Teaching English Grammar? Relax - You Know More Than You Think

Teachers can still get the jitters when delivering the rules of English grammar to students. Francis Jones is empathetic, but equally positive that the move to increase focus in this area will lead to good outcomes – for teachers and pupils alike.

I was talking to an NQT recently, who admitted that she was daunted by the amount of ‘mugging up’ she’ll have to do to attain a firm grasp of the English language components she’ll be expected to teach to her pupils next term. Her anxieties were not lost on me.

During my early days in the world of EFL teaching, I was shocked to realise just how little I knew about the very subject in which I was supposed to be an expert, and which I was expected to teach to those with a supposedly inferior knowledge.

Obviously, as a native speaker and graduate, I had much higher levels of fluency and accuracy than even the most highly skilled and learned students. However, understanding the machinations of the language was an area in which I was, despite my English Literature degree, something of a novice – unlike my students who seemed to know it all.

As those early classroom encounters revealed my ignorance of some of the most basic fundamentals, I came to wonder why on earth I hadn’t been taught all this in school? Twenty-six years later, I can recall foreign students - many of them just out of high school - whispering advice to friends as to which component of their mother tongue related to the English I was teaching at that moment.

Okay, ‘Es el perfecto,’ may well have been an instance of one Spanish student telling another that we were covering the present perfect tense, but hearing, ‘Es el sujunctivo,’ whilst I was teaching the third conditional was proof that these people were not only learning an additional language, they were also able to apply a knowledge of their own to help make sense of it.

It set me wondering if the decision not to teach the tenses and structure of the English language is in some way responsible for the UK’s unenviable reputation as a nation of monoglots. More than this, though, I began to think that this lack of knowledge was a hindrance to native English speakers when using their own language, particularly when it came to mastering the skills of writing and speaking.

This became obvious to me whilst working on literacy courses throughout the UK in the ensuing years, and no more so than when I was called upon to help students with various miscalculations, they were making with regard to time; e.g. mixing tenses within the same sentence, or inappropriately within the same paragraph.

And whereas many able students can use a tense like the past perfect without even realising it (we had some excellent examples of Year 5 pupils demonstrating this on our WriteKey course only this week), trying to help pupils who demonstrate an inability to write accurately about events that have occurred at different times in the past can be bamboozling for them, and frustrating for the teacher. Imagine having to teach the rules of football to a complete novice, and being forced to begin with the offside law: well, if a student has never even heard of the present simple or the present perfect continuous, this is what it can feel like.

The result of this, of course, is that the foreign students I have taught have possessed a higher technical knowledge of English than the native speakers I have taught of the same age, and older. Surely it can’t be right when overseas students have more language choices than native speakers, not only in their own language but in English, too?

Thankfully, necessary changes have been made to the curriculum which address these issues, with the same subject matter in which I was so lacking prior to my EFL training now being delivered to all students, not just those in private education.

Understanding how language works equips us all with the power to communicate and argue our point of view in an articulate and considered manner: a set of strong linguistic skills encourages others to engage with our thoughts, opinions and ideas - whether it be through the written or spoken word.

To those mainstream teachers who worry about having to deliver this content, I would say that you already have 90% of the knowledge: you don’t have to learn how to speak near-perfect English, you just have to learn why and how you already do. Understanding this will enable you to help your students understand how English works, thus opening up a world of opportunities to them in the process.