Grammar and creativity in the English classroom: a utopia? a review by by Flora Varga Do you want to challenge your students and yourself? Do you want to motivate them to learn grammar? Do you want to convey your enthusiasm about English and raise their language awareness? Are you tired of dull grammar exercises and you are looking for some fresh ideas to brush up your teaching? Are you proud to have 6 classes but always short of time to prepare something new? Then this book is the right choice for you. The aim of the authors of “Teaching Grammar Creatively” - all of them full-time teacher trainers – is to foster individuality, motivation and creativity in the English classroom.They are out to stimulate the imagination of both students and teachers by proposing new ways of teaching grammar. The book covers 53 grammar lessons focusing on basic phrase patterns, tenses, aspect and voice, questions and complex sentences. Each comes with lead-in-activities, model texts with and without gaps and as information regarding level, time, aims. It also has keys especially useful for young teachers. You are also provided with alternative ways to do the exercises so that you can adapt them best to the learner types in your class. Your students are going to discover the rules themselves in order to memorize them by playing games, making drawings, inventing stories, writing poems and solving problems individually or in groups. They are constantly motivated to enlarge their vocabulary and to put grammar into personalized use. What is more, the new edition contains a CD ROM with text files of the model texts and radio recordings to play in class. Summing up, the authors keep their promise. The book is inspiring and of lasting help in everyday teaching practice. The flexibility of the tasks allows you to “mix” your own lessons thus making the volume a useful reference for language teaching in general. It is certainly worth a try.
Mag. Flora Varga (Rainergymnasium)
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