Senior School Grade 1.

greenpaint · Post by **greenpaint** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 12:54 am

I've just been given two new classes. I'm teaching in China and they are in Senior School grade one, from what I can gather this is like high school for them. They're a serious class and keen to just get on with learning English. They have asked specifically to be taught grammar. Last week they were learning relative clauses. I'm terming them intermediate learners, but again I'm not quite sure if this is right. I've just gotten so used to teaching middle school students.

I'm not quite sure how to go about designing a grammar course. I was thinking of giving them a needs analysis questionnaire but again I'm not quite sure how to lay it out. Should I include grammar questions from every one of the categories including all tenses? How then do I structure the course? Is there a specific structure by which one usually teaches grammar?

Thanks for your help.

EDIT: I'm teaching in a training school, giving extra tuition.

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 9:48 am

I Googled "teach grammar esl" and got a lot of hits. Here is one"
http://www.eslpartyland.com/teachers/nov/grammar.htm
There was also a video called "Teaching Grammar in context" if you just type in "Teach Grammar"

greenpaint · Post by **greenpaint** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 11:58 am

Hi, thanks for your reply.
I've been googling all day, and while you're right and there are tonnes of resources online, the problem is a lot of websites are either blocked (thank you very much the great firewall) or they focus on individual grammar points, which (don't get me wrong) are in themselves helpful (and I've been making great use of them).

I was just kinda looking for advice from others from their experience on how to teach a grammar course, if maybe anyone has any hints that might help me avoid giving inadequate lessons or designing a course that covers an insufficient amount of content. There is no syllabus or anything laid out by the school, so for this one class I pretty much have free reign.

.... I just want to make sure I put it to good use...

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Thu Oct 22, 2009 8:51 pm

I teach using Systemic Functional Grammar and think it is a great way to teach grammar. There are a ton of websites for SFG and we talked about it in the Applied Linguistics forum. I use the student's own writing and break it down for them showing them what they are using and if it is different from what they do either from language transfer or just classic ESL mistakes.

If you send me an Internet address, I can copy it for you and send it on.
It seems to me that any grammar book will have a list of chapter headings and you could use that as a curriculum guide. For example, the one I sent you covers modals, noun clauses, conditonals, etc. and if you made sure you covered all the ones listed you will have covered a great deal.

I always post the curriculum on a big poster by the door as the students go out so they can see what they have covered and still need to cover or can ask about. I also have a basket full of blank exercises that we have done so they can review or get one if they missed the class.

If you type in Systemic Functional Grammar in the Applied Linguistics forum on Dave's there is a first lesson outlined by klaus.

There is an excellent paper by a teacher in China (I will try to find it on my computer and give you the address) and she said that she teaches capitals and punctuation first because they don't do that naturally and how to use a dictionary, a thesaurus, and how to research in the library because they don't usually know how to do that either. I would add a style book.