Teaching is a very difficult process. It is a vocation. Any future teacher’s objective is to help pupils

to master English. Grammar is much more difficult to be taught.

Grammar is a set of rules that allows the speakers of the language to use it in its correct

form. Being an active process, it involves encoding, transmitting, and decoding intended messages.

Grammar is one of the central elements of communication in TEFL and it requires a lot of work on

behalf of the teacher and students in order to achieve efficient and correct communicative acts. It is

known that grammar is not easy at all and we are sure that student centered approach can help in

teaching it.

The paper under consideration focuses on the importance of student-centered approach in

teaching grammar at the gymnasium level. It emphasizes the types and features of the student

centered approach which is an important method in TEFL to help students express themselves. The

methods that helped us carry out this research were observation and comparative study analysis.

The aim of this paper is to make an overview of the student- centered approach in today’s

methodology and to show how this approach should be applied in teaching grammar. The tasks that

we had to fulfill are the following:

to find out the methods mostly spread in teaching grammar;

to define student-centered approach and to cite the activities that help to implement it;

to analyze the books at the gymnasium level to observe if it is applied in today’s process of

teaching English;

to create some work-based stations to train grammatical material for a topic that is repeated

in each text book;

to implement student centered stations to train tenses.

The paper consists of three chapters. The first chapter presents an overview of grammar

teaching in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and underlines some methods mostly spread in teaching

grammar.

Conclusions that we have come to are:

1. student centered approach is a relatively new method;

2. the student becomes the actor and the teacher is facilitator;

3. all the schools today try to implement this approach;

4. it is quite more disfficult to implement it as it requires imagination and time.

The second chapter touches upon student-centered approach presenting different

points of view regarding the effectiveness of this method in teaching grammar. It throws light on

student-centered approach, its forms and its usage in TEFL. The evolution from teacher centered

teaching to student centered has passed a long period. Moldovan teachers prefer to use teacher-

centered approach, being convinced that it is the most effective. In the last few years it is observed a

tendency to use student- centered approach in teaching English. The analysis of Moldovan

gymnasium level textbooks prove that student centered approach is not highly explored. The

conclusions that we have come to are:

there is no consequence in teaching the grammatical material. The authors make use of student-

centered approach for training knowledge, comprehension and sometimes, mostly in the book for

the 9th form, the application competences. Student centered approach grammatical activities very

rarely stimulate a talk or a discussion.

The third chapter of our paper includes a series of SCA activities designed for teaching grammar in the 8 th

form. To prove the hypothesis that student-centered approach is very effective in teaching grammar, we

have implemented the observation experiment. I remember the time when I was a student too and the

teachers taught us grammar using deductive methods. It was really boring because the teacher talked and

talked continuously, our job being just to listen and put down some notes in our copybooks. Surely, we

cannot ignore the importance of these methods but we should adapt our lessons to the needs of every

student, their minds should be”moved “continuously in order to obtain better results.

The structure of THE EXPERIMENT IS THE FOLLOWING:

1. A questionnaire

2. a set of student centered stations (a classroom learning station is a designated place in a

classroom where students complete an educational task) based on the grammatical material in

Lesson 5 (Present Indefinite, Present Continuous, Present perfect and Present Perfect Continuous

Tenses) in the 8th form versus traditional method.

3. The analysis of the results.

Traditional and student centered methods were implemented in two groups with approximately the

same proficiency rate. The first group got an average of 8, 2 in English and the second group got an

average 8,1

In the first group I taught using the traditional method. The forms that were applied are:

a) vocabulary and grammar lesson without a textbook, using the tenses;

b) create a text according to the model, using a tense;

c) translation from English into native language, using a definite tense;

d) translation from native language into English, using a text;

e) reading, spotting a tense;

f) listening, spotting a certain tense.

The second group was taught according to student centered approach (the stations were at

the basis of the classes). They could not change their group; they had to collaborate, to cooperate

and to help each other. There were 17 pupils in the group. For about 3 weeks, the pupils worked in

groups. Some had to mime the difference between Present Simple and Present Continuous/ Present

Perfect versus Present Perfect Continuous, the second group had to make a situation to exemplify

the usage, the third group had to describe the picture using the above mentioned tenses, the fourth

group had to read the text from the book and then retell it using the same tenses. The second day the

roles were changed. This group was given the same test.

In two weeks, the pupils from the first group urged “Oh, English again!”. The students were

bored to be taught in the same traditional way. The results of the summative evaluation are the

following:

15 students wrote the test, based on grammar material (Present Indefinite, Present Continuous,

Present perfect and Present Perfect Continuous Tenses) from 17.

2 pupils got 9= 13%

4 students got 8=27%

7 students got 6=47%

2 students got 5=13%

5 pupils got 8=29%

7 pupils got 7=41%

The second group was taught according to student centered approach (the stations were at

the basis of the classes). They could not change their group; they had to collaborate, to cooperate

and to help each other. There were 17 pupils in the group. For about 3 weeks, the pupils worked in

groups. Some had to mime the difference between Present Simple and Present Continuous/ Present

Perfect versus Present Perfect Continuous, the second group had to make a situation to exemplify

the usage, the third group had to describe the picture using the above mentioned tenses, the fourth

group had to read the text from the book and then retell it using the same tenses. The second day the

roles were changed. This group was given the same test.

The results are the following:

2 pupils got 10 =12%

3 pupils got 9=18%

It could have been observed that even those students that did not have a good command of

English understood the difference and could use the structures in some simple situations. Thus, the

student centered approach turned out to be really effective.

The other objective of chapter III was to make recommendations to improve 8 th form

textbook grammatical exercises. The activities have been carefully thought in order to make

students communicate more, to use their critical thinking and to be able to express their opinions, to

analyze and to produce different dialogues and texts.

An example of remade exercise in accordance with student-catered approach is the

following:

The grammatical material that is proposed to be taught is Introductory it and is trained

through two exercises. As the grammar cannot be taught without context I admit that we should

introduce the grammar exercises in a certain context. The text is about Mary’s daily program.

Dividing the class in 2 groups, we can give to the students the following instructions:

read and speak about Mary’s daily program

using the construction” it” make up in groups an interesting story and share it to your

colleagues

also we can propose some pictures and ask students to use” it” construction speaking about

those people’s daily program

Img.3.4a Img 3.4b

Img 3.4c Img 3.4d

for reinforcement we can propose them a dialogue and the following assignment: explain the

usage of “it “construction, for e.g.:

Who's that man over there? - It's Dave Brown; he's our instructor.Is that Pete Franshaw? - No, it isn't. It's his brother, Paul.It's Paul who got married last week, isn't it? - No, it was Pete.

(We use it rather than he, she etc when identifying people)

and at the end we can propose a song with daily program as an extension

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn8R_XqjjI0)

We hope that the paper under consideration will be a useful and valuable spring of

inspiration for the teachers of English and the activities mentioned will help students improve both

accuracy and speaking skills.

By ways of conclusion, I am convinced that student-centered approach can help to improve the

grammar exercises making them more interesting and as a result to increase the students’ interest to

learn grammatical structures.

.