Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 3

The other day Scott Thornbury brought up the notoriously difficult grammar point of gerunds.  It became clear from Scott’s post that there isn’t even a consensus on what they are or if they actually exist.   This brought me back to my posts about how I feel grammar is extremely overrated in the ELT classroom.

In the course of the discussion that ensued, Scott asked if grammar was perhaps at the very least an expedient means to an end for learners with little actual time in the class.   A very good question and one I decided to answer here rather than in the comments, as I’d like to give a lengthy response.

While I think simple grammar has its place in the classroom, I would answer “no” to Scott’s question if we’re talking about complicated distinctions like gerunds vs. infinitives.

Here’s my argument:

I think far and away the biggest mistake we adult learners and teachers of adults make is that analytical understanding of grammar aids acquisition.  This is probably the biggest complication when looking at adult vs. young learners. Adults constantly want to understand why something is the way it is instead of just accepting it and using it.  This need to understand actually acts as an obstacle to acquisition.   As language learners, we need to accept language as it is and use it.

I can’t remember exactly who, but someone once made a comment that helping students to analytically understand grammar makes them comfortable in the classroom and therefore lowers the affective filter, aiding learning.  I would agree.  That, I think, is the main positive effect it has.

If analytical understanding truly aided language acquisition, then lecturing and grammar translation would be wild successes.   It’s quite clear they are not.  So why do we persist in trying to teach language this way?

Now, I do think that knowledge of grammar rules can help, but only if the rule is simple to apply and mirrors the students’ L1.  For instance, adding –ed to make the past tense in English or not using the verb “be” with he/she/it in Turkish.  These are very simple rules that can be clearly understood by students with nearly no explanation.

Actually, there should be a distinction made between application of simple rules and analytical understanding.   The former is useful while the latter is not.

An example of a simple rule is adding “s” to present simple verbs when he/she/it is the subject.   We don’t have to understand why that is and it wouldn’t be helpful to do so, we merely apply the rule.   To go back to Scott’s discussion, telling students that the infinitive is more common after verbs than gerunds is useful.   Telling them that one is more nouny and one more verby is not.

Trying to explain something complicated like gerunds vs. infinitives, articles, or the myriad rules surrounding relative clauses is not useful in my opinion.   In fact, most students pick up these “rules” and use the language correctly without explicit instruction the majority of the time.   I never teach explicit rules for articles yet even my beginner and elementary students start to use them correctly as the course progresses if encouraged to do so.   In the same way, I have as yet to have a student that could tell me the difference between a subject & object relative clause, but most of them, if given a choice between sentences on the board, can tell me in which ones we can omit the relative pronoun.

How is this possible?  Well, they are simply taking the language they know and repeating it to themselves.   They go with whatever sounds right.

Think about it.   How many times have you taught a finer grammar point to a class until every one in the room was very confident with it.  They could even give example sentences and do basic substitution drills.   Yet, the students fail to use the new grammar afterwards no matter what context you provide.   In fact, they don’t use it again until you actually direct them to do so. If analytical understanding aided production, wouldn’t the opposite be the case?

When is explicit rule teaching helpful?   There are a couple cases:

1) There is a similar structure in the L1 and they transfer over the grammatical chunk.

2) Simple rules that don’t require in-depth understanding of grammatical concepts.

3) To aid error correction, especially in writing when dealing with really complicated language.  Students can be more confident of their work if there is a rule supporting their language choices although, again, I’d consider ear and sight correction a more important goal.

4) To aid in guessing about how to create unfamiliar sentences based on the rules they know (although really the same can be done by making logical guesses based off of the language they are familiar with rather than some sort of rule and I would say it’s preferable).

Grammar concepts are ultimately quite murky and, let’s face it, in real-time conversation there is absolutely no time think about conceptually complex rules before formulating a sentence.   The same applies for most test situations where writing and speaking are required.   I can think he with verb+s pretty quickly, but I can’t determine whether what I’m about to say is something connected to both past and present vs. something definitely finished in the past vs. my L1 that would use a present construction.

I remember my first month of teaching; I was ecstatic when I realized the difference between the use of “be” & “do” in present simple was one of verbs vs. other parts of speech.   With a grin, I walked into my elementary classes and happily explained this distinction.   Yet, my students still consistently failed to grasp this difference.

