Grammar teaching...

...can be fun and effective!

Hello all. Welcome to the 114th edition of TEPS Weekly! 

We recently observed a Grade 6 lesson where the English teacher was teaching the past perfect continuous tense. She started the class with a very clear and well-prepared explanation of the concept and the rules:

Imagine you're telling a story about something that was happening for some time before something else happened in the past. That's when you use the past perfect continuous tense. Think of it like this: It's the ‘had been doing’ tense.

Now let’s understand when we use it.

• Something kept happening before something else: ‘I had been living here for two years before I moved.’ 

• Why something happened in the past: ‘She had been studying hard, and that's why she passed.’ 

• Things that could have happened but didn't: ‘She would have been feeling better if she had taken her medicine.’ 

Let’s understand how we make it. You need three things:

• had – always the same for everyone: I had, you had, he/she/it had, we had, they had

• been – always stays the same

• the -ing form of the main verb – like reading, writing, eating, playing

Then, the teacher wrote examples on the board.

Statement: I had been reading this book for two hours when he called me.

Question: What had you been doing before I came?

She then summarised it in this way:

The simple rule is that we use ‘had been’ + ‘-ing’ verb to talk about actions that were ongoing before another past event or to explain a past result, OR to imagine ongoing situations in the past that didn't actually happen.

We were impressed by the preparation and clarity that the teacher demonstrated – yet, we were not surprised when most students struggled through the sentence-writing worksheet, using the wrong tense (the more familiar past continuous or past perfect) OR using the past perfect continuous tense in the incorrect situations.

Grammar is complicated and tedious. Rules are tough to memorise. And so, the teacher explaining the concept with complete clarity isn’t enough – the key is to give students LOTS of authentic opportunities to read and use these grammar rules in reading and writing. Here are three research-backed strategies to make grammar teaching both fun and effective:

1. Teaching with real contexts: Contextualised grammar means instead of learning grammar rules all by themselves, we learn them while we're actually using language for real reasons. This happens when we read stories, write emails or talk to each other. The idea is to see how grammar helps us understand how words work together in real situations.

Let’s take the example of the following Grade 2 learning outcome: Students will be able to write sentences with nouns, pronouns and verbs.

In a conventional class, a teacher will recap the meaning of nouns, pronouns and verbs, ask for a few examples of each, and then have students complete a worksheet that might look something like this:

But contextualised grammar teaching and learning looks very different. Imagine that an artist visited the school and put on a puppet show for students. For contextualised grammar teaching, the teacher can use this opportunity to have the students write a thank you note to the artist, using nouns, pronouns and verbs!

Okay class, let's write a thank you note to the artist who showed us the puppets! 

So, who should our thank you note be for? (the artist). What were some of the nouns we saw in the puppet show? (lion, princess, stage). What did the puppets do? What were the verbs? (danced, sang, talked). Now, instead of saying ‘the artist’ many times, can we use a pronoun when we talk about him or her? (he / she).

Let's start our note. "Dear [Artist's Name]," Now, use a verb to tell me one thing the puppets did and a noun for which puppet did it. Someone give me a sentence! What else did he/she do with the puppets? What did we do while watching? Use some verbs! We can finish by saying thank you to the artist again!

1. Leveraging mentor texts: Mentor texts are often pieces of writing by published authors – and so, a mentor text serves as a strong, well-written example that we can learn from. These examples are helpful for understanding grammar because they show us how skilled writers actually use grammatical concepts in their work.

Let’s take the example of the following Grade 4 learning outcome: Students will be able to identify where commas should be placed to separate items in a list.

In a conventional class, a teacher will explain the rule this way:

When you have a list of three or more things in a sentence, you need to put a comma after each item except for the very last one. We usually put the word ‘and’ before the final item. So if I say, "I like apples bananas and oranges," we put a comma after "apples" but not after "bananas." Now, let's practise on this worksheet.

But mentor texts offer a different approach. The teacher might show the class Red Crayon's letter from The Day the Crayons Quit and point to the sentence: All year long I wear myself out colouring fire engines, apples, strawberries and everything else that is red. She can then ask, “Look at the little marks between 'fire engines,' 'apples' and 'strawberries.' What do you notice about where they are placed in the list of things that Red Crayon colours?”

“These little marks are called commas. They help us see each thing in the list clearly as we read. The author didn't put a comma after the last thing, 'strawberries,' because the word ‘and’ is used to connect it to the last item, ‘everything else’.”

By looking at how a real author used commas in his story, the students aren't just learning a rule. They are seeing why the author used them – to make the list easy to understand while reading. It's like seeing a good player use a technique in a real game, not just hearing about the technique. They see it working in a real piece of writing.

1. Working with sentences: Sentence-level pedagogy is about showing students different ways to put their word “blocks” together to make good sentences. Instead of just learning the names of the blocks (like nouns and verbs), students actually practise connecting them in different ways to build interesting things (clear sentences). They might learn how to:

2. Construct more complex sentences by joining short, choppy sentences into longer, more fluent ones – Sentence Combining

3. Add information to short sentences to make writing more detailed and interesting – Sentence Expansion

4. Replicate the structure of a sentence while replacing the original words with their own – Sentence Imitation

Let’s go back to the example of the Grade 6 lesson we read about at the start of the article. The learning outcome was: Students will be able to construct grammatically correct sentences using the past perfect continuous tense.

We read about how clearly the teacher explained the rules, and yet, how students struggled to apply the rules to write their own sentences. A more effective approach would be to use the ‘Sentence Combining’ strategy. 

The teacher could provide students with pairs of short, choppy sentences that describe a sequence of past events, where the first action was ongoing before the second. The teacher will need to first demonstrate how to combine these sentences using the past perfect continuous for the ongoing action, using the ‘had been doing’ form for the action that happened for a longer time. For example: 

• Short, choppy sentences: I lived here for two years. Then I moved to another city.

• Combined sentence using past perfect continuous: I had been living here for two years before I moved to another city.

Then, students work independently or in pairs on other such sentences. When students put short sentences together, they have to think about how to show that one thing was happening for a while before something else happened. This makes them actually USE the ‘had been doing’ tense correctly and understand how it works in sentences, instead of just remembering a rule.

Making grammar teaching fun and effective requires a shift from simply explaining rules to actively engaging students with language. This involves three key strategies: contextualised instruction, where grammar is learned through real reading and writing; leveraging mentor texts, using published authors as examples; and sentence-level pedagogy, where students manipulate and build sentences. Which strategy will you try in your class?

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Edition: 4.21