Rethinking Grammar III
More questions:
6. How did people learn other languages before “grammar” was invented? I have always wondered how people managed to learn other languages before “grammar” was invented. Just imagine having to explain to someone how to transform an active sentence into a passive one without being able to refer to the subject, object, auxiliary, and verb tenses. This of course is exaggerated. No one regularly transformed active sentences into passive ones until grammar and the modern language classroom were invented, but people have been learning other languages for thousands of years without textbooks, teachers, classrooms or even “grammar”. Just imagine a small isolated agricultural community in the middle of a picturesque mountain range five thousand years ago. Not everyone probably dedicated themselves entirely to farming. A few hardy souls took excess produce and handicrafts to other villages to trade for what their area didn’t offer. Others dedicated themselves to trade, walking from village to village selling and trading. But these villages were so isolated they probably spoke different dialects and as our adventurous traders got farther and farther from their home villages, the language they spoke would be completely different from that of the people they traded with. They had to learn the other language to communicate or at least develop some system of commonly understood gestures or a lingua franca. They couldn’t go to their local language institute and take a course or two. And these weren’t the only cases where someone in this remote time might find themselves immersed in a culture that spoke another tongue. What about stolen brides taken to live with a family whose language they couldn’t understand, or slaves thrown together with others from different regions who had to learn to understand the language of their masters and of their fellow slaves just to survive? They weren’t supplied with private tutors to help them get through those first terrifying months of true “cultural shock”.
Obviously our modern language learning methods are artificial. The human brain had uncountable generations to evolve a system of true “natural” language learning that didn’t require books, teachers or grammar. Our problem now is to find out how to take advantage of the resources the brain offers and learn to apply them in our formal educational systems.
7. How do illiterate people learn another language today? In reality, we don’t have to travel in time to find situations in which people learn other languages without recourse to texts, classrooms or grammar. What about the more “primitive” areas of the world where people still live in isolated villages and whose neighbors probably speak a completely unrelated tongue. Has anyone ever examined how people living in remote regions of the Amazon or New Guinea learn new languages?
8. How do we learn languages? I don’t think I am the first to ask this question and I really wonder if we’ll ever know the true answer. Personally I’m convinced that what we, as teachers should do is just provide sufficient input, perhaps limited to the level of language attainment our students have or perhaps not…perhaps just realistic language in comprehensible situations and then let the brain take over. I’ve often compared learning a language with learning how to ride a bicycle. When your five-year-old wants to learn how to ride his bike without training wheels, you don’t just take the little wheels off and give him a hour-long lecture on the theory of bike riding. Here in Mexico, parents spend hours pushing their kids around on the bike with a broomstick (to save their backs) and then give them a hearty push, watch them fall off, dry their tears and convince them to get back up and try again. How does the child learn to ride? Somehow the brain figures it all out. Parents (or “pushers”) just supply the input. The same with languages. The teacher supplies either realistic or contrived situations in which the learner can listen to models and later try to communicate her own ideas in the new language. The student makes errors that impede her communication (falls off the bike….), the teacher pats her on the back and sets her off again to experiment until her brain forms the correct rules to allow adequate communication.
9. Are all those grammar drills and practices doing more for language learning than just giving the student exposure to the language that could be given in a more pleasant way? I really wonder how much help grammar practices, drills, homework, diagrams, colored arrows and underlining really are in language acquisition. Isn’t it possible that it is the time the student is spending doing the activities that facilitates language learning and not the activities in themselves? If this were the case, I would hope we could find more entertaining ways to immerse the student in the new language to allow the brain to find the rules to allow communication. Thinking of many teen learners I’ve had, wouldn’t an hour playing a video game in which the student had to interact with various characters in order to pass to the next level be more entertaining than an hour of fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises in the workbook? Or maybe time spent listening to a popular song, trying to hear and understand the lyrics would be more productive than the kinds of listening comprehension activities most usually found in textbooks? Or an hour on-line chatting with someone in another country or using free Internet long distance telephone calls, or a walk with the class through a park, commenting about the people, plants and animals found on the way or watching a movie and commenting on it afterwards with friends, or…..
