A Critique of Teaching Grammar Theories for EFL Learner with Lower Proficiency Level in Indonesia Context
February 21, 2014
This article has been written in Contemporary Issues in ELT class.
Grammar is important to be learned to understand a reading passage, communicate fluent, and accurate whether it is written or oral. One of the difficulties in teaching grammar is how to make learners know when and how to use grammar. Introducing grammar is not easy, since showing the complicated pattern to EFL learners can be a nightmare for them. In choosing teaching grammar theories for EFL learner especially in Indonesia from theories where come from another country and different context can be suitable or might be not relevant. Thus, the writer will share the experience of rejecting teaching grammar theories but used other approaches with providing authentic materials as a way to introduce grammar.
School Experience Program (SEP), taught me how to experience teaching grammar. Last time, the teacher who is the writer had to teach senior high school students. In this school, I just realized that many teaching theories are just theories. The application of teaching methods might be different from the theories. In a different context, situation, and learners’ interest or needs, especially when the learners have lower proficiency level, lack of vocabularies, and even did not have any motivation to learn English; it would be difficult to find what method which might suit the learners, for a new teacher.
Based on this experience, a spoonful teaching phenomenon still exists, where learners just listened to teachers’ explanations without any further questions. It has happened because it will be easy for the teacher to control class. Unfortunately the fact, the teacher decided this kind of method because the pupils also do not have enough experience or schemata (prior knowledge) to start a lesson, so later on the impact is a teacher will be difficult to lead them. Teachers just focused on the materials or teaching rather than learners’ needs. Then, how to make learners immerse foreign language which is not common for their everyday life is denied.
If this phenomenon happened continuously, it will make pupils to be interdependent with the teachers and cannot understand the importance of lessons learned for them. Actually, one of the key principles of learner autonomy is moving the focus from teaching to learning; take the teacher out of his spotlight and point it at the learners (Țurloiu & Stefánsdóttir: 2011). It means that learning independently for students is very important and the teacher provides scaffolding as a help. To support learning independently, guided discovery can be one of the methods. The guided discovery means that an inductive approach where teachers exemplify a language item and helps the learners to find the rules themselves (Bechtel & Denton, 2004).
If the pupils understand the role of learners in learning, they will be aware of the importance of every lesson and process of learning. In addition, the pupils also have to have enough confidence in their knowledge which can be discussed in the class. So, teachers cannot be spoonful teachers to teach everything specifically or even busy to be teachers in the class who know everything is right or wrong.
However, there are still many obstacles that might be occurred to apply teaching grammar for increasing learner’ ability in fluent English, such as most of the pupils is not ready yet with independent learning especially how to find the grammar pattern by themselves and students cannot understand teacher instruction if the teacher uses English. It is because there is no habit to let pupils explore everything by their-own or teacher habits to not introduce English for giving instruction.
Firkins et. al (2007) stated that low proficiency students have due to a lack of linguistic and rhetorical awareness. Such as in this school, the students still lack vocabularies, then the teacher gives information genre by introducing vocabularies first by connecting new vocabs into students’ real life. In the fact, the students over there could not easily absorb new words especially in another language such as English. Unfortunately, even though gestures have been used to describe and explain the new words or introduced the words which are closely related in their real life. In addition, by exemplifying the usage of the word, they still could not understand what the words meant. How could teachers give instructions in English or teach English, if the students could not know many common vocabularies? Teaching writing in bilingual or using code-switching could be as one of the good solutions and luckily it worked enough in the class even though it was not satisfied.
Then, I tried to use suggestion instruction theory from Gagné et. al. which are gain students’ attention, stimulate prior learning, present the content to elicit the meaning, and provide learning guidance are some steps to Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy from Gagné, Briggs. It should be a solution to face these difficulties, but no one instruction could be applied to design meaningful instruction. The rest is even failed before applied in this classroom because students confusion to understand the lesson and face difficult vocabularies. Notwithstanding, the steps were not applied at all. Fortunately, at least the students understand the instructions for doing practices by code-switching, although the teacher should repeat more than twice to explain or give the instructions. I thought that finally, I could find a code-switching approach as the best way to give instruction for teaching grammar.
Two key instructional strategies for teaching low students proficiency levels are a cycle of modeling, demonstrating, prompting and praising, and direct instructional language that is promoted by Firkins et. al (2007). The fact, it still cannot be applied well in the classroom. Besides, if the genre approach is added with a sequenced and well-structured teaching methodology, it is supposed to be a motivation. Thus, it can be categorized as an effective way to teach writing to students (Firkins, et. al: 2007). In a real class situation such as in this school, it was very difficult only to apply the first stages even though planning preparation was very perfect and well structured. When modeling some materials, the students should be able to activate their schemata, since it was one of the brainstorming activities, but they just copied the sentences based on the model. Actually, even they can answer the questions with some words, not in a full sentence; it took a long time for about 30 to 60 minutes. I thought it happened because there is no habit to do brainstorming or writing class in teaching. In addition, however, the teacher should spend time for about 90 minutes to guide and scaffold students in writing only one paragraph. Therefore, to build students’ background knowledge has wasted so many teaching times. To apply the first stage is too difficult, then how to explore the other stages? So, it would be good if the teacher directly gave students hands-on activities and tried to let them formulate the concept on their own.
However, in applying the approach or method within any new context, there is a need to reshape it to the students’ needs and the educational situation that might be applied in the school (Firkins, et. al: 2007). Practices to teach writing class by paying attention to the basic writing of students are very important whether teaching vocabulary first or the grammar points, the integrated skills or just passing the exam. Here, the teacher has already tried to modify some materials to be more meaningful and motivated for the students such as the provided topic about “how important of learning English through video”, since if the teacher got difficulties to raise students’ motivation, as cited in Tran, L.T. (2007) they could stimulate increasing motivation by themselves because the materials were interesting or needed.
However, many theories are stated successful, but let EFL teacher find other theories for their own class like what the experienced show such as modified code-switching as the instruction, bring lesson learned, and provide materials which are closely related to students’ life. The limited situations and students’ proficiency to acquire language, especially in grammar practices affect students in learning English further. Actually, special students are special teachers who are really caring about what students need. Teaching with some language exposures from this experience can make students aware of the important learning and using English. Later on, based on this experience, knowing students’ class profile first (Teodor & Munteanu: 2013) is needed and compulsory to limit complicated problems in the middle of teaching.
References:
Firkins, A., Forey G., Sengupta, S. (2007). Teaching writing to low proficiency EFL students. ELT Journal (pp. 341–352) 61, 4.
Gagné, R. M., Briggs, L. J., & Wager, W. W. (1992). Principles of instructional design (4th ed.). Forth Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
Teodor, Z. & Munteanu, D. V. (2013). Aspects Concerning the Learning of A Foreign Language Grammar Through Discovery. 5th International Conference EDU-WORLD 2012-Education Facing Contemporary World Issues.
Tran, L.T. (2007). Learners’ Motivation and Identity in the Vietnamese EFL Writing Classroom. English Teaching: Practice and Critique (pp. 151–163) 6,1. Retrieved on March 13 2014, from http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/2007v6n1art8.pdf.
