Grammar Cubes: Giving Control Back to the Class

Tim Gilroy

Tim Gilroy is an EFL teacher of 11 years experience and is currently head of the language department of The Ecole des Mines, Albi, SW France. Gilroy's Grammar Cubes were developed over 5 years in collaboration with his engineer students, his teaching colleagues, and colleagues in French state secondary education.

A new teaching aid, that manages to be both revolutionary and laughably obvious, is on the market, and it seems likely to become a standard tool in every language class-room It also, happily, reinforces many of the principles that are championed by HLT.

" Gilroy's Grammar Cubes " arrive as set of 125 one-inch beechwood blocks, engraved on each face with a word. The 6 words on any given cube have a grammatical relation, for example, 6 subject-pronouns, 6 modal auxilliaries, 6 prepositions, 6 forms of one verb, or the same form of 6 different verbs (gerunds, past participles) 6 adjectives, etc etc.

From there, the possibilities are endless. Any classroom activities involving sentence building, word-order, transformation or recycling of sentences, and so on, can be given a new tactile and fun aspect by using the cubes in place of paper, book or blackboard.

They can also be rolled in combinations like dice, to produce instant " prompts " in free-practice. Take a cube with " WH " interrogatives, a cube with subject pronouns and a cube with verbs and throw them on the table. First student (or team of students) to produce a sentence combining the 3 elements gets a point.

The creator has also come up with the rules of an engaging classroom game, " Gramarama ", which plays a bit like scrabble without a board, and which involves sentence- rather than word- construction. The added twist with cubes is that there are 6 possibilities on each cube. A student who can rotate the cube at the junction of two sentences, and produce two new, grammatically correct sentences, gets extra points.

Of course, the ultimate judge of whether a sentence is correct or not is the teacher, and the students will tend to produce some rather far-fetched (if syntactically correct) combinations. Well, we all know what a flexible thing is the English language. If the student can " justify " her sentence in the context of a little tale or dialogue (however fantastic) then the sentence is accepted and the points awarded.

" Gramarama " and other sentence forming activities are best done in teams of students - allowing a little auto-correction before committing their creation to public view . A group of students with a handful of cubes will quickly go through all the possibilities of juxtaposition while aiming for the longest acceptable combination.

This is an ideal way of putting the language - literally - in the hands of the students. The teacher's rôle is simply to hover nearby in case help or arbitration is needed. If a group of 3/4 students consistently fail to see an error, then it can be safely deduced that this particular language point needs revision or re-teaching.

The superiority over the 2-dimensional support (paper, board) is that the cubes are handleable, and instantly changeable. There is less self-consciousness attached to laying out a line of adjustable bricks (especially if it's a group decision) than writing an erroneous sentence in an exercise book and waiting a week for the correction.

Errors are in plain view, and can easily be corrected either among the students, or ultimately by the teacher, with an instant grammar explanation.

And once the sentence has been accepted as grammatically OK, it's time for the students to do their own explaining : To what or whom does the sentence refer ? What is the story behind it ? Where does the action take place etc etc. So creativity and oral practice (as well as a lot of language-bending !) are encouraged too.

The cubes themselves are pretty, in various shades of " rose " beechwood, with the words precision burnt by laser in different font-sizes depending on word-length.

Wooden cubes need no explanations to students of any age : they are for building ! And anyone who has a set of magnetic poetry on their fridge-door, knows that messing around with combinations of words is an innate human compulsion.

So, in these grammar cubes we have an attractive, self-evident, student-empowering medium for problem-solving group-work that doesn't need batteries, booting up, or the teacher's evening spent playing with scissors and glue. The centre of concentration is in the students' hands and the teacher's interventions are called for only when they can be most surgically efficient.

The cubes are currently available only through the website : http://www.gramarama.com which serves also as a forum for teacher's suggestions and lesson ideas.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Humanising Large Classes course at Pilgrims website.