July 3

Hooray! I know the grammar, now I must impart my wisdom…

Although we have just started a teacher training course here at Active, this is actually a post which I was thinking about a while ago following a conversation with a friend.

I’ve been working as a tutor at Active for a few years now and it’s interesting to see how trainees from different nationalities cope with the different aspects of the course.  Often (though certainly not always), non-native speakers feel much more confident with teaching grammatical aims than their native-speaker peers.  In the conversation with my friend, she mentioned how she felt that some native speaker teachers have a tendency to overwhelm learners during their explanations, perhaps by getting bogged down with metalanguage or feeling that as they now feel confident with the ins and outs of the structure, they must pass all that knowledge on to their learners.

Any thoughts?

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Posted July 3, 2015 by Teresa Bestwick in category Miscellaneous

1 thoughts on “Hooray! I know the grammar, now I must impart my wisdom…

  1. Gordon Dobie

    Use L1 for explanations/comparisons.
    Give a lot of example sentences
    Use L2-L1 and L1-L2 translation activities
    Do a lot of listening as modeling + speaking work
    Stress to ss that inaccuracy is normal and part of the learning process.

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