Language awareness

I was very weak in English when I was in P.6. When I attended the secondary school, my English teacher pushed us to learn English by giving us loads of homework, including grammar books. She was a very serious teacher and could not forgive us for making any grammatical mistakes in a speech or writing. In fact, she adopted a very traditional approach in teaching grammar, that is, explaining the rules, illustrating the rules with examples and instructing us to practise, practise and practise. However, I benefited a lot from her teaching because my learning style matched with her teaching style. I was also serious about learning and I found that drilling helped me master sentence writing, though the process was at times boring. More importantly, I could see my gradual improvements in English.

When I teach my students now, I have to think of creative ways to introduce grammar rules because they are simply unmotivated to learn. They always say that rules are rules and English learning ought to be related to daily application. That is related to what I learned about the communicative approach last week. After today's session on language awareness, I started to reflect on the effectiveness of my grammar lessons.