I am and will always remain of the firm and studied opinion that grammar teachers secretly hate their jobs and yearn for something exciting but are afraid to leave the shores of book safety that have kept them wallowing in their jobs, but which shores are now eroding fast. But what’s wrong with teaching a little grammar in each CI class period? It’s kind of fun and does no harm.
For years here many of us have been devoting hours per day beyond our normal teaching duties, not to mention huge chunks of vacation time, to getting better at this fascinating and productive work of teaching using comprehensible input. We don’t do it because we are crazy fanatics but because we have the vision and the courage and the determination to work toward change in a profession that sorely needs it for the betterment of ourselves and others and for society in general. In the sense that revolutionaries are patriots, we are that.
We pointedly avoid grammar instruction of the old variety because we know it doesn’t work. But perhaps we are overly fanatical. Now I am starting to think that we should throw the dog a bone here, not because teaching grammar works – it doesn’t. But how bad would it be to teach five minutes of grammar a day? We would lose 900 minutes (15 hours) of CI a year. Big deal. They need over 10,000 hours (or whatever!) for command of the language anyway.
Five minutes a day of grammar. Hmmm. It would not only allow us to say that “we teach grammar” (giving the dogs a much needed bone) but it would also satisfy our own inner grammar nerds. Not such a bad idea, huh? Kind of fun? Five minutes? I am going to test this idea next week. I’ll slip it into my lesson plan right after FVR. Five minutes. I’ll report back later.
Here’s my plan: The first words after the mellow and restful FVR period of silent and soft reading will be something like, “Class, are they meeting their friends?” in English. Of course, the kids will look up wanting to know whom I am talking about. I will repeat the sentence. They will then realize that I want them to go get their composition books and go translate that sentence.
I give them the infinitive on the board and that’s all. They try to write it out in their comp books. Then I write the correct version on the board, they correct their work and go put their composition books back in the right stack in the proper place in the back of the room. Five minutes.
Benefits of this activity:
- It allows us to claim that “we teach grammar” in TPRS classes, thus placating those people who, very oddly, seem in need of being placated. (Of course, we know that they learn the grammar in other much more authentic three dimensional ways, esp. via reading, but let’s not try to convince people who just don’t get that concept of it.)
- Satisfy our inner grammar nerds.
- Give the students a little break from all the input.
- Eat up time. Five classes a day is too much. With this plan, we have to teach (and our students get a break from us) for 25 minutes a day, or if you are James or Paul 35 minutes.
You may even want to do two sentences. Ten minutes. Hey, live a little.
Nice tip from James Hosler on this:
“The exercises or examples need to be taken from past class stories. That makes sense and we would probably all do that anyways. But something’s really cool about that: It makes it possible for me to keep holding everyone accountable for all the old structures. Just a collection of 8 sentences from past class stories lets me recycle tons of old stuff. Sometimes it can be difficult to include “plays” in a new story, but with a little light grammar we can see it in at least one sentence every day.”