Then I thought about it.   As a native speaker of the language it took me over a month of looking at it and trying to teach it and the difference only clicked with me because my grammatical knowledge had been growing and growing.   I analytically understood a grammatical point, but this didn’t really aid my students in terms of meaning and use or really help them at all as they still couldn’t figure out an adjective from a verb unless they really stopped to think about it.  We were back to square one.

The same went for me in Turkish.   There is a clear grammatical distinction between subject and object relative clauses in Turkish and looking at them really helped me figure out the English equivalents.   Yet, despite this knowledge, I still could not use them.   I simply couldn’t figure out how to make sentences with them or when to use which form.

Then I started going to the café with co-workers and students after class and the majority of the conversations were in Turkish.  One day I joined the conversations and was using relative clauses.   Sure, it was a bit haltingly, but it quickly improved.  Something had just clicked.   I looked at myself and realized my understanding was no different, but intuitively I had started to figure out when to use what.   The same went for all the Turkish structures and concepts that differed from ones in English.  There was so much stuff that simply never made any sense to me and then I would just find myself using it one day.

If we really look at our learners and our own language learning experiences, this is almost always what happens.   There is a point where it just clicks.   When we first start to learn language, things go quite slow and we’re always formulating sentences in our heads.   With use and exposure, these phrases and transformations become internalized and automatic.   Quite quickly we move from checking our utterances against grammar rules to checking our utterances against what sounds or looks right.

This is really the goal.   I think much explicit grammar teaching of complex concepts literally slows down the process of actual acquisition as students break language into pieces, obsess about rules before producing, and spend more time translating.

Think about moving to a new country.  You always pick up some useful phrases and apply them immediately.   You make no grammar mistakes because you have the necessary language as a chunk.  Why then do so many beginning students say things like “Where you live?” or “I 18.”?   Instead of taking what they’ve heard or seen, they are either translating in their heads or trying to construct sentences based on barely remembered rules.   Other students, especially ones that picked up English at younger ages I’ve noticed, never make these kinds of mistakes.   They’ve learned things in whole pieces, not bite-sized chunks.

What does all this mean?

1) Students need lots of exposure to the language.

2) Students need to use that language so often that it becomes automatic and comfortable.

3) Getting students to understand the finer points of grammar may make them feel comfortable, but ultimately doesn’t aid their inter-language and production abilities.

4) Spending lots of time on conceptually complex grammar rules is time not well spent.

In the end, my strategy is to give an explanation and then just move on.   Turkish students can never figure out why we say “Have you read any of the Harry Potter books?” rather than “Did you read any of them?”   Often the murky answer to this question is that it’s the past connected to the future or life experience or something else that the students simply never conceptualize.  I provide the appropriate rule, which makes them feel like they know it and therefore comfortable, we move on, and then I encourage use of the structure in that vein through error correction in the class and getting them to notice examples of it in material we use.   Sometimes rather quickly, the students just start using it right although I guarantee they aren’t thinking about the rules we worked out previously when they make these sentences.

Over to you.  Is the distinction between simple application rules and conceptual distinctions valid?   What’s the importance of this adult need to analytically understand things rather than just accepting it as “In English, we use this language in this situation”, especially as it regards motivation?  What are your experiences as language learners?

Related Posts:

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 1

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 2

G is for Gerund

Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 2

In my last post I argued against viewing many structures as advanced, especially when they exist in the students’ L1.  While I think my main point of considering many structures as somehow advanced and difficult for students to be nonsense is well-founded, I do stand corrected on two grammar points I used as examples.

Looking deeper into the matter, there is a difference between adjectival passives (or pseudo-passives as one commenter called them) and actual passives.  A sentence like “he is married” is an example of a past participle adjective rather than a true passive as “married” serves a predicative function in the sentence.

Compare “He was married in 1990, but now he is divorced” with “He was married by a priest in 1990.”  There is a slight difference in the meaning I think.

On the “have got” end, I do still think it originally comes from one of the ways in which we use present perfect today, but it has lost that nuance.  It merely has a similarity of form rather than a similarity of meaning.  Compare “I’ve got the car for 5 days” with “I’ve had the car for 5 days.”  The first implies the length of time I will have it while the 2^nd implies the length of time I have had it.  It follows then that the meanings are not exactly analogous.

These two examples lead very well into my second reason for thinking grammar is incredibly overrated in the classroom.

Reason #2:  If it confuses us, how could it possibly help the students?

In the simple definition I use in teaching, grammar is simply the structure of the language.  For instance, in English we use subject + verb + object, the past tense is used to talk about finished actions in the past and we make it with S + V2 + O, etc.

