The potential of teaching English grammar through translation

Abstract

Teaching grammar has always been a tough task for teachers, specially when it comes to the grammar of a foreign language. Despite that English has one of the simplest grammar to be studied, learning its verb tenses can be quite challenging due to the particularities verb tenses have. This MA dissertation is going to present a challenging method to teach the tense of the present perfect to 2nd year ESO students. There are many different methods, most of them are innovative and new since the old ones seem sometimes no very successful, what can happen if an old traditional method is improved and used to teach a particular verb tense? This method is related to translation and its aim is that students get to understand the new tense by linking it to the previous knowledge they have from the grammar of their L1 language. It is relevant to outline that the tense that is being compared to the present perfect is the Spanish pretérito perfecto. After having carried out the study, results have shown that the method used seems to have improved students’ knowledge and understanding of the use of Present Perfect when compared to the pretérito perfecto.