Week 3

Grammar in the Malaysian Primary School English Language Curriculum

The Ministry of Education has set out the Curriculum Specifications (Huraian Sukatan
Pelajaran) for each year of KSSR/KBSR. The document specifies what is to be taught
from Year 1 to Year 6. It comprises the four language skills of listening, speaking,
reading and writing as well as the language contents. The language contents are the
sound system, grammar and vocabulary.

i) CURRICULUM SPECIFICATIONS

Curriculum specifications for the English language syllabus have been prepared as
separate documents for each year of the primary school and these are known as
‘Huraian Sukatan Pelajaran’. Each document serves as a guide to teachers with regard
to the skills to be acquired by learners, the content or topic that is to be dealt with, and
the vocabulary and grammar items that pupils must know in order for them to use the
language.
Grammar forms part of the language contents in the Curriculum Specifications for
Malaysian Primary Schools. Grammar items and sentence patterns have been selected
from the list provided in the English Language syllabus to help pupils master the
structures of English. Two sections of the KBSR English Syllabus deal with grammar.
One section categorizes grammar under specific grammar labels and provides sentence
patterns to be covered under each label. In the other section, sentence patterns are
placed under functions and topics.
Grammar is taught every year under the KBSR syllabus. However, with the
KSSR syllabus, it is only introduced from Year 3 onwards.
 ii) OBJECTIVES
The syllabus sets out the objectives to be met in the teaching of grammar. The
KBSR syllabus sets out its objectives as:
By the end of Year 6, pupils should be able to:
- use correct and appropriate rules of grammar in speech and writing.

iii) LANGUAGE CONTENT

Two sections have been listed to assist teachers. For example, the Curriculum
Specifications document for Year 5 has been divided into section 5.0 (a) and 5.0 (b).

In section (a), grammar items to be taught have been specified under the
different grammar categories. To illustrate what is meant by each category and at the
same time to specify the scope and depth of the items to be taught examples are given.
Words underlined highlight significant points of grammar.
In section (b), suggested sentence patterns for teaching are given. These
sentence patterns are set out under some functions and/or areas of interest. In teaching
these patterns, it is important that teachers teach them in context and in a meaningful
way.

Teachers are advised to limit the number of structures used in any one lesson to ensure
that learners master the structures well. Teaching too many structures may not be
advisable for weak learners as these may only serve to confuse them.

a) KSSR
 Primary (exit after Year 6)

The English Language Curriculum for Primary Schools aims to equip pupils with basic
language skills to enable them to communicate effectively in a variety of contexts that’s
appropriate to the pupils level of development.

b) KBSR
Primary (exit after Year 6)
The English language syllabus for primary school aims to equip pupils with skills and
provide a basic understanding of the English language so that they are able to
communicate, both orally and in writing, in and out of school.
 iv) ACTIVITIES
In this section, we move to practicalities and consider how teachers may actually
go about helping young learners develop their grammatical knowledge in the foreign
language. We begin with seeing how common activities in the young learner classroom
can offer opportunities for grammar learning. We will also look at take noticing,
structuring and proceduralising, and some examples of activities.
Keep in mind that grammar items taught and learnt must be applied both to oral work
and writing exercises.

a) Working from discourse to grammar

 Many types of discourse that occur in young learner classrooms have
grammatical patterns that occur naturally, but that can be exploited for
grammar learning.
 It requires teachers to think about their language use from a grammatical
perspective, so that they become aware of opportunities for grammar that
arise every day.
 Classroom discourse contexts and routines can serve to introduce new
grammar, with access to meaning supported by action and objects, or to
give further practice in language that has already been introduced in other
ways.
 Routines are an ideal context in which chunks can be expanded.
(Cameron 2010:111)

a. The language of classroom management

When children begin learning English, some very simple phrases for classroom
management can be introduced, and as time goes by, these can be expanded. Some of
the phrases originally used by the teacher can be used by pupils when they in pairs or
groups. The language of classroom management can thus act as a meaningful
discourse context within which certain patterns arise regularly and help with building the
internal grammar.
When organising practical activities, for example, the teacher may ask pupils to:

the scissors
give out the books
the paper

The range of verbs to use with the nouns can be gradually increased:

give out the scissors

collect the books
tidy the paper

The noun phrases can be expanded to match or to extend grammar development:

give out the small scissors

collect the green writing books
tidy the paper from the cupboard

b. Talking with children

Conversations with individual children can be very powerful for language development,
because they can pick up on exactly what an individual child needs to know next to talk
about what interests him or her. If a child volunteers something, in the first language or
in what they can manage of the foreign language, the teacher can respond in the
foreign language, offering a more correct way of saying it:

Child: my mummy hospital

Teacher: oh! your mummy’s in hospital. Why?
This type of ‘corrective feedback’ can be used for expanding the talk. If a child offers a
comment about a picture, for example, the teacher can respond with fuller sentences
that pick up the child’s interest:

Child: bird tree

Teacher: Yes. The bird’s in the tree. He’s sitting on the
branch. He’s singing.

By becoming ‘grammar aware’, it is possible to incorporate a lot of grammar teaching

through this kind of incidental focusing on form that seizes on opportunities and
operates in a child’s space for growth.

