GSE Teacher Toolkit: Planning a communicative grammar lesson

Sara Davila
Teacher stood at the front of the class writing on a interactive whiteboard
Reading time: 4 minutes

Planning grammar lessons with the GSE Teacher Toolkit

Grammar is one of the core areas of language teaching. Often, new teachers are nervous about teaching it, but sooner or later, all English teachers will have to get to grips with it. Whether you love or hate teaching grammar to your students, the makes planning a successful grammar lesson easier than ever.

When it comes to planning a grammar-focused lesson, there are two main strategies to choose from: a communicative approach or a focus-on-form approach. The communicative approach is more commonly used.

So, let’s have a look at how the GSE Teacher Toolkit can help you plan a communicative grammar lesson that is effective and engaging for your students.

Teaching communicative grammar

When you’re planning a grammar lesson, you want to be sure there is a reason for students to use the grammar point that you’re going to teach. That way, your students will be more motivated to learn the form and practise using it correctly.

Using and applying grammar generally requires producing something. That’s why grammar, as an enabling skill, is often aligned to speaking and writing, the productive skills. When you want your students to use or produce a particular grammar form, you can begin by looking for the associated skills in speaking and writing.

Choosing a skill to teach

Imagine that you have a class that is learning at an A2 level (35 - 40 on the GSE range). You’ll want to help them work towards A2+/B1. So, it’s a good idea to plan lessons around skills that are in your target GSE range to push their progress.

In order to plan an A2+ range speaking class, you can filter the GSE Teacher Toolkit to look in your target learning range for specific skills to teach:

The GSE Teacher Toolkit defaults to showing you objectives from the least difficult to the most difficult. However, you can use the extra GSE Range Filter tool in the results to sort your objectives in order to see the results in order of difficulty. This way, you’ll be able to focus on the more challenging skills. In turn, this will help your students make meaningful progress.

Choose a speaking skill that is in your target learning range. Then, use the drop down arrows to the left of the GSE objectives to check if there are grammar recommendations.

Access our GSE resources

Many of the learning objectives in the GSE Teacher Toolkit are aligned to specific grammar points. This makes it simple to review the grammar points that are related to a specific productive skill such as speaking or writing.

You can use this list to see if there is a grammar point that aligns to your coursebook, simplifying planning. You can also use the list to identify ‘grammar gaps’, where your coursebook might not cover grammar points that your students need to review before they can practise the speaking skill.

Using the grammar tab

If you’d like more detail about a specific grammar point, you can use the GSE Teacher Toolkit grammar search. Just click on the grammar tab. It allows you to search for the grammar point suggested - in this case, gerunds (A gerund is the noun form of a verb that ends in -ing). By doing a quick gerund search, you’ll find the target form:

Using the grammar tab shows that the gerund form is the appropriate level for your A2 class.

The GSE Teacher Toolkit also reveals that as well as the gerund form, there’s a slightly more challenging grammatical skill: using as a complement. You can easily add this to your speaking lesson to push your students just that little bit further.

Planning your lesson

So, with the help of the GSE Teacher Toolkit, you can now plan a grammar-focused lesson using the speaking objective. You can clearly see how the grammar skills will be used to support productive communication during the class:

  • Lesson: I like/I dislike.
  • Learning objective: Students will be able to explain what they love or hate. They’ll be able to describe their interests by using like, love, hate with verb phrases in infinitive forms.
  • Classroom activity: “Find Someone Who” interview activity.

In this lesson, you can help students make progress by using both grammar forms to support the final activity. In the interview exercise, students will produce information in their own words, using the grammar that they have learned.

Here, you’ve created a well-designed lesson that promotes communication using correct grammar. This is why the GSE Teacher Toolkit is such a good resource for teachers. It allows you to quickly and easily align grammar content with learning and planning for communicative success.

Learn about using the GSE in your teaching

Read our blog posts 'Real-world English: How GSE Job Profiles bridge learning and work' and 'How to assess your learners using the GSE Assessment Frameworks'.

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    Top 10 most spoken languages in the world

    Here’s a closer look at the ten most spoken languages by number of speakers:

    When evaluating these languages, it's important to consider not just the number of native speakers but also the total number of language speakers, including those who speak it as a second language.

    1. English

    Speakers: Approximately 1.5 billion

    Native speakers: Around 360 million

    Regions: Widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

    Highlights: English is the most widely spoken language worldwide when combining native and non-native speakers. It's the primary language in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. English is the dominant language in international business, science and technology.

    2. Mandarin Chinese

    Speakers: Over 1.1 billion

    Native speakers: About 920 million

    Regions: Mainly in China, Taiwan and Singapore

    Highlights: Mandarin is the language with the largest number of native speakers. It's one of the six official languages of the United Nations and has a significant cultural and historical importance.

    3. Hindi

    Speakers: Around 600 million

    Native speakers: Approximately 341 million

    Regions: Predominantly in India and Nepal

    Highlights: Hindi is predominantly spoken in India and Nepal, with approximately 341 million native speakers. It is one of the official languages of India and is spoken by a large portion of the Indian population. It has numerous dialects and is written in the Devanagari script.

    4. Spanish

    Speakers: Approximately 560 million

    Native speakers: About 460 million

    Regions: Spain, Latin America and parts of the United States

    Highlights: Spanish is the official language in 21 countries and is widely spoken in the Americas. In many of these countries, Spanish serves as the national language, playing a crucial role in government, education and media. It’s known for its rich literature and cultural heritage.

    5. French

    Speakers: Around 280 million

    Native speakers: About 77 million

    Regions: France, parts of Africa, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland

    Highlights: French is another of the six official languages of the United Nations. It's widely used in international diplomacy and has a significant number of speakers in Africa due to France's colonial history.

    6. Arabic

    Speakers: Approximately 270 million

    Native speakers: Around 310 million

    Regions: Middle East and North Africa

    Highlights: Arabic is a central Semitic language that is the liturgical language of Islam. It has many dialects, with Modern Standard Arabic being used in formal settings and media. Arabic has numerous spoken forms, with significant variations in dialects across different regions.

    7. Bengali

    Speakers: Around 265 million

    Native speakers: About 230 million

    Regions: Bangladesh and parts of India

    Highlights: Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh and the second most spoken language in India. Alongside other languages like Hindi and Urdu, Bengali plays a crucial role in the cultural and linguistic landscape of the region. It’s known for its rich literary tradition.

    8. Portuguese

    Speakers: Approximately 220 million

    Native speakers: Around 220 million

    Regions: Brazil, Portugal and parts of Africa

    Highlights: Portuguese is mainly spoken in Brazil, which is the largest Portuguese-speaking country. It has a growing number of speakers in Africa.

    9. Russian

    Speakers: Around 258 million

    Native speakers: Approximately 154 million

    Regions: Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia

    Highlights: Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations and is widely spoken in the former Soviet Union countries.

    10. Japanese

    Speakers: Approximately 128 million

    Native speakers: Around 128 million

    Regions: Japan

    Highlights: Japanese is predominantly spoken in Japan and is known for its three writing systems—Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. It has a rich cultural history and is influential in technology and entertainment.

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