Does this really help our students for them to know this?  Does it make sense to them?  My contention is that it doesn’t help them nearly as much as the importance we place on it seems to indicate.

Let’s face it, how many of you knew what an SVO language was before becoming an English teacher?   If you walked into a Turkish language classroom and someone told you that Turkish is an SOV language, would that have meant anything to you before becoming a teacher?  My guess is no.  So why do we teach it to the students?

Do we ever teach that “to give” is a ditransitive verb?  How about that “I wish I were…” and “If I were you…” are past subjunctive structures, or what about even the basic difference between an object and a complement?  I’m betting that almost no one has taught ditransitive verbs, done a lesson on the past subjunctive, or a lesson on objects vs. complements.  Yet our students use these structures all the time and, of course, native speakers use them as well.

Let’s do an experiment.  For those who don’t know, a ditransitive verb is a verb that takes two objects such as “to give.”  For example, “please give me the ball.”  “The ball” and “me” are the dual objects.  Now, take a minute and think of some other examples of ditransitive verbs…

Not so easy is it?  What if I asked you how to determine if a verb is ditransitive or not before seeing it in use?  The fact is, we can’t.

Now do the same with the past subjunctive.  The past subjunctive can be used for counter-factual information, hypothetical situations, wishes, suggestions, or doubt.  Besides the examples given above, please take a minute to think of some other sentences using the past subjunctive…

Again, I’m willing to bet most readers were unable to come up with any.  Why then do we ask students to do things like this?

What I’m betting you could do was come up with a whole lot of sentences using the previously given examples.  You could probably think of a hundred sentences with give, or if I were you, or I wish I were.  Using language with examples that emerge from the class is what is worth teaching – not sweeping categorical rules.  We want information like this to become chunked in our students brains and then recalled in situations similar to what we saw in class, on tv, in a book, etc.

I used the grammar points above because I’d bet that most teachers aren’t familiar with them and it gives us a good feel of what learners are going through.

Moreover, the teacher often has to figure out the rule before class or review it.  I often see experienced teachers walk into a class and bungle up passives, conditionals, or present perfect.  If we actually have trouble understanding how it works, what makes us think that passing on this knowledge to the students will help them?

How often have I seen a teacher give a rule and then ask students to make sentences with it?  It’s not easy, especially if the student is put on the spot in front of the whole class.  Just think, if we can’t quickly do it ourselves in our own language, how can we expect students to do it?

If we have taught complements vs. objects, ditransitive verbs, and subjunctive moods to our students all this time without knowing what they are, what’s to say we can’t do the same exact thing for every other grammar point?

How many of our students ever run through the long lists of grammar rules while speaking?  Well, we can easily spot the ones that do because they take ages to produce a single sentence and it comes out in little pieces.

I think this is really where ideas like teaching students to chunk language and learning through context come into play.  Students are given opportunities to use language in certain situations and then the teacher helps lead them to the most appropriate language.  Through lots of usage opportunities and comprehensible input, the language will chunk and, more importantly, it will start to sound correct to the student’s ear.

This is always a goal in my classes.  I don’t care if the students know the rules much, I want them to be able to say, “well, this just doesn’t sound right.  It should be this way” because they’ve had so many learning opportunities inside and outside my class that he language comes naturally.

What do you think?  Does teaching grammar rules have a positive impact on student learning?

Related Articles:

Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 1

Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 3

Steven Pinker on Language & Thought – A good video showing how grammar talk can be extremely complex and almost useless in a language teaching environment.

In Other News:

I did a guest post over on Barbara Sakamoto’s Teaching Village on different ways of using a text in class for her Stuff All Teachers Should Know Series.

I’m also doing a number of workshops at conferences this year.  Last weekend I did a workshop on storytelling over at Cevre Koleji that went incredibly well although I was rushed into giving it in 25 minutes.

I will also be presenting at TESOL Greece next week, Gelisim College in Turkey, BETA Bulgaria (2 workshops), and the 3^rd International ELT conference in Cyprus.

If anyone else will be at these conferences I would love to meet up.  Shoot me a message.

Why Grammar is Overrated – Part 1

A discussion ensued on my  last blog post about some changes we were implementing at my school.  One of the issues that came up was how to approach grammar teaching.  I’ve been meaning to start a series on this, so here is the first installment.

Assumption:  Grammar-focused lessons, syllabi, and course books are the antithesis of communicative language teaching.

