Teach English in Changzhou JiAnyu - Changzhou Shi

How different students learn grammar? How students learn grammer could depend on a number of factors, such as students' age, linguistic backgrounds and educational systems that a learner is exposed to. While delineating how students learn it, I refer to my own experience as a second language learner as a child, and while teaching students, learning English as a second language. In many parts of the world, young learners learn English through singing rhymes, reciting sentences and memorizing texts without actually fragmentizing sentences into grammatical categorizations and understanding the concepts of grammar in a sentence. Once they go on to secondary schooling, students are taught basic concepts of grammar. Grammar is taught technically and children memorize its usage as a rule. As a child, many of my friends enjoyed reading stories, poems and dramas, and doing comprehensive questions and answers after the completion of a chapter. However, none as I recall used to be concerned about grammar. Grammar was taught as a separate subject, which was boring and entailed memorizing the rules. As our learning was exam oriented, memorizing was a ritual part of learning to pass the exams. Specific usage of English, such as Academic English was learnt only as an adult. Now coming to teaching students now, I see repetition of similar experiences sometimes. I realize and ensure that grammar is an integral part of English learning instead of a separate grammar class. Grammar must be integrated into any form of English teaching, be it a literary classroom, story writing or academic writing. If we compartmentalize it, grammar will be seen as a subject outside learning a language, hence, could be deemed as boring and highly technical. Grammar is a skeleton to learning any language. The key challenge for any teacher would be to make a grammar session as stimulating, engaging and interesting, as a story telling or teaching any literary piece. If grammar is consistently integrated into general English classes, students will remain motivated and will internalize what is learnt in a classroom, as opposed to rote learning without understanding how a grammatical concept works. Linguistic background is also of paramount importance in learning English grammar. I have noticed that students formulate sentences, aligning such sentence structures to the grammatical usage of their native language. If a teacher shares a native language with students, it could be advantageous for the teacher to detect such alignment and correct mistakes, if necessary. English generally has a completely different grammatical concepts and usages compared to many Asian languages. If a teacher is able to identify these, she/he could work on these differences with the students. In addition, many students have accents specific to their native language. Getting right pronunciations, intonations and grammatically correct sentences could be difficult initially, as students would learn English according to how they have learnt their mother tongue as mentioned earlier. Likewise, educational background could also play a significant role in learning grammar in English. I have met students who excelled in grammatical rules, but had difficulties communicating and articulating themselves in spoken English, whereas they had no problem in getting a sentence grammatically correct in writing. This could be the outcome of learning technical know-how of grammar in a non- English-speaking environment. To summarize, students learn grammar in different ways, depending on their backgrounds and nationalities. It depends on the kind of exposure they had while learning English. Some could have learnt grammar as an independent subject, while many could have learnt English through visual devices, literary pieces, or studying English as a subject at school, but without paying specific attention to English grammatical rules and its practice. For this matter, it is important to make grammar an integral part of learning English.