Grammar is one of the two main ingredients of language but there have always been heated debates about its role in the language learning classroom. There are plenty of competing approaches to grammar and grammar teaching and some language teaching approaches even explicitly instruct the teacher not to teach grammar.
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 for learning English.
In the second part of the seminar we will investigate individual linguistic phenomena and discuss what and how to teach students of English to functionally use and understand the respective grammar. This includes linguistic analyses of the selected phenomena, respective didactic reductions depending on the targeted learner group (school type and grade) and critical reflections about the methodological set up or integration of grammar teaching. |
