TESL - 110 Unit 1

This Unit was extremely interesting to me.  I have spent a good amount of time thinking about the importance of teaching grammar explicitly in education.  This is a topic that my colleagues and I have discussed many times and we tend to have deep conversations about the importance of explicit grammar education.  Prior to reading the documents in this section, I was solidly of the opinion that grammar is important and has its place in the classroom but that it does not need to be explicitly taught with the vocabulary that is usually used.  Some of my colleagues believe that this use of vocabulary to discuss grammatical concepts is immensely important and use many of the methods that were used when I was in school to teach these different concepts of grammar. Through the readings for this discussion, I am more firmly of the opinion that grammar, while important, does not need to be taught as explicitly as it used to be.  Through experiential learning and task-based activities, I try to get my learners to understand the grammatical concepts without going into deep detail about the different verb tenses beyond past, present, and future.

Readings/Resources:

Calude, A. S. [TED-Ed]. (2016 Apr 12). Does Grammar Matter? [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn_eBrIDUuc

 Thornbury, S. (1999). Why Teach Grammar, In Harmer, J. (Ed), How to Teach Grammar (pp.14-28). Harlow: Longman.

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