

This depends very much on what your teaching approach is and on the specific grammar point. For example, do you want to introduce the grammar point after the students have had