Involving Students in Grammar Work: Not Too Little, Not Too Much
Michael Swan
Students learn best if they are involved -- if they can participate in the choice of learning activities, express their attitudes to their lessons, and use their personal knowledge, feelings and imagination in their work. As everybody knows, this is not easy to achieve. We have all seen classes -- and perhaps taught them -- where the students never escape from the two-dimensional cardboard world of the teaching materials. Whether because of the teacher's fear of losing control, the general educational ethos, or simple lack of know-how, nothing personally interesting or involving ever happens. Twenty-five or thirty rich and varied internal worlds remain silent, while everybody does and says the same kind of thing.
Attempts to change things can go too far. Early approaches to 'learner autonomy' sometimes came close to a point where students decided for themselves what to learn, chose how to learn it, selected and worked through appropriate materials, and tested themselves, with the teacher simply acting as a consultant. The results were generally disappointing. More recent attempts to avoid 'imposing' pre-planned structural or lexical syllabuses have also sometimes delivered less than they promised. (Whatever the attractions of a task-based syllabus, for example, it is not a very efficient way of ensuring that students learn all the high-priority grammar and vocabulary they need.)
How can we get maximum student involvement in grammar lessons
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