Teaching grammar is an essential part of school education or adult learning. Without good grammar, spoken or written words lose much of their meaning and most of their value.
Grammar is a very important thing to get right, and teachers should take extra care to impart proper grammar to all their students. Sadly, grammar is often seen as a difficult and boring subject and one popular method of teaching is to just repeat the correct grammar for a certain situation over and over until it is memorised and able to be repeated, like a parrot. This is dull for both teachers and students, and often only results in the students being able to repeat what they have learned, rather than resulting in a complete understanding that can be applied to all situations.
English grammar is very complex, and all its intricacies cannot truly be learned by rote, they must be really understood – and understanding is most easily achieved when students are engaged, interested and having fun during a lesson. To make sure you’re covering all the necessary topics with your students, you could check out the Grammar Boost lesson plans here.
Word puzzles are a useful and interactive method whereby students can learn all sorts of important parts of English grammar. They can be used to encourage students to identify and understand various parts of a sentence; grammatical concepts like synonyms, tenses and conjugations; or incorrectly used grammar. Word puzzles such as crosswords are easily modified to suit all age and skill levels and introduce an element of fun competition into the learning process, so they can be invaluable in forging a full and lasting understanding of English grammar.
Another game-based method of teaching grammar that you could use in teaching your students is Bingo. The game of Bingo is based on people marking off spaces on their card until they fill in a row or column fully. In normal Bingo these are numbers, drawn at random from a pool. In grammar lesson Bingo, they could be pronouns, verbs, nouns, sentence structure, antonyms, and so on – students could use the daily newspaper and attempt to find correct examples of these grammatical concepts faster than each other, thereby “winning” the game – and learning in the process! Short and fun grammar exercises like this can be included on a regular basis during your lessons to keep correct grammar usage fresh your students’ minds and improve their recall of the topics at hand.
