How to Get Your EFL Students to Stop Fearing Grammar

It's every EFL teacher's nightmare: A student in the class asks you how to use the past perfect continuous in the passive tense--and you forget. Or likewise for students, you correct a student's grammar and he or she looks ready to throw him or herself from the roof of the school. If you dread doing grammar in your EFL class, so will your students. Here are some tips on how to overcome the fear of grammar:

Stop fearing it yourself. As a rule, EFL students will know the name of the tenses better than a native speaker of the language the students are learning. This is not only true of English, but of every other language in the world. Native speakers and EFL teachers know how to use the grammar--but often forget the name of the tense and why it's used that way. If, as an EFL teacher, you're afraid of making a mistake in front of your students, fear no more: you will make a mistake; everyone does and it's not such a big deal unless you act like it is, deny it or try to fake your way out of it. At the beginning of a course, I explain how native speakers--including myself--sometimes make mistakes in spelling or grammar. I intentionally ask students to let me know if they catch a mistake. That usually takes the pressure off of being perfect--which, in turn, reduces the fear. So far, I haven't had a student complain to the school director that I was stupid because I made a grammar mistake in class.

Regularly integrate grammar into your lessons. Explain that anytime you and the students speak to each other, you're using grammar. When you say something in the past as part of a conversation or discussion, stop when it's appropriate and ask students to notice what tense you used. Ask them why you used it--or if they could say the same thing in another way. In this manner, students will begin to view grammar as part of the whole--like vocabulary or comprehension. Try not to stop and say, "It's time for grammar." That often separates it and makes it a tedious or even worse, a dreaded activity.

Explain that there is more than one way to say things in English. Some EFL students get stuck on one tense, say, the present perfect, and insist that there's only one occasion it can be used. Most of these students have been taught by non-native English speakers. Demonstrate that a question can be answered in several different ways, using and combining a variety of tenses. Write a question on the board--and ask the students to answer it in as many ways as appropriate. Several answers will be in different tenses and most will be acceptable. After some initial confusion and resistance, most students see that this actually frees them to speak more fluently without stopping to wonder if the grammar is exactly right every single time they start to talk.

Demonstrate how native English speakers do actually speak. Play a video or clip of a normal conversation in English (not from a Hollywood movie) and let students see how native speakers--who they are trying to emulate--use a variety of grammatical structures, some of which would "not be allowed" according to a grammar book.

Most important, explain to students that we speak in conversation and not isolated grammatical structures. You can do this by letting students speak and hold yourself back from correcting every single grammatical error. Instead, at the end of the conversation, point out some major mistakes, correct them and practice the correct form. You'll find that students will speak more and fear grammar less.

Ilene Springer teaches EFL and lives in Malta. She is author of An-American-in-Malta.com.