TEACHING STRATEGIES

6 Powerful Strategies for Teaching Grammar More Effectively

26 February 2025/ By Zineb DJOUB

Grammar is essential for learning any language, yet, many students dread grammar lessons and even experienced teachers struggle to make the rules stick. So, how can we make teaching grammar more effective and engaging?

Before diving into strategies for teaching grammar, let’s think about what it means to teach grammar effectively.

It’s more than just memorising rules. True grammar mastery means knowing the rules and using them naturally in real communication—in speaking and writing.

Yet, as English teachers, we often see students who develop a good understanding of grammatical knowledge through practising the rules but cannot use those rules accurately and appropriately in communication beyond a sentence level.

That’s why we shouldn’t focus on isolated grammar points, but on the situations and contexts where students need to use them in real-life communications.

Here are 6 powerful strategies for bringing grammar to life in your classroom. These strategies will make your lessons more effective, interactive, and engaging.

1. Teach Grammar in context

Grammar doesn’t have to feel like a set of dry rules. It’s much easier for students to understand, retain information, and engage in learning when grammar is taught in context.

Create a simple, relevant context for every grammar lesson—sketch a picture, use flashcards, or have students act out roles.

If you want to deepen understanding, expose them to varied contexts like texts, dialogues, videos, or social media snippets that showcase the structure in action.

Once the context is set, ask guiding questions, use gestures or key phrases to prompt their responses, and see if they can figure out the grammar point themselves.

If they don’t get it right away, no problem—you can model the structure and guide them through discovery.

2. Use a variety of teaching approaches

Flexibility is key when teaching grammar. Therefore, balancing deductive and inductive teaching methods is so important.

There are times when explicit grammar teaching is necessary, starting with the teacher’s explanation and modelling the grammar point and then proceeding to practice. If you need more time for practice and application, going straight to the point can be time-saving.

Other times, an inductive approach is more effective—especially if students are disengaged or passive. Instead of giving the rule upfront, present them with examples of texts that include particular grammatical features, invite them to examine them, and figure out the rule themselves.

3. Integrate grammar into reading, writing, speaking and listening

Grammar is an essential part of the structure of texts. With this in mind, grammar must be taught and practised across all the four skills.

Some ways to integrate grammar with the four skills:

• Reading: Use authentic texts that highlight specific grammar structures. Before or after instruction, have students locate and discuss the target forms in pairs.
• Writing: After practising a grammar concept, give students a prompt that encourages them to apply it in a paragraph or short essay.
• Speaking: Use dialogues, role-plays, or gap-fill spoken texts where students insert missing grammatical elements.
• Listening: Have students listen to a recording or video and complete sentences with the target grammar or check off grammatical forms they hear.

Two Key Considerations:

• Use a variety of texts (e.g., informational, persuasive, procedural) to illustrate how grammatical features are used in different contexts.
• Highlight differences between spoken and written grammar by having students compare spoken and written versions of a text, explore examples of spoken language, and transform conversations into written form.

4. Make grammar engaging and interactive

It can be a lot of fun if we make teaching grammar interactive and connect it to students’ interests and real-life contexts.

Here are some strategies for teaching grammar more interactively:

#Tell a story: If you want to get your students attentive and amused while explaining a dull aspect of grammar, tell them a story that they know.  This works best with children and lower-level learners as it provides them with a picture, helping them connect the grammar with an event in the story.

#Use celebrities: Using celebrities or sports stars your students admire to explain your grammar points can help liven up any lesson. You can do it in a variety of ways:

• Use celebrity photos to practice comparatives and superlatives.
• Create timelines from a celebrity’s life to illustrate different tenses, such as past perfect or future continuous.
• You can also use local celebrities to build stories around scandalous events or newsworthy moments, making the grammar point more engaging.

 

#Visualize with timelines: Timelines are great visual aids to show how tenses work. You (or a student) can quickly draw them on the board to make the flow of time visible.

