The presentation of structural form

One of the teacher’s jobs is to show how the new language is formed – how the grammar works and how it is put together. One way of doing this is to explain the grammar in detail, using grammatical terminology and giving a mini-lecture on the subject. However, this seems problematical for two reasons. Firstly, many students may find grammatical concepts difficult. Secondly, it will be difficult unless the teacher is a fluent speaker of the students’ native language. In other words, it will only be possible in a monolingual group at lower levels if the teacher conducts the explanation in the student’ mother tongue. In a multilingual group such as those found in Britain, America, Australia and sometimes strikingly rather often in the Crimea such explanations for beginners will be almost impossible.

A more effective and less frightening way of presenting form is to let the students see and/or hear the new language, drawing their attention in a number of ways to the grammatical elements of which it is made.

These comments apply particularly to beginner and elementary students whose language is limited. At lower levels, we must usually find simpler and more transparent ways of giving students grammatical information. More advanced students may profit from more explicit grammatical explanations to a certain extent. Although even in their case, it should be remembered that few people are comfortable with grammatical explanations and terminology.

The presentation of form, then, can usually take place without the need for complicated grammatical explanation. Instead, the teacher can give the students a clear oral model of the new language with written backup if necessary, attracting their attention to important points.

11.2.1. Forms and patterns: Analysing the form

Before we introduce any new language, we should have analysed the form we are going to teach so that we understand this grammar form and how it is said and written, and also the grammatical pattern we are going to teach it in.

Suppose that the new language to be introduced is the third person singular of the present simple tense (e.g. ‘ The President gets up at six o’clock’). The grammar point we wish to teach is clearly the occurrence of the ‘ s ’ on the verb stem. But we can use the third person singular of the present simple in all sorts of different constructions (e.g. ‘ He loves his wife’, ‘It never rains but it pours’, ‘She lives in Guadalajara’, ‘He goes to work by bus on Wednesdays’, etc. ). In the first sentence, we have a subject + verb + object construction. The second sentence, in fact, has two clauses; the first one has an adverb of frequency, the second doesn’t. The third sentence has a subject, a verb and an adverbial (‘ in Guadalajara’). The last sentence has three adverbials (‘ to work’, ‘by bus’, ‘on Wednesdays’).

As teachers and materials writers, we will make a choice about the grammatical pattern in which we will introduce the new grammar point. In other words, we might decide to concentrate on a pattern of subject + verb + adverbial. This would produce such sentences as ‘ Le lives in London’, ‘She works in Cambridge’, etc. The point about such a pattern is that it is made up of changeable units, which allow creating different sentences with the same grammar (or pattern) simply by changing vocabulary items. We can demonstrate the principle of changeable units using our S(ubject) + V(erb) + A(dverbial) pattern in the following way:

If, when we introduce the present simple (third person singular) for the first time, we stick to a pattern such as the one shown above it will help students to focus on the new grammar point (the ‘ s ’ on the verb). Students will very soon, however, be able to use the new verb tense in different patterns. This can be tried at the immediate creativity stage, or even before with a good class.

The idea of changeable units is that they allow us to create models for the students to work with. A model is an example of the pattern. Thus, the teacher who is introducing the present simple (third person singular) will ask the students to work with a number of sentences all of which conform to a pattern such as the subject + verb + adverbial sequence above. This will be during the accurate reproduction stage. As soon as possible, however, students will be encouraged to use the present simple with other grammatical patterns.

So far, we have considered the changeable units for a grammatical structure. Functional language, too, will often contain the same kinds of units. If we are teaching students how to invite, for example, we might introduce the form ‘ Would you like to’ + verb. The latter part of this pattern is clearly changeable, so that we can introduce models such as ‘ Would you like to come to the cinema/ have lunch/ play tennis? ’ etc.

Certain phrases, which teachers may introduce, or which appear in the textbook, however, may not have such changeable units – or at least the choices may be very restricted. For the function of agreeing, for example, we can say ‘ I’d agree with you there ’. The only real possibility for substitution would be to say ‘ I’d go along with you there’.

The teacher needs to be clear about how the language to be presented is said and written. Thus, the ‘ s ’ of our present simple ending sometimes sounds like [s] (e.g. works, writes, laughs, etc.). Sometimes it sounds like [z] (e.g. plays, says, lives, etc.) and sometimes it sounds like [iz] (e.g. teaches, dresses, washes, etc.). We may decide to introduce these verbs in a definite order depending on the different sounds of the ending. We will not do so, of course, if we think the different sounds will not cause problems.

We must also work out how the models we are going to introduce are normally stressed so that in saying them to the students we will give a clear idea of correct spoken English.