Grammar Teaching: Student-Centered Style

The Celta and Student-Centered Teaching

Back when I took the Celta (for all my posts about that experience check out this link: My Life! Teaching in a Korean University-Celta), the most valuable thing that I took from the course was their student-centered approach.  I previously had thought that my lessons actually were quite student-centered, but one of my tutors pushed me on that and challenged me to go even further. At the time, I was kind of annoyed because he wasn't as hard on the other teachers in my course in this regard, but I'm actually thankful now because it opened my eyes to a whole new way of teaching, especially with regards to grammar and vocabulary.

Simple and Continuous Verbs: a Self-Discovery Worksheet

The book I'm using for one of my classes is Touchstone Level 4 and chapter one has a grammar section on simple and continuous verbs, which should be quick review for the students at their level (3rd and 4th year university English major students), so I put together this worksheet for them to review the grammar, self-discovery style. I will probably end up refining it a bit before the class but this is the basic framework I will use.

How I Will Use the Worksheet

I'm pretty simple in the way I teach my classes. I'll put the sheet up on the projector screen and tell students to work with their partners. They'll have about 5-7 minutes and then we'll discuss the answers together, going over anything tricky or confusing. Then, they'll do some controlled practice in the form of a written exercise in their book and then a freer practice session activity of some sort (which I've yet to design!)

Where does this fit?

If I had to classify this kind of thing, it would fit into the Test-Teach-Test model perhaps. I'm testing the student's knowledge, teaching when we talk about it together and I give them some information about the difficult parts, then testing again when they move into practice and production, where I will monitor closely for errors.