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Grammar is the skeleton that provides proper structure to a language. One cannot write or convey their message correctly in a language without the knowledge of grammar as it is the grammar that provides the rules that dictate the structure of the language.
Despite being important, grammar is boring to most students, regardless of their age. It feels restrictive to those with fluency in spoken language and they don’t see the practicality of putting effort into learning grammar. The subject is so full of information and rules that it makes it feel daunting and intimidating. No doubt, grammar is the most feared aspect of learning a language. If you want your students to learn grammar, you must make it fun for them.
How to Make Grammar Fun for ESL Students
You know that you need to make grammar interesting for your students but how do you actually make it fun?
Regardless of the difficulty and the inherent boring factors in grammar, as an educator, you need to teach your students the rules of grammar. For this, you will need to make a few changes in your teaching tactics and include some fun aspects. Let us provide you with a few tips to make your students enthusiastic about learning grammar.
- Revise the Basics – Always start with the basics, even if it’s just a quick revision. You can intimidate your ESL students if you directly start from an advanced level of grammar. Revising the basics is important not just for students but for you as well. Growing up in a native English-speaking environment you must have picked up grammar rules without being aware of them. By revising the basics you’ll be sure for yourself that you know what you are going to teach.
- Teach with Examples – It is a known fact that examples make things easier to understand and fun to learn for children as well as adults. But, while teaching ESL students you need to pay special attention to your examples as well. You must make your examples inclusive of non-native students. The feeling of inclusion promotes interest in the students.
- Interactive Grammar Games – Gamifying the learning process makes things fun not only for young children but for adults as well. Though English learning books and English grammar books are all important for ESL students, they are not enough to make learning fun for students. You can adopt some already popular interactive games like puzzles to make grammar interesting for your students or you can get a little creative to invent your own new game. Just focus on having a game around rules of grammar that requires active participation from each learner.
- Give Students Plenty of Opportunities for Practicing – Grammar rules cannot be learned by rote learning. Learners need to practice them well. So, allow your students lots of opportunities for practicing the grammar rules. You can take the help of an ESL grammar book that provides plenty of examples and practice questions to help students deeply understand the rules and concepts of grammar. The old adage ‘practice makes a person perfect’ stands very true in the case of grammar. The more the learners practice the perfect they can get in grammar and the language as a whole.
- Get Creative with Grammar Exercises – Students might not like to practice grammar as much as you want them to so you must find a way around the situation. Being a teacher it is your duty to make your students learn your subject no matter what. You need to think out of the box and get creative to make your students practice grammar. You can get them involved in quizzes and friendly competition in the class. You can also involve them in group activities where they can learn while pro-actively participating in the activity together with their co-learners.
ESL Grammar Activities
You now understand that you have to make your grammar class more fun and exciting for the learners of your class. Here, we suggest some fun-filled ESL grammar activities that you can incorporate into your class based on the type of learner.
- ESL Grammar Activities for Beginners
- Picture description – Show your students pictures of people doing a certain task and ask them to describe the picture in the present continuous tense or any other tense form you are teaching.
- The Verb Family Tree – You can draw a family tree on your whiteboard where the root or trunk would be the main verb and ask the students to fill branches of the tree with other forms of the main verb.
- ESL Grammar Activities for Adults
- Sentence Makers – You can start by writing a sentence in the past tense and then ask learners to add 5 related sentences in the past perfect tense. You can do this activity for different tenses.
- Time Box – You can have different boxes labeled past, present, and future (or types of these tenses to make the game more challenging). Take plenty of cardboard with different sentences written on them. Ask students to pick each cardboard and place it in the appropriate box.
These activities are just examples. You can create more such fun activities if you think creatively.
Final Takeaway
Grammar is one of the most important parts of learning a language, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. Applying some of these activities to your classroom can transform the most yawn-inducing grammar lessons into something your students will look forward to each week.
