c). Practice The practice stage consists of a series of exercise done both in the classroom and for home assignments, whose aim is to cause the learners to absorb the structure thoroughly; or, to put it another way, to transfer what they know from short-term to long-term memory. Obviously, not every grammar practice procedure can “cover” all aspects of the structure as listed in the able on page 6; therefore we shall need to use a series of varied exercises which will complement each other and together provide through coverage.
d). Test Learners do tests in order to demonstrate –to themselves and to the teacher- how well they have mastered the material they have been learning. The main objective of tests within a taught course is to provide feedback, without which neither teacher nor learner would be able to progress very far. We have to know where we are in order to know where to go next.
Formal examinations, usually preceded by revision on the part of the learners, and followed by written evaluation on the part of the teacher, are only one kind of testing, arguably the least useful for immediate teaching purposes. (I do not give here a list of techniques that can or should be used for formal grammar testing, since the subject is outside my terms of reference). Most testing, however, is done automatically and almost unconsciously by teacher and learners as the course proceeds, the most valuable-though necessarily impressionistic-feedback on learning being supplied by the learners` current performance in class and in home assignments. Often “practice” exercises are used to supply such informal feedback, in which case they may function virtually as tests: but if this aspect is stressed, their effectiveness as practice techniques is usually lessened (see the end of Chapter 2).
(from Penny Ur “Grammar Practice Activities”, CUP)
Presentation Stage There are two main approaches to grammar presentation:
1)Deductive (rule-driven) which starts with the presentation of a rule and is followed by examples in which the rule is applied
2) Inductive (rule-discovery) which starts with some examples from which a rule is inferred.
