Grammar teaching has always been one of the most heated topics in the field of foreign language teaching. In the history of EFL grammar has been an extensively discussed topic and the way grammar has been perceived had a significant influence on foreign language teaching. Research has shown that teaching grammar through context increases learners’ motivation and their ability to remember and understand the grammatical rules of the language. The teacher can employ various ways for contextualizing grammar in the foreign language classrooms by using numerous resources and techniques. Contextualizing grammar will provide learners with an insight of the foreign language grammatical rules and their meaningful use, which will in turn result in improving learners’ communication skills. Presenting isolated grammatical chunks will not help learners understand the rules of the language; on the contrary, it will increase the already bad reputation of grammar in the classroom and will result in inapplicable knowledge of grammatical rules.
The first part of the master’s thesis focuses on the theoretical part, that is, explains the notion of grammar, the importance of teaching grammar, provides a historical overview of grammar teaching methods and briefly discusses the place of the teacher within each of them; moreover, it highlights the importance of providing context when presenting grammar in the EFL classroom.
This part, furthermore, defines the place of grammar teaching today and presents the two major models for planning grammar lessons, i.e. PPP and TBL.
The second part of the master’s thesis is the empirical part which includes a thorough analysis of two high-school EFL coursebooks, New Headway Intermediate and Insight Intermediate, and analyses the way these coursebooks introduce the Present Simple Tense. This part, furthermore, discusses the approaches that these coursebooks follow and analyses the presentation of grammar by means of form, meaning and use. Finally, the empirical part investigates the quality of the grammar exercises and evaluates how successfully the coursebooks contextualize grammar.
Despite the contrasting attitudes concerning grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom, i.e. some linguists fully endorsing it, while others firmly rejecting it, this master’s thesis argues strongly in favor of grammar as a vital part of ELT.
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