BRAZ-TESOL: A grammar teaching workshop

“Creating effective learning opportunities”
(Anamaria Campanha and Sirley Trinidade Vilela Lewis)
Anamaria and Sirley are teachers at a Cultura Inglesa in Minas Gerais. Their talk represents the conclusions of a project they conducted at their school to find the most successful grammar input activities. Here are the five elements that they found to be essential:

1. Expose learners to the target form and help them to notice it
2. Use plenty and varied drilling procedures
3. Create opportunities for students to experiment with the language in interaction
4. Encourage critical thinking and guided discovery
5. Provide feedback

The presenters demonstrated all of these elements in an activity based on a song. They made the very interesting point that these five elements should all be present in a single lesson, not spread out across lessons, and consequently timing is of the essence. Another important point is that the elements don’t need to be in the same order every time. Unlike the PPP lesson model, we shouldn’t always try to present everything first – better to create a need, let them experiment, and then work on improving on that.