Grammar is one of the main ingredients of language but there have always been heated debates about its role in the language learning classroom. Even you and your fellow students frequently argue in favour of explicitly integrating grammar in language teaching during your introductory courses to EFL-methodology. There are plenty of competing approaches to grammar and grammar teaching and some language teaching approaches even explicitly instruct teachers not to teach grammar.
However, grammatical competence is one component of communicative competence and thus needs to be secured. Learners need to be supported in gaining grammatical competence, which then needs to be reliably, validly, and objectly assessed.
In the first part of the seminar, we will revise and discuss the role of grammar in the different approaches towards language teaching, have a critical look at its mentioning in the official guiding sources for teachers in North-Rhine-Westfalia and analyse the handling of grammar in the main school books currently used.
In the second part of the seminar, we will concentrate on assessing grammatical competence as one component of language proficiency. We will discuss different forms of assessment, criteria for appropriate assessment and respective procedures of marking and grading. |
