Page 124 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Teaching Grammar and Vocabulary

Classroom Insight: Hot Chairs
One of the most popular games for vocab- discussed in the lesson) but then she cir-
ulary revision in Ina’s class is the ‘hot chairs cles the ones which the pupils on hot
game.’ She uses it for motivating pupils dur- chair are supposed to guess.
ing the lesson but often also as a reward at 4. The aim of the game is for the students in
the end of the lesson as the pupils really like the teams to help their team members on
playing it. hot chairs guess the words on the board.
She usually follows this procedure: Here she uses different instructions, for
1. She splits the class into two teams and example, the pupils on hot chairs can
places two empty chairs (‘hot chairs’) in only ask yes/no questions or the team
front of the board, one for each group. members can only give synonyms or
2. One member from each group sits on the antonyms, etc.
chairs with his/her back to the board, fac- In lower levels she sometimes asks two pupils
ing his/her team mates. from each group to sit on hot chairs as this
3. She then writes a word or expression on releases the pressure on individual pupils.
the board. The vocabulary is related to She varies the activities both in terms of team
the topic discussed so the choice is not organisation (sometimes the activity is car-
so wide. With younger learners, she writes ried out with the whole class, sometimes
different words before the pupils on hot there are more teams) and language level (in-
chairs turn their backs so they all see the cluding, e.g. idiomatic expressions or longer
words (e.g. all the names of animals phrases for more advanced pupils).

Grammar Focus
Teaching grammar has undoubtedly been one of the most controversial
issues in the history of English language teaching, strongly influenced by
different approaches which have dominated the area of foreign language
teaching in different periods. With the emergence of communicative lan-
guage teaching, grammar was first marginalised as the focus shifted from
accuracy to fluency.
Today we can speak of two different ways of understanding the role of
grammar – the weak and the strong view (Nunan, 2015). According to the
strong view, learners will ‘pick up’ grammar subconsciously through com-
municative tasks, so there is no need to teach it explicitly. On the other hand,
the weak view sees explicit grammar teaching as beneficial for language de-
velopment. There is a general consensus among researchers today (Nunan,
2015; Ellis, 2006; Larsen-Freeman, 2000) that there is a place for grammar in
the foreign language curriculum, but that it should be considered in the con-
text of meaningful communication and that learners need to be helped to
link grammar items and structures with the communicative functions they
perform in different contexts.
There is a general agreement among authors in the field of teaching En-

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