Race And Win on Teaching Grammar

Learning English can still a burden for some students. Most of the students are afraid of the subject, they think learning English means facing numerous language rules and patterns. The fact that there are still some English teachers who teach the students grammar by giving exhausting exercises pictures grammar as boring and uninteresting lessons. Such teachers argue that the teaching of grammar can only be effective if grammar is presented through repetition and other rote drills. Moreover the little knowledge of current teaching method such as communicative language teaching can lead to dangerous fallacies of teaching grammar. Grammar might be considered unimportant since they have to focus on how the communication occurs, thus accuracy is not taken into account, while to be intelligible one should have permissible language.  Conversing grammar and how to teach it is quite controversial. Not only it is considered as boring, wearing, repetitive drill, but some misconceptions on grammar could discourage the teacher as well as the students in engaging the grammar in the teaching and learning process. Realizing some worries in the teaching and learning grammar, this paper proposed ‘race and win with grammar’, a board game adapted from Toth (38: 1995) as an alternative technique to teach grammar. By using this game, teaching and learning grammar can be very attractive, interactive, fun, and, definitely, effective.

The Teaching of Grammar

Grammar is defined as the study of what forms or patterns are possible in a language and it is conventionally seen as the study of the syntax and morphology of sentence (Thornbury, 1999: 2). In line with that, Brown (2001: 362) mentioned that grammar is the system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence.  Grammar is the mental system in human brain that enables human beings to produce and interpret the words and sentences of their language (O’Grady and Dobrovolsky, 1992: 4).

Teaching grammar has roused controversy along with the occurrence of communicative approach. In its early years, generally some pros of this approach refused grammar instruction in the teaching learning process. They argued that explicit grammar teaching is incompatible with their communicative ideology. Sugiharto (2005: 173) as cited in Collins (2006: 2) stated that Communicative Language Teaching CLT) has had negative impact on grammar instruction. While, in fact, organizational competence, grammatical and discourse competence in this case, is one of the communicative competences which should be acquired to have intelligible communication. Brown (2001: 362) argued that grammatical competence occupies a prominent position as a major component of communicative competence without the knowledge of how to organize an intricate, complex array of rules into a permissible grammatical sentences, one’s language would be simply chaotic. In addition, Patchler (1999: 94) pointed out that ‘grammar allows us to generate an unlimited utterance with finite set of linguistic resources and to talk about the world beyond the here and now’. Avoiding the controversy of whether the grammar is importance the discussion have come to agreement on how to teach grammar to build students’ communicative competence.

In Indonesia, traditional grammar teaching can still be found in some language classroom. The teaching of grammar had fall into memorizing, drilling of producing grammatical sentence. In other words, grammar has been exclusively taught with merely analysis at the sentence-level. Unfortunately, such grammar teaching is not in favor for the students as some students find that the rules and pattern in tenses, word formation, etc is like the formula in mathematics or physics. Thus, learning grammar is like learning mathematics and physics with stretched, complicated, and tiring repetitive drilling (Cahyono: 2009). The traditional way of teaching grammar can evolve bad impression of learning a foreign language as students will get bored easily of the same repetitions and rote drills. Teaching grammar does not mean asking students to repeat models in a mindless way, and it does not mean memorizing rules. Such activities can be boring and do not necessarily teach grammar. This does not mean there is no place for drills, but drills should be used in a meaningful and purposeful way (Larsen-Freeman : 1991).

Some misconceptions in current approaches, notably Communicative Language Teaching, discourage the teaching of grammar. Some teachers in Indonesia possessing the misconceptions tend to neglect the accuracy of students’ language competence in order to establish communicative teaching. They think that teaching grammar will linger communicative activities among the students. In fact, teaching grammar is needed to build students’ communicative competence. Communicative competence should be seen to count linguistics competence not to replace it (Larsen-Freeman: 1991). Therefore, teaching grammar means enabling students to use linguistics forms accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately. It is the teacher’s responsibility to establish the teaching and learning process in which the grammar is presented in an effective manner which can help the students to use the linguistic form (=grammar) accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately, also create a fun and enjoying classroom atmosphere.