We need to stop deluding ourselves that teaching grammar and then asking the students to partake in an activity that uses the structure is actually communicative.  It is not.  It’s simply grammar instruction with a speaking component.  This series will examine the many incorrect assumptions made about grammar and will take a look at actually applying the CLT approach and teaching communication.

Part 1:  The Argument Against Advanced Grammar

One point that came up in the discussion is teaching “advanced” structures to lower levels.  I think Karenne’s reply aptly sums up my feelings on the subject, mainly that language is “NOT math.”  The picture above is a great example of how grammar can be made overly complex in a classroom.  Will diagraming grammar like above help the students use the language?  Certainly not.  Well the same follows for all the time wasted explaining grammar to students with simpler but still overly complex language.

Understanding and using grammar are two different things.  We want to teach our students to use the language, not to be grammarians.  A very common mistake is to focus on grammar as form rather than grammar as meaning.

Well, here’s the question:  should we teach structures like passives or present perfect or mixed conditionals to lower level learners?  My answer is, in most cases, absolutely, if they are ready for it or it‘s appropriate.

The first critical point that Karenne brings up is that a step by step approach to grammar is nonsense and even insulting to some people’s intelligence.  In an article by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings on Dogme and the coursebook, they state that, “there is no research evidence to suggest that such [grammar] lists match the manner nor the order in which language is learned. It is more probably the case that such language items “emerge” naturally in real language use, through repeated cycles of exposure, attention, output and feedback.”

I would strongly agree.  My main language learning experiences are with Turkish and a bit of Vietnamese.  While Turkish is worlds apart from English, I picked up the structures incredibly fast.  As I lived in Ankara, a city somewhat notorious for cold people, when I first came to Turkey and because I was teaching all the time, I had few opportunities to practice my Turkish.  Yet I downloaded grammar explanations online for most major grammar points and started amassing translations of important words.  Not an ideal way to learn, but it’s all I had.

After a month in the country I had the opportunity to take a vacation to a different city.  On that vacation I made friends with a couple of university students who were studying art.  Neither of them spoke a word of English.  However, I had no problem talking to them.  I had the most difficult time understanding anything they said to me, because I had so little listening practice, but I got my message across with the scarce vocabulary I had available at the time.  The thing I did not have trouble with was expressing passives, future plans, unreal situations, etc.  This is all part of my language that I use every day.   It’s not difficult to understand.  Not only that, my language ability sky-rocketed with two days of practice compared to the small gains I had made in the previous month I had been studying on my own.

This has been my experience throughout learning languages.  I progress slowly or I can’t get something, and then suddenly I get immersed in intensive speaking situations and my fluency shoots up in a very short time.

A very similar story goes for my experience in Vietnam although that was much easier as grammar was much simpler and closer to English.  I would meet people who were shocked that I could make sentences in the past, present, future, and continuous in Vietnamese and they still couldn’t after months of Vietnamese classes.  That’s because I took 10 minutes to look them up online rather than wait until the course thought it was appropriate.  I not only knew these tenses, I used them in my interactions every day at the market.

The idea that our students can’t understand some grammar because it is too “advanced” is ridiculous.  What is difficult is actually learning to take the grammar apart and explain it, but I’ll deal with that in a subsequent post.

Let’s take a look at some “advanced” grammar.  How about passives?  Should we really be able to teach this to beginners? Hmm.  Let’s see… 

I’m married.
Is he tired?
He gets dressed at 6am every day.

Well look at that, 3 passive structures that we teach almost immediately to beginner level students (Ok, you can argue the first two can be viewed as adjectives, but it’s a moot point because functionally the structure and the meaning are the same).

This is probably one of the biggest misconceptions in TEFL.  Obviously if the students can get the above structures, we can teach any other grammatical point in the same way, passives or not.  It’s all about meaning and using the correct language in the correct situation.

How about present perfect?  Well, have you got some more time?  A present perfect sentence most course books teach within the first few weeks.  Why then do we wait until later to introduce this tense?  Well, we could say there is no present perfect in many languages so it’s more difficult.  Well, Turkish also doesn’t have a commonly used verb for “have” anyway either.  Of course this use of present perfect is a bit simpler to comprehend, but you get my point.

Then we move on to mixed conditionals.  What thel is a mixed conditional anyway?  The only reason it’s “mixed” is that because somewhere down the line someone came up with the less than brilliant idea that there were only 4 types of standard conditionals in English.  What egghead sitting in an office decided this I don’t know.  Mixed conditionals are only difficult because our students have been told for years that there are only 4 types.  Now you are mixing them?  How about just not putting constraints on them in the first place?

