See Grammarman In Action At YouTube

With the advent of YouTube, TEFL Logue readers can now experience Grammarman live: follow him as he prevents poor punctuation, gets rid of gruesome grammar mistakes and wipes out wrong words. View the first Grammarman video here and watch the others from the menu there once you finish. Also check out Grammarman Comic online for even more Grammarman activities (like Joke Of The Day and the A-Z Movie Quiz) you can use in class.

All joking aside, these comics are an excellent way to incorporate correction of common mistakes into class and raise student awareness of grammatical concepts like countable and uncountable nouns. The stories are engaging because they are funny and visually appealing; students will focus on the content and meaning first and on the grammar only later, which is usually the goal of a communicative class.

While one obvious audience for comics is younger people…adults read comics too and Grammarman could fit nicely into a discussion about people’s experience with comics as children, their role in society, and typical heroes, villains, and plot twists (“How do Grammarman and Uncle Uncountable compare to the typical comic book heroes we’ve discusses in class?”)

The instruction to find the eight grammar mistakes at the end of this first video is like a challenge – there is an end in sight and students can test themselves individually or see how well they perform against their classmates for time. It’s fun!

I like this also because it illustrates the way that many EFL teachers are expected to teach: create an engaging and motivating context for students so language is something interesting, and let them find the mistakes instead of simply lecturing on grammar. Not all of us can create comics as well as Brian Boyd…but we can bring Grammarman to class!