By: John W.
Submitted: 2012-01-21 05:22:11 | Word Count: 504
Part of the difficulty of learning and mastering the English grammar rules is that they are, well, rules. There is just something about these rules that repel most of the people. Adding to this problem are the strict and uptight English teachers who are often associated with learning this all-important subject. It is especially challenging with children, who are settled with other forms of meaningful communication; they do not see an apparent need or relevance in learning the English grammar. So, how can it be fun and motivating for people, regardless of age, size, and shape?
In teaching the grammar rules to children, it is important to know and speak their language-games. Kids are innately competitive, with lots of energy waiting to be spent. They cannot sit on a chair for solid one hour learning about the eight parts of speech, the subject-verb agreement, the pronoun and its antecedent, among others. Also, at their age, children learn best when they are running, kicking, and screaming. In the preparation of lesson plans, the first activities can include games that will exhaust their energies, so that they it is time to process the game and glean the grammatical principles from them, they are in a relaxed state of mind, and are more prepared to receive lessons via straight forward lecture.
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There is an old cliché that goes, "Rules are meant to be broken." When it comes to teaching English grammar rules to older kids and adolescents, it is encouraged that they make mistake and leave room for them to learn from these lapses. It is important for the teacher to create a safe environment for the students to commit grammar mistakes, and allow them to correct themselves in the process, so that the learning is more experiential, rather than didactic, the latter of which, will only cause many of them to fall asleep during the class. Also, presenting the English grammar as a set of hard fast rules tends to turn off teenagers, most of who have the knack for breaking them anyway. So, why not grant them to liberty to break grammar mistakes, and evaluate their class performance based on how many mistakes they, themselves, have corrected.
People who have aged in the writing craft are no less exempted from committing grammatical mistakes. In reading novels, biographies, essays, and articles, authors will often have their editors to thank for making them "look good on paper." But these authors also do their homework in honing their mastery of the English grammar by developing habits that contribute to that end. One such habit is keeping a dictionary for easy access when writing. More than just provide definitions for a word, it does so according to the various functions it can assume in a given sentence. Understanding words and their several uses and relationships can help the writer or the speaker in his attempt to improvise, be creative, and play around with them, in order to communicate ideas, ending, themes that inform the mind and move the heart.
Author Resource:-
Go to the official English Grammar website for more grammar lessons, rules, and news for everyday use - http://www.englishgrammar.org/