I tell my students, if they ever ask, there are two main categories of conditionals, ones that deal with real situations and ones that deal with unreal.  That’s the only point to even worry about.  As for conditional types, anything goes.

Once the student is ready, they’ll attempt a sentence like, “If rain, I (hand motion for grab) umbrella.”  Why would I not give the student the correct language he wants to use?  What can possibly be more important than what the student is trying to say? I don’t need to create a context, the student already has it.  He just needs the correct forms, “If it rains, I’ll take an umbrella.”

Now say the same level student comes out with the sentence, “If I rich, I buy very nice house.”  Again, the student has the context, give them the language they need to say it.  They’ve got it in their own language already.  Do you want to clarify it for the rest of the class?  Ok.

Teacher:  So Mehmet, are you rich?

Mehmet:  No teacher.

Teacher: Do you have a nice house?

Mehmet:  No

Teacher:  So this is real or not?

Mehmet:  No real.

Teacher:  Ok then, say, “If I was rich, I’d buy a very nice house.”

There, you just taught 2^nd conditional to a low level class.

Will they remember it right away?  Probably not.  Should you spend lots of time on it and drill it?  Again, I’d say probably not, it depends on the nature of the conversation or activity taking place.  But now the students have been introduced and, when they are ready or when they see it again, they’ll be much more prepared.

Were a few of your students a bit lost?  Ask for a quick translation and move on.  You’re not going to waste time trying to explain something unless you really think your students are ready to use it or it’s appropriate for the activity.  Once you really want to or need to dig into this kind of language, then really bring the points home, but if it’s just something that came up in class (which is the best way to introduce language anyway), quickly get students on the same page with a few well chosen concept check questions or a translation and move on.

We know that grammar knowledge does not equal acquisition.  No matter how much you teach the students about the grammar, it will not translate over to proficiency and fluency, so why do it?  Most students have had years of grammar instruction and it has not worked for the vast majority of students as we can see quite clearly by looking at our students.  Why then do we continue to give grammar instructionwhen it so obviously hasn’t been working?

Present a topic very briefly, I usually say under 5 minutes like in the example above and then just give the students tons of practice opportunities in the form of conversations and tasks.  Will everyone get it immediately?  No.  Is that ok?  Most definitely.  They will see it again and again, and – this is very important – when they are ready, they will pick it up.

This isn’t just theory.  This is something I have seen work in my classes time and time and time again.  For all the trouble Turkish students have with present perfect I can honestly say that my elementary students start to use it naturally without even realizing they’re using it after a while.  Why?  Because we don’t focus on the grammar.  We just do lots of activities with excellent context that provide them language use opportunities.

I would argue that the only thing that should limit explicit grammar teaching, if it is explicitly taught at all, is size and whether it’s in the mother tongue or not.  Obviously for a student that can barely get out “I live in Istanbul,” we’re not going to introduce “If I get a new job, I’ll move.”  However, the student is hardly going to attempt saying something like that if he’s not ready for it.  It should never be a problem.

Obviously beginners have less ability to keep long sentences in their head or to manipulate a lot of variables.  It makes sense to teach present simple and future before introducing the 1^st conditional because the conditional builds on the previous two.  In the same way, students need to have a critical mass of vocabulary before dictionary use can be really effective.  However, grammar that depends on other grammar is in the minority in the language, so this is rarely a problem.

The other constraint is the L1. It’s always much easier to learn something that is already present in your L1.  I’ve been told Chinese does not have language for imaginary situations in the past, so 3^rd conditional will be a struggle.  Turkish students don’t have anything like the present perfect, so it’s more difficult for them to pick up.  It doesn’t mean we can’t introduce it early on, it just means the students will need to spend more time working on it to acquire it.

To connect back to my last post.  Stop worrying about what the book and the syllabus say and start worrying about what language your students need and are ready for.

What are your thoughts?  Are structures like passives, perfect tenses, and wishes really any different from present tenses or possession?  Is it really that difficult for an adult who may have a master’s degree and run a company to make a sentence with two pieces instead of one (i.e. I go vs. I am going).  Do some classes focus too much on grammar?  Are complex analytical explanations useful to students?  I’ll be interested to hear what others have to say.

Related Reading:

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 2

Why Grammar is Overrated Part 3

Dogme and the Coursebook