Time Spent Teaching 'grammar'?

[KhunLing]

Hi there fellas

Out of curiosity, how much of your weekly teaching hours would you say are directly ‘grammar’ related?

How many jobs involve no grammar teaching at all? How many are predominantly grammar related?

[Bluffer]

Depends what you mean by "teaching grammar"

You dont really do in blocks as in "for the next 20 minutes we are doing grammar ! " Its usually tied in to the theme you are teaching, so for one lesson you are doing everything in the past tense or present continuous or future or whatever or 5 minutes or anything inbetween.

Its actually quite difficult to teach anything except vocab without introducing grammar even in the background.

This is the same for Prathom, Mattayom, Corporate and so on.

At the start of a corporate course, I always ask what the students want. They always say more grammar. Normally I say the grammar is used through the course but one lot were very insistant. So I agreed and the next full 2 hour lesson was spent discussing the uses of continuous, perfect, simple. They never asked for it again

[els17]

in my experience as a student in M. 6 at a public school, 2/3 of all time would be dedicated to pure grammar (4 hours a week). Whether it was helpful to have so many hours, I doubt it.

[PeaceBlondie]

Thai teachers teach an incredible amount of grammar, in a certain style and method (rote, chorus) because that's what they do best. Farang are hired to do something else: talk good English. They don't expect you to teach grammar. But you'd better know what to answer, such as when star pupil Wasin asked me in my third month of teaching, "What is a gerund?"

[KhunLing]

Thai teachers teach an incredible amount of grammar, in a certain style and method (rote, chorus) because that's what they do best.  Farang are hired to do something else: talk good English.  They don't expect you to teach grammar.  But you'd better know what to answer, such as when star pupil Wasin asked me in my third month of teaching, "What is a gerund?"

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

lol

Personally, I'm "re-learning" grammar myself for just such an occasion. I've mainly done private tutoring / a lot of essay editing / writing for Uni

students. Thus, was unsure as to how much grammar teaching is involved.

Cheers PB

[ajahnlau]

When students asked about grammar I told them that when they were 6 yrs. old they could speak Thai in the proper grammar before they started school. They learned this as did we through conversation and practice. So lets start stringing a few sentences together before learning a mound of rules. Good for lower grades but of course uni. students should be up to learning the rules for more advanced writing.