Lifelong Learning

The grammar wiki constrcution has started although in slow and tiny progress. It is not that easy to adapt to the idea of reviewing and reconstructing your own work upon others’. It needs very careful reading and thinking before you make changes to others’ work. So I just found students add things up instead of really interacting and collaborating with the previous students.

It takes time and patience for every innovative idea to be spreaded and accepted by most of people. The idea of learning through wiki is relatively new and immature. There is no definite saying so far in terms of its feasibility and validity. Not many successful cases to follow although most of the educators agree that it has a promising prospect in teaching and learning, considering its low-tech requirements, high-collborative features.

Maybe another reason for the slow progress lies in the course I’m teaching-grammar! It is really hard to motivate students to participate in searching tedious grammar rules and doing endless drills.

Is there any way to make gammar less boring?

Having enough drills is necessary since most of the students agree that practice makes perfect. I just wonder about some other way of reviewing and pratising prammar-in a more authentic context.

I came a cross a very interesting idea of learning grammar recently called grammar safari.(if you’re interested, just have a glance of its instructions here)

It applies a “natural approach” to the study of grammar. As it claims, ” the World Wide Web is an excellent place to begin experiencing English as it occurs in its natural surroundings–not only are there millions of English texts readily available, but also most of them can be electronically searched for those elusive yet fascinating English grammar structures. The “grammar safari” activities suggested here are just that, suggestions for “hunting” and “collecting” EXAMPLES of specific words as they are used in documents accessible to anyone on the WWW — a vast, ever-growing, always up-to-date “corpus” of language ranging over an inexhaustible range of topics, geographic areas, and users.”

This pegagogy, learning language through authentic and natural surroundings, actually is not very new indeed. However, hunting for grammar through reading really strikes a chord with me. Endless drills may make a temporary good-grammar student, but not liable to improve language proficiency in the long run. Reading, as I always stress, is the best way of learning, whatever the subject is. In addition to that, in this era of collaboration and creation, reading through sharing and interating with other people of the same interets may be a better way of learning.

Since I’m learning with a group of language students, I would like to try this out with reading some literature works which I think most of the students would have interest in. How about starting with Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice? It may be a friendly start since most of the students are girls and familiar with the story.

I’m stepping into the jungle of language with tricky but interesting grammar, would you like to venture with me?

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Today is the first day of spring semester. I’m going to teach grammar for the first time. New students, new course and new challenge.

The term grammar does not bring pleasant memories to the minds of many people, the same to me. When I was learning grammar in college, I often struggled with my drowsiness in class. It is so boring~~~I don’t want my students to doze off my class!

I’m thinking of the way of teaching grammar. Recently, I read a book titled Grammar for Teachers written by Andrea DeCapua which really shed some light for my teaching. This book starts with clarifying the definition of grammar, the differences between prescriptive and descriptive grammar and gives a very provocative perspective about grammar.

From the grammarian’s point of view, grammar is a set of written rules we should follow in order to use the language correctly. However, from the linguist’s point of view, grammar is a system or the “blueprints” for creating language and it is governed by a set of rules. Different point of views determine the way of learning and teaching grammar.

Just as the author says in the book, the vast majority of what ESL/EFL learners need to learn is descriptive grammar. So while teaching ESL/EFLlearners, teachers must also take into account why students are learning the language, which errors are more serious than others, and on which aspects of grammar to focus.

What makes this book very appealing to me is the abundant class activities it includes which I found very provocative so far.

I’ve introduced wiki to the students in today’s class. Most of the students showed interests and concern about this new idea because few of them have even heard about this new item before. I’m still worried about its feasibility since there are a lot of obstacles ahead that could be forseen, e.g. the access to internet, technical problems, students’ participations…

What i should do this week:

1. get the students grouped and give some instructions to the class presentation online, hopefully they will see.

2. write a brief introduction to wiki and how to use it. Try to make it easier to understand.

3. give a piece of reading (academic, formal writing) to the students every week through e-mail, GG, or the course wiki.

4. Try to find more grammar exercises for supplementary practice in and out of class. The students would need it!

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