When I embarked on my quest to make my classroom more communicative, I researched all I could on how to do this best.  Every single bit of research I read shows that students do NOT learn language by memorizing grammar rules.  They may be able to conjugate a verb in the imperfect or fill in a blank with the right form of the adjective, but this did not equate to being able to communicate in the target language.  If I asked my students: “What were you like as a child?” and we had moved on from the imperfect unit, they would stare at me open-mouthed and not utter a word.  So my first year of implementation, I threw out all grammar instruction.  I never mentioned the words “conjugate”, or “agreement”.  I never talked about parts of speech.  My kids were talking freely and communicating with each other.  It was magical!

As time went on, my French 1 students moved on to French 2 and then on to French 3.  I started to see some issues.  Students could express themselves orally but it wasn’t always translating into their writing.  They would try to talk about others and use the 3rd person plural subject but with the 1st person singular verb!  I could not just say, “You conjugated this wrong” or “Look at your subject-verb agreement” to help them because they didn’t even know what that meant. I was getting frustrated and more importantly and more worrisome, my students were getting frustrated.   Clearly, I was missing a piece somewhere.

This moved me to try teaching grammar in context.  True, grammar topics should not drive the the unit, but they also should not be erased from the unit completely.  Even in our first language, we learn how to express ourselves first, and then we learn accuracy as we progress.  My 3-year old son once told me “I goed to the park today” and that was just fine at the time.  But if the same boy today at 16 expressed himself in the same manner, there would be a problem!

So what exactly is “grammar in context”?  First, it is planning your units with themes in mind.  It is looking at the ACTFL Can Do statements and determining what your students can do with the unit based on their proficiency level.  It’s planning your IPAs.  It’s deciding essential vocabulary.  Finally, it is working out what structure(s) your students need to know in order to meet the Can Dos.  Once you figure that out, you need to ask yourself how you can point out the structure without an explicit grammar instruction.  My favorite way to do this is to have the students come up with the rules themselves.

Tomorrow, I will share for an example of a grammar in context lesson that I just used with my Novice-Mid students.  My French 1 class is currently in a unit on city life and I will show how the students themselves came up with rules to express going TO a place in French.  It worked really well and was not a lot of prep for me.  A demain !