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Explaining Grammar
Decide what to explain and what not
English grammar is pretty complicated: theres lots you can say about it. But for learners its best to keep the
explanation as simple as possible. Dont try to teach them everything you know about relative clauses, or
about the use of the definite article! - just explain the form and the most important and most easily explained
meanings. You may find sometimes that this means presenting something as a simple rule that in fact has
lots of exceptions. Dont worry. If the rule is true in most cases, itll be really useful for the learners now, and
theyll cope with exceptions later.
Keep it short
Dont spend too much time on explaining. As soon as youre fairly sure theyve got the main idea, go on to
practice in context. Talking about the language is useful only up to a point; the main learning takes place
when students are actually languaging using what theyve learnt to create and understand meanings. In
most cases, keep the explanation to less than five minutes. Aim to keep the basic explanation to less than
five minutes though with more advanced classes and grammatical points you may need more.
Explaining Grammar
Contrast with L1
If you know your students mother tongue then this will help you decide which grammatical features need
more teaching, because they are different from or even non-existent in the students L1. And it often
helps a lot if you can explain to students how the grammar being presented differs from their mother tongue.
If they know, for example, that English uses a present perfect progressive with since, for (Weve been
waiting for hours), but their L1 in the same context uses the present, this will help them avoid errors later.
Go straight on to practice
Immediately youve finished explaining, go into a simple practice activity. This doesnt have to be the
traditional gap-fill; it can equally well be a brainstorm, requiring students to think of as many examples as
possible. If youve taught the modal can/cant for example, ask students for as many things as they can think
of that a rabbit can or cant do, or a baby, or a computer, or whatever. The main point is to elicit plenty of
examples of the target grammar and help students to feel that they are in control of it, and can use it
themselves to make meanings.
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2015, Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Assessment