Changing Perspectives
Abstract
Communication skills are imperative for a successful career.
Communication skills are different from fluency skills in the language, we learn to speak.
A skilled communicator should have excellence in all four major skills.
Communication skills with proper grammar add to the image of an individual. He or she is seen to possess-able personality.
English teachers are charged with the responsibility of improving the grammatical skills of students.
They can help improve the grammatical skills of students by engaging them in Activity-based Grammar Teaching through media. Grammar is a problem for our students.
Students get nervous if the teacher utters the word Grammar. So, language teachers have to find effective means to teach it and avoid involving them in gloomy drills and imposing on them rules regarding it.
Many grammar-oriented conferences and seminars focus on teaching through media.
Media is a combo of print, sound, art, video, and blogs. Media is not only used as an entertaining tool but also as an educational tool that helps students in their language learning.
To make teaching even more interesting to the students, a teacher can use the most popular, cheaper, a better medium, namely, newspapers.
The reading habit, especially newspaper reading, is in decline. Newspapers can be used as an efficient tool to improve the skills of the students.
The use of newspapers in teaching will motivate the students and help them to sharpen their LSRW skills.
This paper focuses on the grammar and style used in media language, and on teaching it in an easy way of using newspapers.
The findings of the paper throw light upon the activities that have not been tested on the students so far in improving their skills.
Introduction – Activity-based Grammar Teaching-Learning
We do not learn grammar to supplement our use of the mother tongue while acquiring our mother tongue.
We just adapt our mother tongue to what everyone speaks around us.
However, when it comes to learning another language formally, we need to study its grammar.
To make grammar teaching more memorable and interesting, the teaching method should include some activities to handle the grammar.
Activity-Based Grammar Learning Method fosters active learning among the students.
This method is relatively very easy to implement in the classroom to help the students learn the targeted portion, faster and more efficiently.
This Activity-based Learning involves face-to-face interaction, group work, and individual activities, and it even includes social skills. Which involves more activity-oriented training than mere lectures.
These classes that involve such activities may seem to be messy, chaotic, and noisy. Because students will sit in a group and discuss to come out with some concrete results.
The majority of the teachers with the fear of losing control over the class hesitate to take up such activity-based teaching.
They end up in lecture mode in dealing with it.
There is no need to advise the teachers to give up the lecture method to teach grammar rules.
However, the paper aims to weigh the benefits of activity-based teaching vis-à-vis lecture mode to make the lecture method even more effective and interesting.
For Further Reading, Click
Grammar and Grammar Teaching: Changing Perspectives – Part 2
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