Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

5.6.7.BORG 331The teacher now gives the students a list of sentences (e.g. By this time next week I’ll have beenstudying for my exams for 2 months) and asks them to match them to this diagram. The studentswork on this in groups, identifying which of the perfect forms each sentence illustrates. They take afew minutes to do this.In groups, the students are then asked to compile everything they know about perfect tenses inEnglish. The teacher elicits from the students what this will involve and together they establish thatstudents should think about the form, when to use it, examples, and common expressions or relatedwords. The students engage in this task, and the teacher circulates and discusses with them as theydo.For homework, the students are asked to look at pp. 71-72 of their course book, where a summary onperfect tenses is given, and to compare the notes they made during today’s lesson to the informationprovided there. The teacher asks the students to make a note of any questions they want to ask and tobring them back next lesson.This lesson highlights several typical features of Zsanna’s approach to teachinggrammar. Firstly, there is a high level of explicit talk about and analysis of grammar.This reflects the teacher’s own experience of language study; however, her decision toapproach grammar in this way was not simply the unquestioning adoption of thestrategies she had experienced as a learner; she did in fact go through a phase earlier inher career where she avoided explicit grammar work altogether and attempted toimplement what she called a ‘communicative’ approach. However, after experimentingwith this approach for a while she had decided that an element of explicit attention togrammar was beneficial for her students, especially with areas, such as the perfect,where Hungarian did not have equivalent concepts. In such cases, as the teacher recalledfrom her own learning experience, formal study was a useful way of enabling learners todevelop their KAL. As she explained, “Yes, definitely I try to use my experience andthat is why non-native teachers have advantages because they just learnt from the samesteps on their own”.This lesson also illustrates typical processes which she engaged students in. Thus sheencouraged students to generate their own examples, and to analyse and to classify these.She also regularly engaged them in brainstorming group activities where the goal was toreview what they knew about a particular issue and to generate questions for furtherresearch. Students would then be asked to follow up these questions by reading theircourse book or using reference materials in the library. As we saw earlier, the intensivestudy of grammar books was a strategy the teacher herself had found helpful indeveloping her own KAL.As already noted, the perfect was an area of the grammar which the teacher admittedshe still occasionally had problems with, and one she knew her students foundchallenging too. Nonetheless, as the lesson shows, she was willing to engage in an opendiscussion of this topic with her students and to encourage them to generate and analyseexamples and to ask her about these. This reflected her belief that having an adequatelydeveloped KAL is less about always knowing the answer when students ask questionsand more about knowing that there is always more to learn: