Teach English in Matou Zhen - Linyi Shi

Introduction The book I am going to review is called Impact Grammar: Grammar Through Listening. This book was written by Rod Ellis and Stephen Gaies and first published in 1999 from Longman. Generally, this book aims to improve learners’ grammatical competence through listening activities, assuming the development of it can contribute to the development of students’ communicative competence. Altogether, this book includes fifty units and each unit is devoted to one grammatical point. Also, each unit deals with one topic, where a certain grammatical point is incorporated. In each unit, the learners will do five activities in order to learn one grammatical point through listening, reading and writing, that is, listening to comprehend, listening to notice, understand the grammar point, checking and trying it. Strengths of the book In the preface, the authors suggest that this book is suitable for both individual learners and classroom students because it gives a specific guidance on what learners should do in each of the aforementioned five activities. Also, this book provides answer keys and tape scripts for users’ reference. Thus, this book seems to be very helpful and suitable for autonomous learning and teachers may play a facilitative role in learning because most of the learning can be done by students after completing the tasks and what teachers can do is to offer extra help when necessary. Additionally, the topics included are very relevant to daily life communication like describing one’s job, holiday postcards and so forth. So it is very useful for leaners to use what they learn in this book to communicate with others in real life. The difficulty level of vocabulary and sentences structures in this book vary a lot throughout the book, ranging from simple ones like “pronouns”, “there is/are” to difficult ones like relative clause. Considering its difficulty level in terms of sentence structures and vocabulary, it is not difficult to see this book is intended for beginning and intermediate level language students. This book is very user-friendly and eye-catching because it uses different colors in different units. Also, the book employs a lot of pictures to describe different scenes to help readers better understand the topic. As visual aids can assist language learning, especially for beginners, this is one of the highlights of this book. Moreover, the book also uses tables to explicitly present grammar rules so that users can gain a clear idea about these rules once they read the tables. As for the layout, each unit consists of five activities in a fixed order throughout the whole book. Thus, the organization of activities in each unit is very clear and predictable. Generally, this book combines many different approaches to teaching grammar. For example, the book uses input-based approach (Ellis, 1999) to teach grammar through providing students with meaningful input, students can process the input and learn the grammar rules inductively. Also, the input is also modified by frequently incorporating the target language form into the input and asking students to use the target forms to complete the task, that is, fill-in-the-blanks. In this way, students’ attention would be drawn to the target language and they have plenty of opportunities to practice the target form. Possible improvements of the textbook The listening content is much modified in low speech rate without background noise. The sound quality is very high and there are frequent pauses. Thus, the modified input would not pose a heavy burden on listeners’ working memory. However, this easiness brought by unauthentic materials cannot contribute much to the improvement of students’ listening ability in real life settings. Also, in the listening task, students are only required to supplement missing information through fill-in-blanks activity after listening. The task itself is not very authentic in real life. In order to fill in the blanks, students only need to recognize the sound in the speech and use his/her language knowledge to work out the target linguistic forms and the students don't need to take advantage of general understanding of the materials because they can only listen for target words to finish the task. Pedagogical implications Since students are told to choose between two target forms to complete the task, it is very possible they will only focus on single words instead of the meaning of the sentences. Thus, if a student knows how to use the target forms, he can even complete the tasks without listening at all. Thus, when I use this book in my classroom, I will add more tasks to help students focus on meaning like comprehension questions, True/False tasks to make students find it necessary to listen for the content and better focus on semantic meaning. Also, I will make my students listen for at least two times with one for meaning and one for target linguistic forms. Based on the understanding of meaning, students can better learn about how to use a target language form in appropriate context. Another point is this book involves no speaking activity. When I use this book, I will design some speaking tasks to help students use the target form in oral communication. As the book states, it is intended to help students develop communicative competence. It is important for students to improve their ability to communicate both in oral and written form. From my perspective, I would use this book for grammar teaching purpose instead of listening comprehension. In addition, as an important component of communicative competence, students’ ability to talk is not included in this book. Last, considering the unauthenticity of the listening texts and listening tasks, I prefer to introduce more authentic or even unscripted listening texts and tasks in my classroom like, listening to real conversation between two friends about their schedule and come up with a travel plan. I believe the use of authentic listening texts can better engage students in listening and contribute to their communicative competence through listening activities (Wagner, 2014). References Ellis, R. (1999). Input-based approaches to teaching grammar: A review of classroom-oriented research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 19, 64-80. Wagner, E. (2014). Using unscripted spoken texts in the teaching of second language listening. TESOL Journal, 5(2), 288-311.