Teaching grammar

One thing that amazes me about the teacher I work with is her ability to seamlessly incorporate grammar into a contextualized writing lesson that draws from the experience of the students. Today we worked on questions starting with “Do you know how to” and “Would you like to.” My teacher wrote the following simple definitions after introducing questions one at a time:

Do you know how to ride a motorcycle?
Do you know how to = Can you

Would you like to know how to fly an airplane?
Would you like to = Do you want to

Students immediately understood the more complex way of asking the question after seeing the simple definitions. The teacher did not have to launch into a detailed grammatical explanation, but the students understood meaning through the context and practiced different forms of the answer, as they responded to the questions and asked their partner. (Yes, I do know how to ride a motorcycle. No, I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle. Yes, she/he does . . . No, she/he doesn’t . . . )

Sometimes grammar can feel very daunting to teach, but doing so in a manner where meaning is emphasized over a strict repetition of grammatical forms seems easier to both teach and understand. My teacher also does this with vocabulary words. Today she defined “ride” as “sit and go.” There was a collective “ohhh” of understanding as all of the learners instantly were able to envision the verb. Through the use of pictures and simplified definitions, my teacher is able to aid learners in grasping new vocabulary and structures of English.