Sáng kiến kinh nghiệm Enhancing communicative competence for students through grammar lessons in English 10 – Global Success

 PART A: INTRODUCTION 
 1. Rationale: 
Together with the advancement of science and technology, English as an 
international language has become an indispensable tool for integration and 
development among countries around the world. To many people, travelling abroad 
for holiday, for jobs, for study or for business is a common thing and not beyond 
their means. That is the reason why the demand of communicating in English is 
getting higher and higher. Thus, teaching and learning English in the context of 
globalisation has become more and more essential. English as a compulsory subject 
in the national curriculum not only helps students broaden their knowlege of the 
language in the most coutries all over the world but also improve their competence 
of using the language in communication in order to meet the demand of high quality 
workforce for the job market in the future. Therefore, the Ministry of Education and 
Training issued Circular 32/2018/TT-BGDĐT in which the curriculum of the 
English subject focuses on the communicative competence and considers learnered-
center approach as the main point of the teaching and learning process. The level of 
upper secondary education requires students to be able to use English as a 
communication tool as well as to enrich the knowledge of English through 
phonetics, vocabulary and grammar lessons. To meet the requirements, the authors 
have been applying various methods to encourage students to build up their 
confidence and promote their communicative competence not only in skill lessons 
but also in grammar lessons to replace the traditional method of teaching English 
grammar – teachered-center. That is the reason why we have decided to choose the 
carry out the topic: “Enhancing communicative competence for students through 
grammar lessons in English 10 – Global Success”. 
 2. Aim of the Study: 
 The topic was studied and applied with a view to enhancing the communicative 
competence for grade 10 students through grammar lessons in the textbook English 
10 – Global Success. It is also served as a source of materials that help English 
teachers improve speaking skill for their students. 
Through this study, the topic has helped the writers draw experiences of developing 
the students’ communicative competence by teaching grammar communicatively. 
The writers’ experiences shown in this study may provide English teachers with a 
source of materials to teach grammar lessons in such a way that helps to improve 
students’ communication skill in general. 
 3. Scope of the study: 
 As mentioned at the beginning, the study attempts to figure out the methods of 
teaching grammar communicatively for grade 10 students at Cua Lo high school. 
Once successfully applied, a few activities used in teaching grammar towards 
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 PART B: CONTENTS 
I. THEORETICAL BASIS OF THE TOPIC: 
1. Concept of teaching grammar communicatively 
 Generally, grammar shows the correct orders of words to make meaningful 
sentences. “Grammar may be defined as the rules of a language, governing the way 
in which words are put together to convey meaning in different contexts”. 
(Nesamalar Chitravelu; Sararatha Sithamparam & The Soo Choon, 2005). 
Traditional teaching methods follow the PPP pattern (short for Presentation – 
Production - Practice) in which teachers present and illustrate the grammar rules and 
students then use the prompts given to make similar sentences. In the Practice stage, 
they continue praticing the controlled target laguage. For example, to teach the 
present simple tense, the teacher introduces the verb form, the usage, the structures 
and gives examples. Students take notes and follow the rules to put the verbs given 
into the correcct form of the present simple tense. Then they practice making 
sentences, using this verb form. In this model, the teacher plays the main role – 
teacher-centered framework and learners study in a passive way – receiving the 
“one-sided” knowledge. In this way, grammar points seem boring because they are 
explained by teachers, memorized by students separately. Students focus on doing 
exercises to indicate that they understand the lessons but they can hardly use these 
rules to communicate. “The problem is not in grammar itself, but in the way, that 
grammar has been taught and learned”. (https://elttguide.com/want-to-teach-
grammar-communicatively-its-so-simple-follow-these-3-tips/). 
 Teaching Grammar Communicatively means encouraging students to use 
grammar points to communicate effectively in real life situations. 
2. Concept of communicative competence 
 In a broad meaning, the concept of communicative competence is a very 
complicated term, which has been researched by famous scholars in the world for 
years. “The scientific history of the concept of communicative competence began in 
the 1960s as a counter-movement against the so-called “linguistic competence” 
introduced by the structural linguist Noam Chomsky (1965), who based linguistic 
theory on an ideal speaker-listener with perfect linguistic knowledge, which is 
supposed to be unaffected by cognitive and situational factors during actual 
linguistic performance. Among others, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1970) and 
the sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1972) argued that Chomsky’s concept could not serve 
as a relevant component in a theory of real-life communication. Habermas argued 
“that general semantics cannot be developed sufficiently on the narrow basis of the 
monological linguistic competence proposed by Chomsky” (1970: 137–138). But 
similar to Chomsky’s idea of an idealized speaker-hearer, he idealized the speech 
situation: “Above all, communicative competence relates to an ideal speech situation 
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 II. PRACTICAL BASIS OF THE TOPIC: 
1. Common problems during the teaching grammar process: 
 Grammar is an indispensible part in learning a language. However, it is not 
only difficult for students to master all the grammatical structures but it is also boring 
to memorize the rules in separate patterns. Thus, English teachers have had a lot of 
difficulties in teaching grammar lessons. First, teachers give students too many rules 
to remember. They soon feel frustrated and confused as there are too many things to 
understand as well as too many exceptions from the grammatical rules which are not 
simple at all because real life situations vary while no rules can be fixed to all cases, 
so students have to learn the rules and memorize the exceptions at the same time. 
