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Teaching Grammar For me knowing grammar is essential, although I understand it can be daunting for students. Knowing that, I still think it is very important for ESL students to understand the structure of our language. It has been my way of learning Latin, Spanish, French, and Indonesian. A sentence, to be a sentence, needs a noun and a verb. We can say that in another way, that every sentence needs a subject and a predicate. The simplest sentence of all, and the most important, is I AM. I is a noun, a pronoun to be exact, and AM is from the verb TO BE. It is the first person singular of the verb TO BE. Verbs are the actors of language and we have to know how to talk about them. We have to know how to CONJUGATE them. Take the verb TO BE. What conjugate means is this: Singular Plural 1. I am 1. We are 2. You are 2. You (pl) are 3. He,she,it is 3. They are These "voices" are described as the first person singular, the second person singular, the third person singular, the first person plural, the second person plural, and the third person plural. I spell this out and drill it until everyone knows it well and I make sure they don't forget, drilling a few minutes every class. This is the basic structure we can use for practicing and understanding all the tenses in English. My students learn this beginning with the present tense. They learn that in the third person singular, the verb in the present tense almost always needs a final "s" letter. For example, I teach, you teach, (he, she, it) teaches. Learning this system is very worthwhile as I know from the progress my students make once they understand it. We practice it until everyone can conjugate verbs in the simple present tense, the simple future tense, and the simple past tense. Once they can do that, the work about learning the other verb tenses gets much easier. The hard part then is to make students, depending on their native language, understand how verb tenses in English refer to time, in some cases indeterminate time, or time depending on context, subjective time. The other aspects of grammar I teach religiously are basic parts of speech. They have to know what an adjective is, what an adverb is, what a gerund is. An adjective modifies, (goes with), a noun. An adverb modifies, (goes with), a verb. A gerund is a verb form ending in "ing" used as a noun, e.g. Swimming is fun. Once these fundamentals are understood and able to be used, student progress happens much faster than otherwise. We combine this knowledge with speaking exercises such as role playing. Sometimes we do these without correction; sometimes I correct them and encourage the proper sentence structure and proper use of the parts of speech. Here in Indonesia, I have to constantly remind students to use articles with nouns, that nouns need articles. They learn that the articles are: an, a, the. Indonesians speaking English sound one hundred percent better when they understand what an article is, which ones there are, and remember to use them. Even advanced Indonesian speakers fail here. Understanding the "rules of the road," the structure of the language, is fundamental in my opinion and should be a part of the process all along. It is not all we do by any means. Student motivation and excitement are fundamental values in my classes brought about by encouragement, variety, a lot of good humour, and a goal in mind……mastery! Ricker Winsor Surabaya, Indonesia September 29, 2018
