Abstract: This interactive workshop-style presentation will examine how grammar instruction in a beginning level language class can be incorporated into communicative language teaching. It will conceptualize grammar instruction as helping learners make correct mappings between form/s and meaning, as they process the language input that they encounter. In this approach “learning the grammar” starts with students comprehending the language input for its propositional content and for the way that words, phrases, and grammatical forms contribute to the meaning of the input. “Learning the grammar” continues in structured input activities (Lee and VanPatten, 2003; Farley, 2004) that give learners opportunities to exchange information and opinions in communicative tasks while they encounter and build a richer repertoire of exemplars that illustrate a particular form-meaning connection. “Learning the grammar” continues in activities where learners produce the target form-meaning connections in communicative contexts. Participants will look specifically at structured input activities and have an opportunity to think about adapting that technique to the language that they teach. Examples will be drawn from the open-access beginning level Russian textbook Mezhdu nami by deBenedette, Comer, Smyslova and Perkins, but they will be applicable to teaching other languages as well.
Farley, A. P. (2004). Structured input: Grammar instruction for the acquisition oriented classroom. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages.
Lee, J., & VanPatten, B. (2003). Making communicative language teaching happen. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
William Comer (Ph.D, 1992, University of California, Berkeley) taught Russian language and culture at the University of Kansas from 1992-2014. At Kansas, he coordinated the Russian language program, developed the Russian language curriculum, and trained and supervised graduate teaching assistants. He has published numerous articles in national journals including the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Language Journal and Foreign Language Annals. His pedagogical edition of Viktoria Tokareva’s short story A Day without Lying (Slavica, 2008) was awarded the prize for Best Book in Language Pedagogy by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2010. In August 2009 he won the University of Kansas W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. He is co-author of Mezhdu nami (=Between you and me), an online, open-access textbook for elementary Russian.