• Use them as an aid when explaining the meaning and use of a tense.
• Try using incomplete timelines as a way of eliciting ideas from students (When do you think it happened?).
• Invite students to come to the board to draw their suggested timelines, encouraging collaboration and discussion around the correct use of tense.

 

#Use newspapers: Newspapers (in the target language) give students a practical understanding of how the target language is applied in daily life.  You can use articles or headlines to introduce grammar points and have students analyze how grammar is used in real-world texts. With lower-level proficiency students, start with simpler articles or news snippets and gradually introduce more complex texts as their skills improve.

#Keep students thinking: Be unexpected to sustain students’ curiosity. You can do so by:

• providing an incorrect answer to a question;
• addressing a thought-provoking question (e.g., spot the mistake);
• guessing the grammar rule;
• relating grammar points to their experiences (e.g., creating a sentence using the present perfect to talk about your experience);
• imagining and acting out situations that require specific grammatical structures.

 

#Integrate movements: Actively going through the motions, saying the sentences, and showing the action can help explain the points while doing it. This also helps keep your students’ attention while teaching them the grammar point. You can also invite students to act out sentences or perform verbs. This makes grammar learning more dynamic and memorable.

5. Provide meaningful opportunities to practise

An essential element of teaching grammar is providing students with ample opportunities to practice. To make practice meaningful, consider these key strategies:

#Use different types of practice: Effective grammar practice must go beyond mastering form to developing fluency in different contexts. This requires moving through the three different types of practice:

• Mechanical practice (controlled): a controlled practice activity where the primary focus is on the form (e.g., repetition drills, filling the gaps exercises, etc.).
• Meaningful practice (semi-controlled): an activity where students control the form and practise using it in a variety of ways. For instance, students follow a model text in which particular grammatical features are highlighted to create their own versions.
• Communicative practice: focuses on using language within a real communicative context. For instance, to practise modal verbs, students are provided with scenarios of making requests to friends and people.

 

#Vary practice activities: Bringing different tasks into practice helps sustain students’ engagement and enrich learning experiences. So, consider integrating the four skills through activities such as:

• Interviews: students pair up to practise the grammar point (e.g., tenses, questions formulation).
• Debates: Students in groups prepare their arguments about a given topic which can be tailored to a specific period to practice the tenses you want to focus on.
• Creating captions: Using news stories or current events, students write short captions that tell what is happening in the picture using a reporter tone.
• Songs: find songs that use the grammar points, have students sing along, and analyze the lyrics for tenses or grammatical patterns.
• Grammar games: Turn grammar practice into a competitive game, using Platforms like Kahoot! or Quizlet Live.

 

# Encourage reflection and provide constructive feedback

Reflection helps students track their progress and identify areas for improvement. Encourage them to:

• Self-assess: After completing an activity, ask students to reflect on their answers and assess them using the model answer or your guidance.
• Peer-assess: Have students assess each other, provide peer feedback, and then revise their work accordingly.
• Journal their learning: Ask students to keep a grammar journal where they write about their difficulties, goals, and strategies to improve their grammar.

 

Students also need feedback on their performance to improve their grammar. There are different ways you can offer feedback or correction:

• Use error codes to indicate the type of grammar errors in writing.
• Use body language, repeat or stress the mistake to help students self-correct in speaking.
• Give the correction, either partly or wholly (e.g., by saying a corrected verb form) and get the student to complete it or repeat it.
• Allow opportunities for peer correction.

6. Use student errors to inform instruction

Each time you assess student writing, jot down the common frequent errors among your students. These lists can help inform your daily lessons to target the grammar your students still have not mastered.

Your students should also have opportunities to improve their grammar errors. So, make a worksheet based on those errors and ask them to correct them.

This can be a good warm-up activity, but be sure to remind students that everyone makes mistakes, even the teacher and that each student has one error represented in the worksheet.

To conclude, grammar teaching doesn’t have to be dull or overwhelming. By using these powerful strategies, you can make your grammar lessons more engaging, meaningful, and effective for your students. All the best in your teaching journey!