Second, there are so many students in classes that it is hard for teachers to make sure 
that all students can understand the grammar lessons. The class size ranges from 
thirty-five to fourty-five students, which makes it impossible for teachers to stop by 
each student’s table to check if they can make sense of what they are taught in a 
limited time – forty-five minutes for each period at school. Besides, teachers also 
have to deal with teaching multi-level classes and different learning styles from 
students. In each class, there are always many different levels of students – excellent, 
good, fair, average, and weak. Teachers have to control the speed they give lectures 
so that average and weak students can catch up with and they also have to adapt a 
suitable method so that excellent and good students find something deserving to 
follow the lectures. In addition, teachers also have trouble giving feedback to 
students who have different levels at grammar development. Correcting students’ 
grammatical mistakes is also time-consuming. 
2. Principles of teaching grammar: 
 As we see, teachers have to face a lot of issues when teaching grammar and 
the problem is not grammar, but the way it is taught and learned. A good way to 
combat this problem is teaching grammar communicatively, which helps students 
practice the target grammar patterns through particular communicative activities. 
“Teaching grammar effectively is about enabling children to control grammar to 
express increasingly complex ideas. When grammar is taught well, it can make a 
significant different to children’s literacy development”. (Key principles for 
teaching grammar, retrieved on December, 9th, 2022 from 
https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/key-principles-for-teaching-grammar) 
 Here are 7 key principles when teaching grammar: 
 a. Build up own subject knowledge 
 To teach grammar, teachers need explicit as well as implicit knowledge, to 
 be confident about using the correct terms and explaining these. Don’t just 
 learn the next term you are teaching. It is important to be able to relate new 
 learning to other features and the text as a whole. 
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 Games are beneficial to both teachers and students. First, students are 
motivated to win the games, especially when they have chances to compete in 
groups. The tasks given will become more challenging and demanding. In stead of 
sitting boringly in one place doing exercises as teachers ask, they have chance to 
express themselves by trying to answer the questions in the shortest time if they 
don’t want to lose the games. Second, games helps to reduce the stress during 
classes. By taking part in the games, students somehow forget that they are being 
asked to do exercises. They just concentrate on the main objective – find the answers 
to be the winners. To make it more appealing, sometimes teachers also give the 
winners small presents as the rewards of the games, which makes students more 
eager to be the winners. Finally, using games will make the lessons more learner-
centered as most of the time, teachers just give the instructions, and it is students 
who play the main role in the activities. In this study, we have searched for several 
common games that really work in teaching grammar as follow: 
 a. Word Scramble: 
 This game is suitable for students to practice making meaningful sentences 
 using the target language. To play this game, teachers write a sentence and cut 
 the words separately and give them to students so that students can form the 
 sentence. Students can play in groups. They have to use their grammatical 
 knowledge as well as their vocabulary to make complete sentences. 
 b. Time Bomb: 
 This is a fun game to teach grammar. To play this game, teachers need wind-
 up toy, an oven timer, or a stopwatch, and preferably that audibly ticks. First, 
 teachers start the timer, and then ask students a question and they have answer 
 it before the timer stops, if not, they will lose the game. Teachers can give 
 students a few questions, depending on the students’ levels. Students can also 
 play in teams. 
 c. Find someone who..... 
 This game is suitable for students to practice speaking and listening skill by 
 going round in the classroom and make a survey, using the target grammar 
 structures. At first, teacher will show a topic and the grammar points to control 
 the activity. Then, students move around, making questions and take notes 
 their friends’ answers with a piece of paper and a pen. After that, students will 
 report the results to the class. 
 d. Card game: 
 Teacher prespares cards with random words written on each card. Students 
have to choose one or several cards and try to use the words to practice the grammar 
item. This is a fun game for individual activities. 
3.2. Teaching grammar in contexts available in the coursebook: 
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 Teachers can use visual aids to teach grammar. They can hang the visuals on 
the board or show them on the screen to explain the grammatical rules. By this way, 
the grammar lessons can attract students’ attention and make them actively 
participate in learning activities. They also motivate students to develop their 
listening, speaking and reading skills. “Visuals help learners visualize what are being 
taught to them and stimulate deeper understanding as well as create actual and 
interesting contexts of grammar learning that facilitate the learners to connect the 
material being taught to their own lived experience”. (Adriadi Novawan. 2011. 
Visually-based grammar teaching, retrieved on December 26th 2022, from 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290544123_Visuallybased_grammar_tea
ching). There are various kinds of visual aids that teachers can use to teach grammar, 
based on the requirements and the aim of each lesson such as pictures, images, 
charts, real objects, ...... 
 III. PRACTICAL APPLICATION IN TEACHING: 
 Teaching grammar is not easy at all. Firstly, teachers need to master the target 
language clearly to be able to explain the rules to students. Secondly, teachers have 
to develop various methods to make their lectures more appealing to students. 
Working together in this study, we have discussed and applied the principles as well 
as the techniques in the grammar lessons in Global Success 10. Here are the lesson 
plans and the procedures that we have applied in teaching grammar for grade 10 
students in Cua Lo high school. With the grammar lesson of Unit 1, actually, 
students have already learned a lot about the present simple and the present 
continuous tenses. Therefore, in this lesson, teachers just help them to revise the use 
and the structures as well as the difference between these two tenses without having 
to explain everything in details. Teachers can use the context available in the Getting 
started lesson in the coursebook or create a context to talk about daily routines. 
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