How To Contextualize Grammar

There are three perspectives in presenting grammar. They are grammar in discourse, grammar and style and grammar as meaning. The teacher should contextualize grammar according to the three perspectives. (Hedge,2000) When we contextualizing grammar we can use functions. For example, the functions can show us a habit in a period of time or an invitation. The contexts should be useful and appropriate to the learners’ levels. With this way the students can transfer the grammar to the relevant situations. The teacher can create contexts with pictures, miming, demonstration, through a dialogue or a song. But the context should be appropriate to the students’ level.

The learners take the specific characteristics of the language and

We can interpret this term in two ways. It is a relation with a text and the readers try to make sense of it. To create and understand the meaning of the text the learners involve in a process. We can say the reading is a dialogue between the reader and the reading text or this may be also the reader and the writer. The reader uses his prior knowledge to make sense of text. When the readers make sense of text they use their different knowledge. There are six different knowledge. For example, if a word follows an indefinite article “an” the reader can say this is likely to be a noun. The reader uses his syntactic knowledge to understand the word. The farmer and the farm are related to each other. They are derived from the same morpheme. If the reader notices this, the reader uses his morphological knowledge. If the reader uses his general word knowledge, he can see the appropriate words in the text. For example, “what can be suitable for keeping gold and treasures?” the answer cannot be a drawer because treasures are not put into a drawer. The answer can be a box. Also the readers can use their social cultural knowledge when they read a text. If there is a church in the text and the text about the features of church, we cannot understand the text completely because we do not have sociocultural knowledge about the church. The readers use their topic and genre knowledge when they read a

The teacher should provide a purpose for the reading. There are different purposes in reading process. If the learner reads a short story to enjoy or understand the basic stages in a book, he can use receptive reading. The next one is reflective reading. When the reader pauses to reflect and backtrack he can use this reflective reading. If the reader wants to get an impression about the content of a text or focusing only the headings and first lines of the writing, he can use skim reading. If the reader wants to find a point of information in a text, he can use scanning. When the reader works on a text carefully and intensely, he can use intensive reading. These different purposes determine different approaches and strategies for the readers. The readers use different processes. Readers use bottom up and top down process. For example, in skimming to get the general impression the readers use generally top down