This document outlines an agenda for a teaching session on teaching grammar communicatively. The objective is to provide strategies for making grammar lessons interesting and meaningful to develop communicative competence. The outcome is for participants to demonstrate their understanding by drafting a grammar lesson plan. The agenda includes sharing experiences with grammar lessons, experiencing communicative grammar lessons, learning about communicative grammar, and completing a lesson planning form for one of the sample lessons.

1. Teaching
Grammar
Communicatively
The main purpose is to develop
communicative competence in
which language use shows
fluency and grammatical
appropriateness.
April 30th 2016
Image by Ruben Alvarado)

2. OBJECTIVE
To give participants some strategies and
activities to make the teaching of
grammar interesting and meaningful for
their students to develop communicative
competence.
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3. Teaching Grammar Communicatively
OUTCOME
At the end of this session participants will
demonstrate understanding of teaching
grammar communicatively by drafting a
lesson planning for a specific piece of
grammar they’ll want to teach children.
3Communicative Grammar

4. Teaching Grammar Communicatively
2:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Sharing your experience with grammar.
Experiencing communicately grammar oriented
lessons
Learning about communicative grammar
(inductevely)
Coffee break: 4:30 - 4:55 p.m.
4:55 to 7:00 p.m
Let’s recap and learn a bit of theory
Complete a lesson planing form about one of the
sample classes.
Microteaching criteria.
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SESSION 4TH AGENDA

5. Sharing your
experience about
grammar

6. Task 1: Tell your right elbow’s partner
about the most grammatically and
ineffective lesson you’ve ever had.
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7. Task 2:Take 3 minutes to remember and
write about a good and meaningful
grammar lesson
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8. Communicatively-Grammar-
Based Sample Lessons

9. Task 4: Using Delectable Descriptions
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1 2
man ogre
3
horse
4
doctor
5
flowers

10. Suggest a list of adjectives to describe qualities,
and write them on the board.
Describe each one of the pictures with two, three,
four or five adjectives from the list.
Read out their descriptions to the class.
Generate a humorous debate on whether the
descriptions match the pictures.
With a set of attributive adjectives organize them all
to describe the picture.
Find the correct position for the adjectives.
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11. 11

12. Attributive Adjectives
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surprising
Expressing feeling
enormous
Size
youthful
Age
rounded
Shape
reddish
Color
American
Origen
fleshy
Material
Noun

13. SILLY SENTENCES GAME
Pair Work: Using five cards, make sentences in several
ways.
A game of 54 cards divided into four categories:
adjectives, nouns, verbs, and conjunctions.
Each card has a color-coded to help you organize the
cards according to parts of speech.
You have to make sentences by using more than two
adjectives for one or two nouns.
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14. A time line
PAST PRESENT
1988 1990 2004 2016
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TYPE WRITING
TEACHER
LANGUAGES
STUDENT
ENGLISH
TEACHER
SCHOOL
COORDINATOR

15. What was your occupation before now?
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16. What were you before now?
Look at your pics and complete
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You before now
________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
You in the present
________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________

17. Let’s think about
previous lessons

18. REFLECTIONS
What did you find most useful?
Are these activities appropriate for your students?
If you were to modify them, which parts of the unit would you
change to suit your context?
What was the purpose of my lesson?
How many segments / stages was the lesson split into?
What do you think was the purpose of each one of them?
Was the grammar clear to you?
What do you think about the effectiveness of deducing the rules?
Complete a form to plan one of the previous lessons.
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19. The problem with the traditional way of
teaching grammar…
 Direct grammar instruction is still very common.
 Contextual instructional techniques are not readily
accessible to practitioners.
 In most cases grammar instruction is not integrated
into the four skills but given in isolation.
 Mostly it is teachers that formulate the grammar rules.
Grammar rules will be clearer and be remembered better
when students formulate them themselves (inductive
learning) than when teachers formulate them (deductive
learning).
 Learners need repeated input of a grammar item. Just
one grammar presentation is not enough.
 Learners should not be overwhelmed with linguistic
terminology (Brown, 2001).
 Grammar should be taught in digestible segments
bearing the cognitive process in mind.
19Presentation Title Arial Bold 7 pt
Taken from Bayram Pekoz http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Pekoz-Grammar.html

20. So how to plan a communicative
grammar lesson ?
 Integrated grammar teaching is a unique and an
authentic approach because it implements the
pre-, while- and post-stages.
 Make it meaningful and related to Ss’ lives.
 Provide real contexts.
 Recall it over and over ( practice makes practice)
 Give Ss the chance to make mistakes and se´lf-
correct their own mistakes.
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21. Improve Communication with Grammar
When students have a solid foundation in
the form, meaning, and use of
grammatical structures, they are better
able to understand and use
their target language. They are more
effective communicators as well as
more confident users of the language.
Tomado de Alwaysesl-Newsletter.
http://longmanhomeusa.com/blog/teachgrammar-or-communicative-skills-why-not-do-both/
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22. Now…Over to you
A practical exercise

23. Task 2: Plan a lesson of 30 minutes to
teach 5 year-olds
This is pair work
Prepare to present your planner to the class
23Presentation Title Arial Bold 7 pt

24. Helpful links about this topic.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (ELT/ESL/ELL)
http://longmanhomeusa.com/blog/teachgrammar-or-communicative-skills-why-not-do-
both/
ORELT Open Resources for English Language Teaching Module 6 – Communicative
Grammar
http://www.colorelt.org/sites/default/files/module_attachments/ORELT--
Module%206_Modified_0.pdf
Communicative Activities
http://www.cambridge.org/grammarandbeyond/communicative-activities
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