Teaching Grammar Through Situational Approach

 by Prashant Mishra, Professor and Head, Department of English, Government S.V.P.G. College, NEEMUCH(M.P.) 458 441

Introduction:

Learning of mother tongue is an unconscious process. People learn their mother tongues from the socio-cultural surroundings. They do not learn the grammar of their mother tongues consciously and deliberately. But learning of a second language proves to be a difficult and complex exercise. In spite of making extra efforts, non-native learners find it difficult to acquire proficiency in the use of a second language. An L2 learner comes across two main obstacles in the learning of a second language. One is to acquire linguistic competence and second is to extend linguistic competence to communicative competence i.e. to use grammatical items appropriately in various real-life situations while communicating with the people. Most of the teachers are accustomed to teach grammar rules in isolation. They follow prescriptive approach by first acquainting the students with the grammatical rules and then providing practice to them in their uses and applications. Even teachers who follow descriptive approach too divorce the teaching of grammatical items from the real life situations. Therefore, it becomes necessary for a grammar pedagogue to associate teaching of grammatical rules with their uses in real life situations. Here a teacher has to adopt a strategy to create such situations in the class room which provide ample opportunities to the students to use grammatical items meaningfully in different types of real life situations. As class rooms are divorced from the lives of the students due to imposition of curricula, examination pattern and time constraints, it becomes difficult for a teacher to match the class room situations with the real life situations they encounter outside the class rooms. But a resourceful teacher can easily maneuver class room situations to extend teaching of rules to their appropriate uses in various socio-cultural situations. (more…)