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How to Teach Grammar Topics
Insight’s methods feature fresh perspectives. Using the same old approaches is often the way to go, but they don’t work every time, and not with every student. Whenever you need to try a new approach in order to reach every student, you don’t need to develop alternate methods on your own; take advantage of the methods we share in our Grammar Guide pages!
Teach how to create sentence structures with just 3 or 4 STEPS, as with Passive Voice, Relative Clauses, Reported Speech, Wishes & Regrets, and more.
Help students avoid common mistakes with RULES-OF-THUMB like the One Blue Word rule, the One Red ‘S’ rule, sequencing for the Past Perfect tense, and more.
Break down complicated lists into simple PATTERNS as with Conditionals, Verb Patterns, the Present Perfect tense, and Subject & Object Questions.
Explore how each grammar topic is CONNECTED to several others by sharing a form, meaning, and more; learning one topic can help us understand another.
All Series
Each grammar topic is categorized into one or more series. Select a series to find that topic along with its related topics, or browse all topics.
Fundamentals
Much of what even advanced students learn is built on basic concepts, so here are some tricks to help your students get those concepts right from the very start.
Passive Forms
Passive words, phrases, and clauses are used when the focus is on the result of an action instead of the action itself or its cause.
Question Forms
Interrogative structure is a bit different from declarative structure. Furthermore, there are quite a few ways to ask a question. Let's explore them.
Tenses
Tenses are used to express when verbs took place in relation to other verbs or time periods. Explore not only the individual tenses, but their common aspects.
Helping Verbs
It turns out auxiliary verbs are the key to several different sentence configurations. Understanding how they work grants us mastery of the English language.
Verbals
The meaning of an INFINITIVE, GERUND, or PARTICIPLE is based on its verb form, but as a verbal it takes the role of a different part of speech.
Indirect Speech
Instead of direct speech, we often use more round-about ways of communicating. The results might be easier to fit into the flow of the context, or it might be more polite.
Unreal Mood
We use the Unreal Mood to talk about things that are uncertain or outright impossible. Hypothetical situations, like with many conditionals, are unreal.
Modifier Clauses
Embedded RELATIVE CLAUSES and ADVERBIAL CLAUSES
fill a particular role (like that of an adjective or adverb) within main clauses to create complex sentences.
Noun Phrases
Noun Phrases include determiners, adjectives, nouns, and/or pronouns. These phrases can be a single word, a clause, or anything between.
Complex Sentences
Using complex sentences is a mark of fluency; we use them to improve the flow of speech/writing and to fit related information together into a single sentence.
Complex Sentences is largely a combination of the Modifier Clauses series and relevant topics from Indirect Speech and Unreal Mood.
How to Apply Insights's Methods
Get an overview of the lesson. For most teachers, the lesson comes from a curriculum set by the school, often in accordance with a coursebook. Whatever you’ve been using, continue using that. Between that and your own agenda, you should have a idea of what you ultimately want to get across for this lesson.
Review the prerequisites. Grammar points tend to build off one another, and the videos assume the learners are already familiar with certain terms or other topics. Check out the ‘Before You Begin’ sections to see what those prerequisites are, then make sure your students know and remember those terms and topics.
Watch the video. Feel free to take notes. What are the steps, patterns, or rules-of-thumb that will help your students better grasp this topic? How does it connect to related topics? What’s the key to making this topic easier or more memorable?
Where are the places you should slow down for your students? Would you present this method in a different order? What questions can you ask to make sure your students comprehend everything?
Get additional information. Since only so much can be covered in a short video, there may be more you need to present to your students depending on their level and curriculum. The ‘Bonus Notes’ and other sections in the topic pages are filled with extra information on the videos’ topics and related grammar points. Peruse these resources until you’ve got all you need.
Apply your own teaching style. The videos show an approach to a grammar topic; how you present that approach to your students is ultimately up to you.
We recommend going slower than the video’s pace. We also recommend making the lesson as interactive as you can. For this reason, we’ve converted each video to a slideshow in case you’d like to use the same visuals. Printouts might also help. Use either or both or neither; use whatever makes the most sense for your teaching style and your students’ learning styles.
- Run through the video and the slideshow on your own before the lesson. Make sure you have a good understanding of the content and its order.
- Pay attention to what each click does. Does it move to a new slide? Does it add new information? Does it reveal the answer to a question?
- Make some notes of what you want to say before certain clicks.
- Are there questions you want your students to address before the next click reveals the answer?
- When a click moves into a new section, you may want to recap or ask if the students have any questions before moving on.
- As you present the slideshow to your class, use your understanding of the content as explained/modeled through the video, but also add your own style. Explain the concepts your own way, the way your students are probably familiar with by now.
- Take it as slow as your students need it to be. The videos can move pretty quickly for the purposes of modeling the methods to teachers, but you may need to expressing things at a slower pace, perhaps more than once, and then check for comprehension.
- The videos progress linearly, but feel free to jump backward in a slideshow to revisit examples or key points.
- Add to the lesson plenty of exercises. Our topic pages include practice activities and projects, but before using those, it’s good to have some more basic exercises (perhaps from your coursebook or from other worksheets) shortly after the explanation, or even between key points.
Practice the grammar point. Insights’s resources are here to help you with the methods, but when it comes to practicing those methods, there are plenty of other resources out there. How you practice is up to you. Again, choose something that best fits your students’ learning styles.
You may have noticed ...
Focus on Structure & Usage
Most of our methods are all about either sentence structure or usage. We touch on forms of individual words less often, and we hardly ever address infection or pronunciation. All five of these are important, but form and pronunciation tend to be more straightforward, so we let teachers decide for themselves how to present those. We dedicate our resources to the trickier stuff.
American English
We mostly use American English, although most ESOL books primarily use British English. We do this because our founder and lead content creator is American, so it’s what comes natural to him. Just think of this as an excuse to teach your students some of the differences between British English and American English.
Working in Phrases
Most of the time when we say ‘noun’, we actually mean ‘noun phrase’, which typically includes determiners (like articles, possessives, and quantifiers) and sometimes adjectives. We often do the same with verb strings; auxiliary verbs, ‘not’, and sometimes adverbs are included when we say ‘verb’.
Within the framework of a sentence, combining all those individual words into one block is generally helpful, as they act together to serve a single purpose.
Colored Text
Our videos feature selective colored text. Colors stand out and help students know what to pay attention to. We’re rather consistent with our color choices so that students learn to expect certain things from certain colors. We recommend using this same technique yourself. Read our article to learn more.