Congratulations

on the successful completion of Module 1!

Watch the video summarizing the most important points from this week.

[The video can be viewed online. The transcript is provided below.]

Transcript:
On bricks, walls, gardens and metaphors
We started the course with an overview of most influential approaches to grammar teaching, which
hopefully helped you put the communicative approach in a historical context. Being aware how the field
evolved definitely deepens our understanding of various approaches to teaching grammar. There are
important lessons to be learned from history: focus on discovering what works, for whom, when and
why.

The main focus of the past week were two approaches to teaching grammar, two metaphors to reflect
on: the organic garden approach, and the brick wall approach. The sample lesson plan you analyzed
illustrated the most important characteristics of the organic garden approach:

• Grammar is brought to students’ attention as a part of communicative language practice.

• In a communicative lesson, the target grammar structure is a vehicle for communication, not
just the object of study.
• The students are primarily focused on the message - on ‘what’ is said rather than ‘how’ it is
said.
• The students feel a desire to communicate because they are asked to talk about themselves
and contribute their ideas.
• Communicative grammar tasks also contain some kind of ‘gap’ - information, opinion, affect or
reason - which students seek to bridge.
• The teacher’s role is to make students aware of grammar structures or help them notice certain
grammatical features while they are engaged in completing communicative tasks.

© 2017 by World Learning. MOOC Task 1.11_Summary for the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of
State and administered by FHI 360. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, except where
noted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This is a program of the U.S. Department of State

administered by FHI 360 and delivered by World Learning

• The teacher is also facilitator establishing situations likely to promote communication and the
use of target grammar structures.
• Communicative grammar teaching is not mechanical. Rather than asking students to focus on
definitions and rules, teachers may focus on imparting instructional strategies where the focus
is on creative usage of grammar.

However, it is important to mention that teaching and learning contexts can impose certain restrictions
to applying the organic garden way of teaching:

• lower level (beginner) learners might find it hard without enough 'bank' of knowledge to build
on;
• short lesson time, e.g. 40 min;
• large class size;
• mandatory materials/course books designed with the brickwall approach in mind;
• materials/course books do not correspond to the students' needs and interests;
• mixed levels of students' language proficiency in the same group;

These restrictions do pose a difficulty, but they are not insurmountable. In many ways, classrooms are
similar to gardens: there are soils which are harder for planting specific flowers. Master gardeners know
what they need to do to prepare the ground and have good conditions for growing. In the following
modules, we will continue exploring what teachers can do to bring different grammar gardens into
blossom.

This is a program of the U.S. Department of State

administered by FHI 360 and delivered by World Learning