A story of a grammar class

Nabanita Deshmukh

Storytelling is a great way to introduce English as a second language (ESL) to students who are not yet familiar with it. Children cannot analyse language like grown-ups do but imbibe it naturally from the surroundings they live in. Teachers therefore need to use the same approach to make language teaching as authentic as possible by introducing activities such as stories because children make sense of their world through them! Stories can be read, written, and repeated in many different ways by offering students a rich repertoire of interpretation and meaning.

But the question remains, especially in the minds of teachers whether grammar can be taught through stories. After all, the basic component of a language is its grammar and every child has to learn it to be able to communicate well but most often this does not happen. Children dread grammar lessons and are unwilling to learn the rules, not because the subject is boring but because often teachers do not teach it right!

How to make grammar classes relevant is an important point of discussion in most teacher meetings and what comes to the fore is the need to teach grammar meaningfully.

Given that stories have such a great impact on children, here is a list of creative activities to make English classes fun and interesting. And who knows? By using them in class, you may end up teaching better and students may actually love to learn!

Sequencing skills
Sequencing helps children comprehend what they read or hear. It also helps them identify the components of a story such as the beginning, the middle,and the end and then retell it in a sequential manner. Sequencing skills are important comprehension strategies, especially for narrative texts and they also help in problem-solving.

Activity 1: Story strip sequencing

Objective: For developing reading and sequencing skills

Outcomes:

• Students will learn how to work in groups and choose the right sequence for recreating a story.
• Students will learn how to link the beginning and ending of sentences to create a meaningful unit.

Materials: Cut-out strips of stories

Procedure:

• The teacher narrates a story to the class.
• The teacher cuts the printed story either into paragraphs, sentences, phrases or words depending on the age and level of the students.
• She divides the students into groups and asks each group to arrange the strips in the correct order.
• The teacher retells the story to the class and each group has to rearrange the story strips if they have done it differently.
• As a variation, teachers can make children do this exercise before telling them the story and use it as a prediction exercise and to generate interest and suspense.

Sentence-weaving
The ability to write correctly and clearly can transform any challenging writing task into a fulfilling experience. In this regard, the development of sentence-making skills assumes vital importance especially for primary students.

Activity 2: Sentence game

Objective:
• To help students link the beginning and endings of sentences to create a meaningful unit.

Outcome:
• Students will be able to identify different parts of sentences and how to link them in the right order.

Procedure:

• The teacher distributes strips containing partial sentences from the story and makes the students stand in two rows facing one another. Row 1 has the beginning of sentences and Row 2 has the endings.
• At the word ‘go’ students from both rows have to run to find their respective partners and read out their sentences aloud to the entire class.
• The teacher can then make all the sentence-pairs stand in an order to reconstruct a story or a paragraph.
• As a variation for very young learners, half pictures of objects or characters from the story can be used for the same game instead of sentences. Once the pairs form, the teacher can shout out the word to help students remember it.

Questioning skills
Questioning is an important skill to be developed in both younger and older students. By learning to ask the right questions clearly, the ability to gather information and knowledge improves and so do verbal skills.

Activity 1: Five questions

Objective: To develop questioning skills in students
Outcome: Students will learn how to ask questions about people and objects from a story

Materials: None

Procedure:
• The teacher narrates a story to the class and asks a student to think of an object or a person from the story. The others have to ask him five questions each for guessing the right answer.

Story fillers
Gap-fillers are excellent ways to reinforce vocabulary and allow students to encounter words and phrases in different contexts. These exercises can also help teachers gauge the comprehension levels and spelling difficulties of their students.

Activity 1: Missing story parts

Objectives: To help students focus on the lexical, syntactical, and grammatical features of a new language.

Outcomes: Students will know the precise positions of language features such as words, phrases, and sentences for creating a meaningful text.

Materials: Photocopies of stories with gaps

Procedure:

• The teacher narrates a story and distributes printouts of it with some words missing.
• Students have to fill in the words to complete the story.
• To make it more difficult, the teacher can erase entire phrases or sentences for students to fill in the missing portions.

Story grammar
The parts of speech in grammar are considered ‘the building blocks of sentences’. To write grammatically correct sentences in English, one has to know at least some of them and what better way to do it than through a game?

Activity 1: Grammar envelope
Objective: To help students identify and correctly use parts of speech.

Outcome: Students will be able to learn the right usage of grammar by creating sentences on their own.

Materials:
• Paper slips with words written on them
• Envelopes

Procedure:

• The teacher narrates a story to the class and makes photocopies of the story.
• The teacher cuts out nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and others from the text and puts them into different envelopes.
• The students are divided into groups and each group gets a set of envelopes for creating sentences either from the story or new ones from the words that they have got.
• The group that makes the highest number of correct sentences is the winner.

Reflections
The story activities described in this article for teaching grammar in a meaningful way have been tried out in classes and are popular with students. It has not only motivated children to learn better but has also inspired teachers to use stories creatively in class. By doing so, both teachers and students seem to have benefited or should I say grammar has benefited? This much misunderstood topic seems to have shed its ‘hateful garb’ of meaningless drills to emerge as an interesting activity that can make language classes so much more fun!

The author is a teacher and writer of children’s stories and rhymes. She conducts workshops for teachers and students on storytelling and interactive methods of teaching. She can be reached at deshmukh.nitu@gmail.com.