Effective Strategies for Grammar Teaching: Ideas for Learning Prepositions Coursework

Introduction

ELL students often face serious difficulty when it comes to the use of prepositions. Most languages have very different logic of the use of prepositions, and a different system of cases to replace prepositions at all.

What Can be Done to Overcome the Difficulty?

Communicative grammar strategy is the answer. This approach is now considered to be a panacea for teachers working with ELL students (Celce-Murcia 1991). Numerous outstanding instructors apply it successfully. One of them is Bill Johanson who is now considered to be a leader in developing successful methods in teaching grammar using communicative grammar strategy. He offers some interesting ideas on how to help ELL students to learn difficult grammar material concerning the use of prepositions and more in his book Daily Grammar Lessons (2010).

Bill Johanson’s Methods for Teaching Prepositions

The first effective method is to offer the students a few sentences containing some common prepositional phrases and to ask them to find these phrases (2010). Let us consider the examples of the offered sentences:

1. Jim painted a picture on the wall of the house.
2. I like to lie in the shade of the apricot tree and think of the jobs for the day.
3. The dog jumped over the mound behind the barn and ran into the street.
4. Everyone but you will need a note from home with parental permission.
5. Around the yard for miles, you could see nothing except junk.

All of these sentences are commonly used by the native speakers and contain some of the wide-spread prepositional phrases, which are on the wall, of the house, in the shade, of the apricot tree, of the jobs, for the day, over the mound, behind the barn, into the street and others. Thus, using such a method you will be able to get a double result, both helping your students in sharpening their knowledge about the use of prepositions, and seeing the way they are applied in the daily flow of speech.

The other interesting method is to offer the students to “play” with sentence structures using the rules of the use of prepositions. For example, to make a compound sentence from two simple ones using the prepositional phrase as in the following example: “The sunset was beautiful. The sunset was in the west. The sunset in the west was beautiful”.

One more method to consider is to offer the students printed cards with the sentences featuring prepositions and prepositional constructions shown in italics along with the other words and to ask them to identify the prepositions. For example,

1. Come in and sit down with me.
2. He climbed up on the ladder and through the window.
3. Mrs. Jones came by at suppertime but not since.

In this case, the learners will be able to differentiate between different parts of speech and thus, between different grammar rules for their usage.

Conclusion

The Benefits of Applying the Methods Offered by Johanson – Your lessons are interesting, engaging and effective.

Your Smart Choice. Effective communicative grammar strategies will become a sheet anchor both for you and your students. By choosing them you choose your professional success.

References

Celce-Murcia, M. (1991). Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. United States: Heinle ELT.

Johanson, B. (2010). Daily Grammar Lessons. Salt Lake City: Word Place, Inc.