Since English grammar is different from Indonesian grammar, it is important for the teacher to introduce it to the young learners.
When the teacher presents an English structure, it is important to:
• show what the structure means and how it is used by giving examples
• show clearly how the structure is formed, so that the students can use it to make sentences of their own
Some techniques for presenting a structure are as follows:
1. Using an English song text
The teacher finds a song text which contains a structure that she/he will teach.
a. Give the students the uncompleted text.
b. Ask the students to listen to the song and fill in the gaps.
c. Explain the use and the form of the structure.
2. Using a time line
The teacher draws a time line on the board, representing the example of the structure.
I have seen her
past ______________now ______________future
3. Using realia
• The teacher puts some objects on a desk in front of the class, then tells the students the position of the objects (near, between, on, in, etc.)
• The teacher uses things in the classroom to present a certain structure (e.g. this/that or these/those)
4. Using picture
The teacher draws/uses picture to present the structure
a. Adjective (short, long, big, small, etc.)
b. Present perfect
5. Using substitution table
| Subject | Verb | Object |
| I We You They | read write buy | a book a letter a story an apple |
| He She | reads writes buys | a bag a magazine an egg |
The following is an article given by Kenna Bourke about ‘Teaching grammar to young learners’. You can read it further in www.oup.com/elt
People are grammatical animals. By the age of three, whatever our mother tongue is, we all get our grammar 90% correct. Even when we make mistakes like 'Don't giggle me' or 'I seed the dog,' we're applying previously encountered grammar rules to newly acquired vocabulary. We don't, for instance, say 'I seed' instead of 'I saw' because we've heard our mother or father say it, we say it because we're extending a grammatical rule which we know works well with other verbs.
From a very young age, we are all equipped to learn to use grammar with ease in our mother tongue. Why then should we find it difficult in a second language? In a sense, teachers of young learners have a considerable advantage over teachers of adults. Pupils are at a highly receptive age when everything is of interest to them, when nothing seems impossible, when they are at their most retentive.
How do we teach grammar to young learners? Here are some suggestions.
'Giggle' your pupils
Children laugh on average 400 times a day, adults a meager fifteen. Why do children laugh so much? Amongst other things, their laughter is a response to new discoveries they make each day. And that might as well include grammatical discoveries!
1. Presenting the grammatical structure in a child's context, with humor
Characters are extremely helpful when presenting points of grammar for the first time. In Jennifer Seidl's Grammar series, a small, friendly alien called Trig provides an opportunity for children to relate to a character who, like them, is struggling with some of the idiosyncrasies of the English language. Trig is funny, greedy, clumsy and mischievous: he hangs plates on the washing line to dry; he eats anything he can get his hands on, including his exercise book; but he perseveres with English and even enjoys it.
You can create your own characters to suit the English you're teaching. Children enjoy making up silly names and giving characters a personality. You could, for instance, use a mad professor who collects things to help practise the plural of nouns (She's got two green parrots, five sharp pencils, three chairs, eighteen hats etc.) Parts of speech can be 'people' - try having a character called the Present Simple. Encourage the children to tell you what the Present Simple does every day (He gets up at three minutes past six. He brushes his tooth. He combs his green hair and so on.)
Use a soft toy or a puppet as a character. This can be particularly useful and memorable when you're teaching prepositions. Let the children give it a name and take turns to put the toy in various places round the classroom.
Sometimes it's difficult to see how a grammatical topic can be made humorous but with a bit of imagination, almost anything can. Countable and uncountable nouns don't seem very amusing at first glance, but in The Grammar Lab 1, the hero, Splodge, demonstrates just how silly it would be to try to count sugar. Visual stimuli can be very effective in teaching young children - seeing somebody trying to count individual grains of sugar is quite likely to stick in the mind, making it easier to remember that it's an uncountable noun.
2. Practising the grammatical structure
Traditional exercises in the form of mechanical drills, gap-fills, and sentence transformations all have a part to play in practising grammar. They are useful at times when you need to calm your students down, and in the early stages of practice when you need to familiarize the children with the structure taught and give them the confidence to use it in a controlled environment. But grammar exercises need not be limited to this. Here are a number of other ways of practising in class.
3. Drawing and writing on the board
The board is a wonderful resource. You can use it for all sorts of things. Try playing hangman to practise specific points - ing forms, for instance, or adjectives. A crossword can be done on the board so that all the children can see it at the same time. Crosswords can be used for practising countable and uncountable nouns, plurals, irregular verbs and many other things. Try drawing the outline of a large crocodile or shark on the board. Tell the children that it's a noun-eating crocodile or a verb-eating shark and he's very hungry. Then let the children write in the verbs or nouns to feed him on. Vanessa Reilly and Sheila Ward's book Very Young Learners is packed with ideas of this sort. Again, its originality has the merit of fixing ideas in the children's minds.
