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ARE WE BUILDING COMMUNICATORS, OR JUST DRILLING GRAMMAR?

Have you ever stopped in the middle of a lesson and asked yourself whether your pupils are truly learning to use English, or simply repeating rules after you? Many children can underline verbs, circle nouns, or chant spelling lists, but when asked, “Tell me what you did yesterday,” they fall silent or mumble broken phrases. Isn’t that a red flag that something is missing in our teaching?

Picture this: A teacher writes ten verbs on the board and asks the class to copy them. The pupils obediently fill their books. But when the teacher suddenly asks, “Who can come here and act out the word jump?” only a few hands go up, and others giggle in confusion. The verbs have been memorized but not understood. Are we building users of English, or just drilling grammar?

Now imagine another scene. A teacher asks, “Describe your favorite fruit without naming it, and let your classmates guess.” One child says, “It is yellow, it is sweet, and monkeys like it.” Instantly, the class shouts, “Banana!” Here, adjectives are not just defined; they are lived. Isn’t this the kind of English lesson that sticks in a child’s mind long after the bell has rung?

Mistakes, too, offer golden opportunities. A child proudly writes, “My mother goed to town.” Do we simply cross it out in red ink, or do we pause and say, “I like your effort. In English we say, ‘went,’ not ‘goed.’ Can we all try that together?” At that moment, grammar transforms from punishment into discovery.

Fellow teachers, we must ask ourselves daily:

Are our classrooms producing confident storytellers, readers, and speakers—or just test passers who fear to use the language?

If English is to be more than a subject, it must become a tool of expression. Let us turn drills into dialogue, rules into practice, and every lesson into a chance for our learners to find their voice.