Copyright (c) 2025 Synergía
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This systematic review examines various pedagogical approaches to grammar, aiming to help second language (L2) learners develop their communicative competence. Twenty journal articles on the use of teaching methods such as online grammar games, the Communicative Approach (CA), the audio-lingual method, the grammar translation method, and the eclectic method were included to evaluate their impact on students' speaking and writing performance, enabling them to communicate effectively in an English as a second language (ESL) environment. The objectives of this study were to identify and analyze traditional and modern pedagogical methods for teaching English grammar in ESL. To this end, the PRISMA criteria were used to search an initial total of 76 articles located on Research Gate, Academia, and Google Scholar, applying filters based on thematic relevance, publication period, full-text availability, and language. In some academic articles, contrastive grammatical analysis was used to highlight morpho-syntactic features, word order, and other aspects that influence the acquisition of L1 English grammar in L2. The results showed that teachers can use the eclectic method to teach English grammar to ESL students. The eclectic method combines the best of the approaches mentioned above to enable second language learners to develop their communicative skills. The results also showed that online grammar games, or gamification, have been shown to enhance L2 learning.
