Learning Grammar

Learning Grammar was not easy! I think I only managed to write grammatically correct sentences smoothly in F.2! Looking back to Primary school, I struggled a lot to get the prepositions, pronouns, tenses and irregular superlatives and comparatives right. There were several reasons. Firstly, I think that the teachers’ instructions were not detailed and elaborated enough. Most of the time, I had to do exercises and apply what had been taught before I had fully understood the Grammar structure I was expected to know. I remember that in P.4, I was asked to do composition using past tense, however, I was still not sure when to use was and when to use were. I can’t remember how I finished that piece of writing today, but that helpless feeling is still very vivid.

Secondly, I was too shy to ask for help and clarification. Therefore, I adopted the method of “trial and error” which of course left me with unsatisfying grades in homework. Moreover, I was too lazy to memorize and test myself on some Grammar rules, such as the differences between a little, little, few, a few and a plenty of.

My Grammar started to improve in P.5. In P.6, I was still one of those who came last in English tests but in F.3 I came second in a writing exam. I can’t remember using any methods to catch up in those years. But I believe that there were two important factors which might have contributed to my progress.

The first one is encouragement from adults. I was very lucky to have some caring English teachers whose encouragement raised my confidence. Even my father praised me. He said, “I never knew that your English is so well,” after I wrote him an email in English in P.6.

The second one is doing leisure activities in English. The dominant activities include watching TV programmes and playing ICQ. I usually watched cartoons on Pearl/ATV/Cartoon Networks after school. Listening to the characters’ conversations could in fact remind me of Grammar structures. For playing ICQ, it was a good platform for me to apply Grammar. Moreover, most of my friends had good command of English. Therefore, I would think thrice before replying them to prevent losing face due to wrong Grammar.