Teaching Grammar as a Communicative Resource

Most of the traditional teaching methods of grammar focus on practicing grammar as a rule at the word and sentence levels. So they try to teach students how to make adverbs and adjectives and so on. But the challenge is how to use these rules at the level of communicating? Here comes the idea of teaching grammar as a communicative resource and it is to provide students with opportunities to use grammar in communicative situations such as engaging them in conversations where they have to narrate a story or give an account of something. For example, you say to a student "this is how I spent my vacation, what did you do?" In such as a case the student has to call upon his or her knowledge of grammar and use, for example, the past simple, action verbs, adverbs, adjectives and so on. So, in teaching grammar we have to go beyond the use of grammar at the word and sentence levels and enable students to link it to real contexts and situations.  The following video by Jack Richards explains that: