Job Discussion Forums

[Guy Courchesne]

[Prof.Gringo]

[Isla Guapa]

[nickpellatt]

I would suggest that lots of people who get into TEFL have no business being there!

I think prior to entering TEFL, most people have little knowledge of grammatical terms and constructions, although they may be competent at using the language. The exceptions would be those who are already competent students of another language. I would quote my son as an example, who had very good English A level grades, and writes and co-edits a magazine. His command of English is good, but his knowledge of grammatical constructions is minimal. He couldnt explain a second conditional statement, and he probably wouldnt know what one is!

TEFL courses dont teach grammar either. I think many students start a course expecting to learn grammar, but that isnt their purpose at all. The most common phrase one hears is 'you learn grammar, when you teach it', and this process of acquiring grammatical knowledge can take a few years in the classroom. Thats why I normally suggest people forget reference books, and look at teaching material. Becoming familiar with a lesson plan to teach present perfect normally illustrates rules, usage and problems in a way that is accessible to a grammar newbie, and then relevant to a classroom later.

In my experience, approaching the teachers room with a grammatical problem normally leads to a variety of answers, and some people dont know, or dont really get to grips with the query. That happens on forums too. Some people answer a different question, some people post at length with a linguistic analysis that is more suitable to a post-grad assignment than a TEFL class.

What a course normally does is prepare trainees to expect questions, and teach them how to break down the problem, analyse it, and then come back to the student at a later date. Courses also teach trainees how to anticipate these problems and hopefully go through many of the possible scenarios and problems before they arise when teaching a grammar point.

Courses arent the holy grail, I often think they just open the door and let you peek inside a well organised, structured and informed TEFL classroom. Its something trainees need to build upon during the initial few years of the TEFL journey.

OP - Have a basic handle on some grammatical terms is enough. Being familiar with (not an expert in) the tense system, conditional statements, parts of speech, and IPA is going to be more than the average trainee enters the classroom with. Dont worry too much, just enjoy the experience and give it 100% when you're there!

[fluffyhamster]

I'm not quite sure if this has been answered in the above, but the difference between the Essential and Basic versions of Murphy's 'Grammar in Use' is merely that the former is for British English, whilst the latter is for American English (hence the co-author Smalzer); then, there are differences in illustration-design (the latter has drawings similar to the Interchange series, but in two-tone/not in full colour; overall they are more professional and consistent, if a bit uniform and bland, compared to those in the British version), and only the Basic comes with an audio CD, IIRC. Both books are for beginner to pre-intermediate level learners.

You'd probably be better though to get the intermediate-level English Grammar in Use, as it will obviously cover more points than the Essential/Basic book can (not that the intermediate-level book doesn't quickly cover a lot of the same points that the Essential/Basic does). I'm not sure if there are quite the regional "BrE versus AmE" versions of this intermediate work.

Bear in mind however that books like Murphy are more for learners than teachers, so you might eventually need or want to get something more comprehensive (an A-Z of usage like Swan's, or that from COBUILD; or indeed a "grammar proper" that builds from words and parts of speech through clauses to sentences and beyond...Eastwood's Oxford Guide to English Grammar is good and hits the right sort of level), the use of which could be assisted by (being au fait with the terminology used in 'em by) reading formalish introductions/inductions to grammar such as Leech et al's English Grammar for Today (far more appealing and approachable than Parrot's book IMHO!); then there are dictionaries of 'grammar' (i.e. that incorporate terms from general linguistics too - from phonetics, morphology, semantics etc) such as Trask's Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar and Chalker & Weiner's Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (the two complement each other very well in a more chatty/discursive, versus more comprehensive but necessarily succinct way), which can both come in very handy for clarifying concepts and those concepts' utility etc. You can find out more about grammar books (generally, and for the CELTA) and the aforementioned specific books/authors by searching these Job Discussion forums, and the Teacher Discussion ones too, for the relevant terms in conjunction with me as author (I've made quite a few posts, too many perhaps, over the years!).

Regarding Ur's Grammar Practice Activities, that isn't a bad book, but some of its activities are hampered by the unimaginative if not useless example phrases (e.g. Comparatives: 'This pen is longer than that one') with which Ur contextualizes the grammar and thus the activities, so you may need to find better exemplars (in your other grammar books, and don't forget learner dictionaries, and online corpora such as those at BYU etc - again, do a search of my posts) to make things more functionally useful. It's a shame though that Ur herself didn't supply more real than merely 'display' language a lot of the time (I guess her defence would be that times change and only you the teacher will know what is current and relevant to a particular class, so you can but and will indeed have to extrapolate from her general/vague pointers).

As for Harmer's TPoELT4, that's also not bad, though I think something got lost a bit once it began to "sprawl" after the 2nd edition, and it may not be as interesting or succinct as other books you might go on to read (e.g. Lewis & Hill's Practical Techniques, Scrivener's Learning Teaching, Bowen & Marks' Inside Teaching, Richards' The Context of Language Teaching, Thornbury & Slade's Conversation, Lewis' The Lexical Approach, etc etc etc).

[VladJR87]

Thank you everyone for the wonderful responses. I went with the English Grammar in Use (Intermediate). I believe the combination of books I have now, on top of the resources the internet and school libraries will have- will be quite sufficient. I am confident what I was lacking was something very basic. I have to say, even when I was learning Russian, I am not really the rule-focused learner, rather I pick up on what is "natural" and not. I am confident there are a lot of downsides to that approach, though undoubtedly some benefits as well (but most importantly, it just works better for me!).

Though I think there is definitely a bias against teaching grammar to my generation and younger, this learning style of mine might also explain some of my lack of understandings.

I am really looking forward to it. I cannot believe how quickly it is approaching- twenty some odd days!

[VladJR87]

I have not spent a ton of time in this book yet, but so far it is perfect . I tried to do quite a bit of studying before my interview with BKC (for the CELTA program) and found things very complicated. Reading the one page on Present Continuous and it is crystal clear .

[Isla Guapa]