Can you think of other classroom routines which can allow opportunities
for practising grammar items?
Guided noticing activities
Activities in the previous section are those likely to lead to noticing of grammatical
patterns in the language. It is possible to construct activities that make noticing even
more probable, and which fit all or most of the criteria for good noticing activities.

a. Listen and notice

Pupils listen to sentences or to a connected piece of talk, e.g. a story or phone call, and
complete a table or grid using what they hear. In order to complete the grid, they need
to pay attention to the grammar aspect being taught.

b. Presentation of new language with puppets

When introducing a new pattern, the teacher can construct a dialogue with a story-line,
that uses a ‘repetition plus constrast’ pattern, to be played out by puppets. For example,
a story where a crocodile and a squirrel discuss going swimming; with dramatic irony
added because the children know that the crocodile wants to eat the squirrel. The pupils
listen several times to the story-dialogue:

S: I wish I could swim like you, Croc.

C: I’ll teach you to swim.
S: Oh, will you?
C: Let’s start next week. Shall we go swimming on Monday?
S: No, sorry. On Mondays, I clean my house.
C: Shall we go swimming onTuesday?
S: No, sorry. On Tuesdays, I visit my grandmother.
Similar pattern for Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays.
C: ((wearily)) What about Sunday?
 S: Yes! On Sundays, I’m free.
C: ((more excited; licking his lips)) OK. On Sunday we’ll have our first
swimming lesson!

The teacher can then recap the routine events by pointing to the calendar and saying
the key pattern phrases on their own: ‘On Tuesdays, I visit my grandmother’ etc. To help
input processing, pupils may be given a blank calendar and be asked to complete
Croc’s regular routine from listening, making a distinction between routine events, ‘On
Mondays, I catch fish’ and, non-routine events ‘On Sunday, I’m going to teach Squirrel
to swim’.
Language practice activities that offer structuring opportunities
In structuring activities the goal is to help learners internalise the grammatical pattern so
that it becomes part of their internal grammar. The focus is on internal work that
happens as a result of activities that demand accuracy, rather than on fluency in
production.
a. Questionnaires, surveys and quizzes
These are commonly found in young learner course books; after input on favourite
foods, for example, children are asked to interview their friends to find out their favourite
foods. Preparation and rehearsal of the questions is necessary to ensure accuracy, and
the activity must be managed so that the questions are asked in full each time. Once
the information from several people has been collected, group work on compiling results
can offer further opportunities for internalising or structuring the grammar patterns. Such
structuring requires learners to manipulate the language so that they produce the form
with attention and accurately.

b. Information gap activities

Activities with information gaps are often found in course books to practise oral skills.
Again, with just small adjustments, they can be used with grammar goals rather than
oral fluency goals. For example, children work in pairs; each has a calendar covering
the same month, but with different entries (this is the ‘gap’). Without looking, again
perhaps pretending to talk by phone, the children are to find a time when they are both
free, and can then decide what they want to do, e.g. go swimming, go to the cinema, go
shopping. In finding out when they are both free, they should be encouraged to use the
language form being practised, e.g. Shall we meet on Friday? No, sorry. On Fridays, I
go to the library.

c. Drills and chants

Drills offer language and involvement support to children when used to practise new
language, because the child can listen to others to pick up bits that she or he is unsure
about, and drills can be lively and fun if the pace is kept up.
Repetition drills,in which the children repeat what the teacher says, can help in
familiarising a new form, but substitution drills are the ones that offer more for grammar
structuring. In a substitution drill, the learners may transform the teacher’s line, as here
from you want to to let’s:

T: You want to play football.

PS: Let’s play football.
T: You want to go swimming.
PS: Let’s go swimming.
(Doff 1988)

Alternatively, the teacher may use single words or pictures as prompts for pupils to
produce a sentence:
T: Cinema.
PS: Let’s go to the cinema.
T: Football.
PS: Let’s play football.
(Doff 1988)

In each case, the pupils are doing grammatical work in their minds to produce their line
in the drill, and this may help structuring.
Proceduralising activities
At this point, we want learners to automatise their use of the grammatical form so that it
is available quickly and effectively for use in communication. Task design must ensure
that grammar is essential for achieving task goals and that some attention to accuracy
is required, but the idea is that attention to accuracy can gradually be relaxed as it
becomes automatic.

a. Dictogloss
The basic idea of dictogloss is that the teacher reads out a text several times, the pupils
listen and make notes between readings, and then reconstruct the text in pairs or small
groups, aiming to be as close as possible to the original and as accurate as possible.
During the collaborative reconstruction, learners will talk to each other about the
language, as well as the content, drawing on making their internal grammatical
knowledge. Through this talk, a pupil may learn from another about some aspect of
grammar.

Summary
The teacher can probably best help to develop children’s grammar in the foreign
language, not by teaching grammar directly, but by being sensitive to opportunities for
grammar learning that arise in the classroom. A grammar-sensitive teacher will see that
language patterns that occur in tasks, stories, songs, rhymes and classroom talk, and
will have a range of techniques to bring these patterns to the children’s notice, and to
organise meaningful practice. To do this well requires considerable knowledge and
teaching skills.
WEEK 3
WEEK 4
WEEK 5
WEEK 6