The current practices of teaching grammar in CLT at secondary school level in Bangladesh: Problems and probable solutions

Abstract

Experience of teaching English in Bangladesh demonstrates that grammar is the least interesting learning item in ESOL classes. In other words, students often feel uninterested and bored with lectures dealing with grammar. Consequently, learners of English remain quite weak in grammar; they cannot use appropriate structures of grammar neither in spoken nor in written English even though they have completed English language programs at various levels of educational institutions. Besides, huge number of students fails in different public exams for their lack of knowledge in English grammar. Besides, learners in Communicative Language Teaching or CLT chiefly aims at achieving communicative competence, and seem to bypass grammatical competence as noticed in the context of Bangladeshi learners. But, theoretically grammatical competence or the practice of grammar is not enemy of achieving communicative competence other than it facilitates the goal of CLT or communicative competence. This situation necessitates thinking over the matter in a different analytical way so that some dynamic and interesting ways of instructing grammar can be found out. The current papers makes an effort to investigate the performance of learners in mastering grammatical competence and the reasons of their failure in developing this linguistic skill of accuracy. The study also tries to find out some probable solutions to improve the current level of learners in grammar. © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.