Teaching grammar in context and multilingual environment

Abstract

Multilingual environment has always been characteristic to Georgian reality. Today, due to current political or economic changes multilingualism has impacted the various fields including education. In this respect, Tbilisi State University is no exception, where the number of multilingual classes of ESL students of Azeri, Armenian and Georgian nationality is increasing. This process is accompanied by new challenges posed to the acquisition of the English language. The necessity of tackling these problems imposes responsibilities on English teachers, who are constantly engaged in the search for appropriate strategies and approaches fostering the proper learning process.

Having a good command of a foreign language implies the acquisition of new language items and the development of all the skills and sub skills that cannot be achieved without knowing grammar as an important component for developing the receptive and productive skills. The paper aims at finding the efficient ways of teaching grammar in multilingual environment. For this purpose, the problems related to learning grammatical structures are identified and analyzed and their solutions are suggested. Reviewing the advantages and drawbacks of applying various approaches and strategies, the paper singles out teaching grammar in context and supports its utilization in the multilingual classroom with the findings demonstrated by the experiment conducted.

The paper presents scholarly viewpoints regarding the above mentioned issues, inferences and concludes that the proper strategies, methods and approaches to teaching grammar should be determined considering the peculiarities of multilingual classroom so as to achieve the favourable learning outcomes.