Most teachers, including myself, prefer to use the Communicative Language Teaching Method - a method that appeared as a reaction against the other methods that didn't consider the ability to communicate in English such an important aspect of learning the language. This method is based on the idea that learning a language means being able to communicate in that language mainly if you are outside the classroom, being able to enter in meaningful communication.
The Present - Practice - Produce way of teaching is a model derived from the CLT method and is very popular among teachers. It has three stages and it can easily be used for a grammar lesson for the Present Simple.
The first stage is the Presentation, in which the teacher presents the new item of language in various ways using different materials and devices ( pictures, short videos, etc) . In my recent grammar lessons for the Present Simple I used pictures and videos.
I started of by showing the students a picture ( it can be seen below) and eliciting what the man does every day.
I wrote the sentences on the blackboard while the students were talking " The man wakes up at. The man brushes his teeth." etc
After this I elicited from them the time of the action and the type of action ( daily routine). I also presented them with different other situations in which you can use the Present Simple.
A short presentation of the Form and Spelling Rules is also required. Simple discrimination and sorting games are appropriate in this case and they are great fun. For example you can make a table on the blackboard with three columns -S, -ES and -IES and give student cards with different verbs that they will have to place in the right column.
The second stage is Practice. In this stage students have to practice what they have learnt. Many types of exercises can be used here : fill-in, error correction etc. In this stage , I like to combine activities on different skills. For example, I once showed my students a video with people talking about their schedules. After watching the video, I asked my students to answer some questions regarding what they heard and also dived into some speaking exercises about their schedules. This is one possible video.
The last stage is also very important because it shows the teacher if the students have assimilated what he/she has said and where they need further practice and how much, I usually ask my students to write something- a detailed account of their daily schedule is an option.
In addition to all of these, I must mention that I am a firm believer in using the most recent technologies in teaching foreign languages, it can certainly make a difference. A lesson in which you show students videos, pictures and you play them recordings is always more attractive. Actually, I recently saw a funny video of a Math teacher introducing complex numbers using modern means. Why not try something like this for an English Grammar Lesson?! :)
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