ENGLISH GRAMMAR CLASSES WITHOUT FEAR!

I sometimes tell my students at VirtualEnglishTeacherOnline that I would love to meet the grammar teachers they had back in their school days. If I met those teachers, I would tell them that a lot of them really make me angry – many years after their students, who are now my students, have graduated and have left their school days far behind them.

Why am I angry at these teachers? (If you are one of those English grammar teachers, don’t be afraid! I won’t come and throw my drink in your face or anything, I promise!) Still they annoy me because they made people afraid of grammar. Those English grammar classes were obviously not fun. And I mean not just classes in English grammar, but grammar even in the students’ native languages! And there is no reason for it. Why do I say there is no reason for it? Because those English teachers obviously did not show their students that grammar is really just a puzzle! That’s right – just a puzzle.

This secret is not really such a big secret, and in any case, all of my students at VirtualEnglishTeacherOnline know it. The secret is that grammar is like a game. A puzzle is a kind of game, after all. Any language, not just English, is made up of words. We all know that. How do those words fit together? That is the big question. A jigsaw puzzle is made up of little pieces in strange shapes. How do those pieces fit together? That is the big question there! Online English grammar classes should look at grammar like a puzzle. Then it becomes fun. Which adjective goes with which noun? Which adverb goes with which verb? And then there are pronouns. What do they all refer to? Is the verb singular or plural? Well, it depends on what the subject of that verb is. You need to find the verb to see.

There is a good reason why people still read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery stories “starring” the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes. Those books have been popular since the day they were written (actually, they were not written as books, but as magazine articles). They still fascinate readers because they are all about hunting for clues. And hunting for clues is what you do in online English grammar classes. You trace each word until you see exactly where it fits into the sentence. There is satisfaction in giving every word its proper function. Students never learned that in the English grammar classes they had back in school.

That is why I tell my students: Online English grammar classes are more enjoyable than you think they will be. We make it into a kind of game as we hunt for clues.