We Need O Provide Opportunities For Our Learners To Experience Its Liberating Potential

By Author: emaly su
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In this paper I have identified three elements which I see as being central to an approach to teaching grammar which emphasizes its role .

As 'a liberating force' (as defined in Widdowson's essay), and have gone on to show how these elements can be incorporated into the design of grammar production activities in the E F L classroom. As has been pointed out, the approach which these activities exemplify is task-based in design, in that the focus on form comes after a freer activity in which the learners use whatever language resources they can muster: the teaching progression is thus from fluency to accuracy rather than vice versa.

The activities also follow a process approach to teaching grammar, in which grammatical items are not selected and presented in advance ...
... for learners to use, but rather grammar is treated as 'a resource which language users exploit as they navigate their way through discourse' (Batstone 1994: 224). Gaps in their knowledge are noticed later through the process of matching and comparing so that work can begin on trying to fill them.

There are two further observations about the task types presented here which need to be made. Firstly, given the scope of this paper, I have looked only at types of task which require learners to produce language and have not discussed receptive grammar tasks designed to raise awareness of the various notional and attitudinal meanings which can be expressed by grammar. Such tasks would involve considering the effects created by changing some of the grammatical features used in a text, or asking learners to make grammatical choices in a given text, for example, between active and passive verb forms, and then comparing their choices with the original text.

Such awareness raising activities would also have an important role in teaching grammar as a liberating force since they emphasize the notion of learner choice in the use of grammar. Secondly, all the task types presented have involved the learners in the creation of written texts, and are derived from fairly standard guided writing tasks.

This emphasis on writing is deliberate: writing is generally done with more care and attention to grammatical accuracy than speaking, while having a written text to study and compare with another written text makes it easier to focus on form and to notice and record features of grammar which might otherwise be overlooked.

Finally, although I have argued in this paper that a process-oriented approach to teaching grammar is more consistent with the notion of grammar as a liberating force than a product-oriented approach, I am not claiming that such an approach is inherently superior, and preferable at all times and for all levels of student.

There are many circumstances where it may be necessary and desirable to pre-select language items for attention prior to setting learners loose on a task, particularly for lower-level students, and as a general policy a balanced combination of the two approaches is likely to be the most effective teaching strategy to adopt.

However, if we are serious about emphasizing the notion of grammar as a liberating force in our teaching, we need at least to provide opportunities for our learners to experience its liberating potential through the kind of process-oriented grammar tasks described here.