Post 100: Teaching Grammar Using The Acquisition View

Post 100: Teaching  Grammar Using The Acquisition View

While the Learning View emphasized grammar textbook learning, rote memorization, teacher centered classroom and tests, the Acquisition view focuses on a more student centered, interactive, discovery-inquiry method method of teaching grammar where students are actively engaged in constructing new knowledge to add to their existing knowledge base. The teacher is no longer the sage on the stage, but now is the guide on the side merely facilitating student quest for knowledge.

At UCLA, when I taught French to American students, I would write a bunch of sentences or nouns on the board that all held a similar grammatical pattern. Then I would have the American students tell me what grammatical pattern they saw and what grammar rule can be formed by looking at those sentences. Students noticed that all the French nouns ending in 'e' had 'la' feminine gender while all the French nouns ending in other vowels and consonants took a 'le' masculine gender. Students loved being able to interact with the new knowledge and students love being able to construct their own knowledge rather than have the teacher dictate the new knowledge to them. When students construct their own knowledge, they become more engaged and more involved in their learning.

If you teach online, you can use the same technique of having students become engaged or involved with their learning. I would post an incorrect sentence in the forum. I would ask students, 'What is wrong with this sentence?', 'What grammar rule is being violated in this sentence?'. Example sentence: John likes to eat peas rice beans and salad.  Students look at this post and look at their grammar sheet to try to guess what is wrong with the sentence.  Of course, the answer is comma usage. There should be a comma in between the adjectives in a list in this sentence. The correct sentence reads, John likes to eat, peas, rice, beans, and salad. Then I have students create their own incorrect sentence and have other students guess what is wrong with their sentence. (Go to my Grammar Games blog post for more detail that I have posted previously.)

The Acquisition method corresponds with the Bloom's Taxonomy and corresponds with other learning models, where students have a triggering event or perceive the new information such as the incorrect sentence/ or having to figure out what a sentence pattern means, then students explore/discover/examine the triggering event to figure out the grammar rule or figure out what is wrong with the sentence and what grammar rule is being violated, then once the student guesses/and or figures out the correct grammar rule from the sentence patterns or figures out what grammar rule is being violated, then the student reaches the synthesis level where they can apply this knowledge to their everyday lives. I get students who later on tell me that they know how to find grammar mistakes in other people's email or business correspondence or that they themselves have become better writers because they can spot check their own grammar mistakes in their own papers.  I love interacting with students whether they be online or face to face. I use both the Learning method of teaching grammar and the Acquisition method of teaching grammar with my ESL or American students.