GSE Teacher Toolkit: Planning a communicative grammar lesson
Planning grammar lessons with the GSE Teacher Toolkit
Grammar is one of the core areas of language teaching. Often, new teachers are nervous about teaching it, but sooner or later, all English teachers will have to get to grips with it. Whether you love or hate teaching grammar to your students, the makes planning a successful grammar lesson easier than ever.
When it comes to planning a grammar-focused lesson, there are two main strategies to choose from: a communicative approach or a focus-on-form approach. The communicative approach is more commonly used.
So, let’s have a look at how the GSE Teacher Toolkit can help you plan a communicative grammar lesson that is effective and engaging for your students.
Teaching communicative grammar
When you’re planning a grammar lesson, you want to be sure there is a reason for students to use the grammar point that you’re going to teach. That way, your students will be more motivated to learn the form and practise using it correctly.
Using and applying grammar generally requires producing something. That’s why grammar, as an enabling skill, is often aligned to speaking and writing, the productive skills. When you want your students to use or produce a particular grammar form, you can begin by looking for the associated skills in speaking and writing.
Choosing a skill to teach
Imagine that you have a class that is learning at an A2 level (35 - 40 on the GSE range). You’ll want to help them work towards A2+/B1. So, it’s a good idea to plan lessons around skills that are in your target GSE range to push their progress.
In order to plan an A2+ range speaking class, you can filter the GSE Teacher Toolkit to look in your target learning range for specific skills to teach: