A study on effective ways of teaching English grammar

효과적인 문법지도 방법에 관한 연구

The purpose of the present study is to explore effective ways of teaching English grammar, which is geared toward improving students' communicative competence. Grammatical competence is essential to communicative competence. Grammatical knowledge cannot be acquired unconsciously in an EFL environment such as in Korea. Therefore learners should be given grammar instruction. More importantly, they should be instructed in grammar so that they can develop their grammatical abilities which are the foundation of communicative competence. The following is proposed for the grammar instruction placing the focus on improving communicative competence. First, it is effective to explain the form, meaning and pragmatics of a grammatical rule to learners in Korean. Second, learners should be given instruction in grammatical patterns that deals with constructions and meanings together, which can enable them to produce sentences by themselves. Third, it should be taught to understand constructions and meanings on the basis of word orders. Then the following steps of grammar instruction are suggested. In the first step of grammatical instruction, students should be provided with the illustrations of grammatical structures which link communicative functions and grammar. In the second step, learners should be gotten to practice grammatical constructions repeatedly enough to use them unconsciously. Lastly, communicative activities such as description and role plays should be included in grammar instruction to integrate grammar practice and communicative language use.