THE AUTHOR

Greetings my friends. Hi, I am Sayantani Banerjee, a former visiting faculty member of NIELIT Dept, Jadavpur University Campus. I used to teach Communicative English to the my students. I also served as a private English tutor for over ten years.

In my ten years experience as a private tutor I mostly got students whose mother language is Bengali and not English. English is their second language. Hence they find it somewhat unfamiliar. When a new student come to my class, I receive complaints from their parents:

"My son faced certain difficulties while learning English Grammar and Composition".

"Can you please teach him some grammar. He is doing it all wrong."

"My daughter cannot understand the basic differences between adjectives and adverbs...."

"She is very weak in tenses and voice."

....and so on.

The basic pattern is the same:

Almost all of them find grammar uninteresting, the most difficult to grasp and use. Finding it unmanageable the students learn by heart only the class works and home works that are given to them in schools. They cannot relate Grammar with the composition they are making in school copies.

At the beginning I tried to teach grammar in the traditional way. I started with the definitions and the examples then going over to the exercises. It did not work well with some students. Words, words and words...there they find it so boring.

Then I remember that young brains pick up nice examples and they learn quickly if shown images instead of words only. I tried some innovative ways to teach my students. I picked up examples from day to day life, used images and charts to teach them grammar in a whole new way. And it worked.

I have developed several such lesson plans to teach my students. These lessons are easy to learn and remember. I wish to share these lesson plans with my online students through my blog TUTORTRIX so that they can also learn the "Tricks and tips for proper use of English Grammar" in their day to day life.