Teaching English: teaching grammar skills
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to the online lecture "Teaching English: teaching grammar skills," during which we will discuss how grammar affects language competence and confidence in communication, as well as the practical application of grammatical knowledge through exercises, games, and contextual tasks. The lecture will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, Candidate of Philology.
The teaching of grammar is one of the oldest and most important areas in the study of foreign languages. Grammar is the skeleton of a language, its structure and foundation. Without grammar, it is impossible to achieve language competence. How can we develop maximum grammatical competence when learning English? We will discuss this at our next meeting.
Traditionally, the process of teaching English grammar has been reduced to the PPP triad: Presentation — Practice — Production. This triad allowed the belief that a well-explained rule and subsequent reinforcement of grammatical construction would enable automaticity.
In practice, automaticity was often not achieved. The methodologist and specialist in pedagogical grammar, Keith Jones, therefore proposed the idea that students should master a particular construction through direct application before learning the rule itself. The idea is that Practice and Production of the grammatical construction should precede the Presentation of the rule. Grammatical exercises should not be meaningless, but aimed at discovering new linguistic phenomena, which, in his view, enhances students’ creative abilities.
The lecture will focus on effective methods of teaching English grammar. We will examine how grammar affects language competence, discuss the main approaches to teaching grammar and ways of integrating grammar into practical communication.
Lecturer
Nina Shcherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish as part of the celebrations to mark the 300th anniversary of Russia’s oldest university — St Petersburg University.