Giovannangelo: Blog Post # 6


For this week’s blog post, I explored teaching resources for teaching Grammar to L2 learners. I teach grammar regularly to my academic English students, but I never thought about how I would adapt that instruction for English language learners. I explored Fluent U’s resources for teaching Grammar to ESL students and found it to contain lots of great ideas and resources that I wouldn’t have previously thought to explore. 
The article first starts out with explaining how we can make our grammar lessons more meaningful for our ELL students. They recommend three basic principles. As someone who teaches grammar on a daily basis, I agree that these three principles are important when teaching grammar to all students; however, when teaching to ELL students, the skills can be that much more overwhelming and confusing, therefore, we need to make sure we are getting creative.

1.       Contextualize: as teachers, we need to make sure that we are not teaching grammar in isolation, and that we are always teaching in context.

2.       Incorporate all skills: teachers should not just teach grammar as a stand-alone skill, we should incorporate it into all aspects of our instruction including reading and writing

3.       Teach them thematically: teaching with a theme allows students to make connections, which will help them remember the skills better

The article makes the four following recommendations for teaching grammar to ELL students following the basic principles listed above:

1.       Teach using songs

2.       Teach watching movies

3.       Teach with short stories

4.       Teach with cartoons

For each activity, the article explains different activities you can do that directly correlate with speaking, listening, and writing. I found this interesting, because I don’t usually think about grammar in terms of listening and speaking, but when working with ELL students, I think these skills are obviously very important, and should be considered. I also like that the site provides different examples of movies and songs that lend themselves to the suggested activities. Of course, a teacher could pick their own, but it’s nice to have the options already laid out. Another nice feature is that they’ve linked the stories, songs, movies, and cartoons, so teachers can use the links to take them directly there. Overall, I found the website to be a great resource that I would definitely recommend and share! Check out the link below!

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