Teaching and

Assessme nt of
Grammar

Week 1-3
Ms. Cindy P. Sicat
 Course description
This course equips the pre-service English teachers with an
understanding between and among the four types of grammar:
functional, descriptive, prescriptive and pedagogic. Aside from the
emphasis on how teaching and assessment vary considering the
four types, the course also provides an avenue to carry out analysis
on the role of grammar in achieving communicative
competence. Specifically, it allows them to demonstrate linguistic
proficiency as an important factor in promoting their students’
literacy skills. As a manifestation of this competency, they are
required to apply teaching strategies that are responsive to their
students’ linguistic backgrounds considering the principles of
formative and summative assessments.
 At the end of the course,
the learners are expected
to:

A. design a compendium of
assessment tasks-formative
and summative, which are
consistent with the selected
competencies;
C. conduct a teaching
B. craft a learning plan that
demonstration using
promotes literacy among their
innovative teaching
students by incorporating their
approaches and tasks that are
principled understanding of
responsive to the students’
assessment of grammar; and
linguistic needs.
 Topics
Key Terms and Concepts in
Managing and Implementing
Standards-based Grammar
Teaching
1. Grammaring
2. Grammaticalizing
3. Error correction vs
feedback
4. Spoken vs written
grammar
5. Grammatical assessment
6. Pedagogical Issues
Scan Me!
 How is grammar perceived?
How do people treat others based on
grammar?

What role does grammar play in

language learning?
How does a person's grammar affect
how you see the person?
 Grammar

A lot of research has agreed

one component of that there is a positive role of
grammar teaching in foreign
communicative competence language learning.
(Canale & Swain, 1980)
Grammatical competence is
one of the essential elements of
essential for communication;
language learning and teaching.
grammar instruction is part of
the language teaching.
 Grammar:
to teach or not to
teach?
 to teach grammar
instructed learners are found to outperform
uninstructed learners in their rate of learning
and level of achievement
grammar teaching can enhance learner
proficiency and accuracy and facilitate the
internalization of its syntactic system
explicitly instructed students outperformed in
a grammar test than implicitly instructed ones.

to not teach grammar

teaching grammar should not be banned and

grammar instruction should be carried out in a
way that does not interfere with natural
acquisition (Larsen-Freeman, 2015)
some scholars think grammar teaching has
little value for natural language acquisition
process
learning grammar rules and practicing them
are only of marginal value (Krashen, 1999,
2011)
Grammar Teaching in
Different Contexts
1. The Grammar-Translation Method,
2. The Direct Method,
3. The Audio-Lingual Method,
4. The Cognitive Method
5. The Communicative Approach
6. Grammar Consciousness Raising Approach
7. Interactional Feedback Approach
8. Textual Teaching or Discourse-based Teaching
Mode
9. Processing Instruction Approach
10. Task-based Grammar Teaching
11. Interpretation-based Grammar Teaching
12. Output Tasks Communicative Teaching
13. Story-based Approach
14. Content-based Teaching
15. others
Grammar and
Grammaring
 GRAMMAR
Grammar is a lexicogrammatical resource
for making meaning. In the process of
making meaning, grammar changes in both
form and meaning to ensure appropriate use
in different situations.
GRAMMARING
Grammaring was first put forward by Larsen-Freeman in
1992. She regards English grammar not only as a set of
structural patterns, but also as an important resource for
making meaning and for adapting language appropriately to
the communicative context.
The grammar system is not closed, but is rather constantly
evolving, due to the creativity of its users as they make new
meanings, making it impossible to distinguish errors from
linguistic innovations without an appeal to sociopolitical
factors, such as who is doing the talking (Larsen-Freeman,
2012, 2014b).
According to grammaring, grammar has
features of duality to English majors,
that is, it should be taken both as
knowledge and as ability.

When viewed as knowledge, the focus is

on the acquisition and research of rules
for sentence formation. When viewed as
ability, the focus is on how grammar is
used as a resource in the creation of
spoken and written texts. (Richards &
Reppen, 2014)
 Grammaring

Larsen-Freeman says “grammaring” can be

seen as a “fifth skill.”
Her definition of the word is as follows: “the
ability to use grammar structures accurately,
meaningfully, and appropriately”
Grammaring is sometimes used to refer to the
process by which language learners use
grammar to create messages through
grammaticalizing or adding grammar to a
sequence of words to create finer meaning
distinctions.
The linguist Diane Larsen-Freeman proposed
grammaring as an important process in second
language acquisition.
Grammaring emphasizes grammar as a
dynamic process rather than a system of rules
 Grammaticalizing

evolution of a lexical category to a

grammatical one or of a hybrid/functional
category to another grammatical category.
The fundamental insight of
grammaticalization (also called
grammaticization) is grammation, a change
from lexical to grammatical content via
reanalysis of a lexical item to be merged in
a functional category (Gilder and Gelderen,
2015),
is defined as "the process whereby lexical
material in highly constrained pragmatic
and morphosyntactic contexts is assigned
grammatical function, and once
grammatical, is assigned increasingly
grammatical, operator-like function"
Error Correction
Feedback
 ERROR CORRECTION
Correction is termed as feedback by teachers.
Feedback is useful where there is a lack of
knowledge, especially the failure of students
to use language correctly.
Error correction is not an essay and it is should
be practiced as instructed by the teacher in a
language teaching setting.
Error correction is a way to develop
competence of language learners in a second
or foreign language.
FEEDBACK
Corrective feedback as a response to the
learner’s erroneous output with the aim of
improving the accuracy of the targeted form.
Corrective feedback can include a wide variety
of responses, ranging from implicit (e.g.
indirect feedback without providing the
correct form) to explicit (e.g. direct feedback
that provides the correct form).
 Verbal Models
involve repeating back correct language, and
are used most frequently when learners are
speaking or reading aloud. They are less
effective when giving feedback on written
work.
 Prompts
involve asking a question or a series of questions to
encourage the learners to notice and correct errors.
They may also include a non-verbal prompt, such as a
confused look to indicate a misunderstanding, or a
gesture backwards over a shoulder to encourage a
learner to use the past tense. Prompts work well for
spoken and written errors. Direct Correction is
Direct Correction
Direct Correction is straightforward. It lets the learners
know that they’ve made a mistake and where exactly it
occurred. Direct correction works well for both spoken
and written
errors.