Story telling is much under-used in grammar practice. We all know that children love stories. They'll even listen to the same story over and over again. One of the best ways to introduce the past simple is through a story - you can use well-known traditional tales, like Little Red-Riding Hood, or indeed make up your own to suit the particular point of grammar. If you possibly can, it's a good idea to rehearse the story before the lesson so that you know it well. This enables you to develop special voices for individual characters and it means that you'll know when to lower your voice (e.g. to tell the children something scary) or to raise it. Some people like to tell the story without any notes, perhaps even acting out bits of it, others prefer to use a book to read from. Use whichever method you feel more comfortable with. Often children will want to act out bits of the story themselves. Try to encourage them to do this: it will enhance their understanding.
For further ideas on how to exploit stories for grammar practice, see the excellent section in Andrew Wright's Story telling with children. In it you will find both original stories and traditional ones, together with instructions on how to elicit rules, what to pre-teach, and how to encourage learners to start hypothesizing about the grammar contained within the story.
Every playground the world over rings out with the sound of children singing or chanting rhymes. What better way to practise grammar than allow the children to do what they do for pleasure? There are so many songs that you can use to practise grammatical structures, you'd need a huge book to list them in, but here are a few examples:
To practise can for ability (by Sheila Ward)
I am a robot man!
Chorus
I am a robot, I am a robot,
I am a robot man.
I am a robot, I am a robot,
I am a robot man.
I can sit and I can stand,
I am a robot man.
I can shake you by the hand,
I am a robot man.
Get the children to put on a special metallic robot-voice as they sing - they'll enjoy it all the more.
Of course you can also make up your own songs and rhymes. Try fitting new words to traditional tunes, like Old MacDonald had a farm, for instance.
A rich source of songs and chants is to be found in Very Young Learners by Vanessa Reilly and Sheila Ward, and also in Young Learners by Sarah Phillips.
If you would like to try out chants specially devised for grammatical structures, have a look at Carolyn Graham's Grammarchants in which you will find a wealth of chants on a large range of topics.
Just like songs and chants, rhymes and poems can both entertain and inform. Here's a traditional rhyme you could use to introduce children to the past simple:
(Traditional)
Incy wincy spider climbed up the spout.
Down came the rain and washed poor Incy out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.
Incy wincy spider climbed up the spout again.
Look at any book of children's verse and you are sure to find poems which give you opportunities either to present or practise grammar. Alternatively you can quite easily make up your own rhymes or poems. The advantage of this is, of course, that it enables you to target the very point you wish to teach. It's not too difficult to do, either! Here is a poem from The Grammar Lab 3 to introduce prepositions.
Mice!
Mice, mice - they're everywhere!
They're on the table and under my chair.
Mice, mice - at half past two
I saw one sitting in my shoe.
Mice, mice - running along
My garden wall, singing a song.
Mice, mice - just last week
I found them playing hide and seek.
Mice, mice - on Tuesday morning,
I saw one in my cupboard, yawning.
Mice, mice - beside my bed,
I felt one jump over my head!
Mice, mice - oh, why don't you
Go and live in North Peru?
I know no better way of practising imperatives or prepositions with children than by playing a game of 'Simon says'. The value of total physical response lies in the fact that young children are not able to cope with abstract concepts but rely on their senses to learn new things. Physically doing something helps the child to understand the language. The difference, say, between reading this sentence in a book: 'John is opening the window' and actually performing the task for yourself is immense. Using TPR also means that you can instantly change the pace of your lesson - if your children are getting restless or tired, a physical activity can re-energise them.
Occasionally teachers are afraid of playing games in the classroom - games are seen as frivolous and 'not real work'. Nothing could be further from the truth. A child who can act out an instruction or throw a ball to a fellow student in response to a teacher's request has understood and learnt something new.
In Gordon Lewis and Gunthur Bedson's book Games for Children there are literally hundreds of suggestions for language practice involving games. You can also adapt traditional games to suit your own needs - a game of hide and seek could be adapted to practise prepositions, for instance. Chinese Whispers is also very popular and can be used to practise a variety of things from adjectives to the present continuous.
In some books you will find board games that require TPR from the students. For an example see 'The Rabbit Game' in The Jungle Grammar Book 1, in which children do all sorts of things from roaring like a lion, to touching their heads, to bicycling with their legs in the air.
Grammar has a nasty reputation for being boring and difficult. It needn't be. It's just part of language and many of the activities we readily use in general English teaching and practice can be adapted to specific grammar topics. Above all, we shouldn't lose sight of the one thing children do best: have fun.
