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…..

Here are a few questions I’ve had about how we “teach” grammar.

1. What exactly do we “teach”? How many times have you ever looked at the list of grammatical structures your students have to “master” to finish your courses? If you use a textbook, look at the Overview at the beginning of the texts. It often amazes me how much students are expected to learn and be able to produce in one or two years… present tense, past and future, nouns, adjective word order, relative clauses (restricted and unrestricted) and all three (or four) conditionals. Some curricula basically cover the entire English grammar system in three years of study. Here in Mexico until recently all Middle School students did this and when they got to High School they started all over and did it again.

2. How many of these “grammar structures” are really parts of the lexicon? Many “grammatical structures” are really just lexicon: frequency adverbs, possessives, modals, comparatives, etc. They should be taught in the “Vocabulary” sections of texts and not as grammar structures. And which “structures” require “analysis” and which are really just sentence patterns? In reality, most of the structures listed in our Overviews are really predictable patterns. Even the past tense questions: What / Where / When did [person] [verb] …? By learning the basic chunk, students can produce many different questions effortlessly. There is no reason to analyze the structure, draw colored lines transforming the affirmative sentences into the question, etc. Verb tense formation, many clauses (If I were you…., When X happened, [person] was/were [verb + ing], and other structures fall into this category.

3. What is more important—the correct form of a verb or knowing what the tense means and being able to use it when it’s needed? Teachers spend hours teaching students the correct forms of verb tenses (comparatives, clauses, etc.), but often forget that what is the most important is that the student understand what the structure means and how to use it. What use is it to the students if they can form the present perfect without error and know how to use it when they see since in the sentence, if they don’t understand what the tense really means in different situations and if they can’t even translate a sentence into their native language (a true test of understanding)?

4. How do you respond to a student who asks a question like: Why can’t I say he don’t if I always hear Americans say it on the TV? The question is, what is correct English and for whom? Why is a serious error for a beginning English student a common colloquial variant in many English dialects. Why do teachers get so upset when students make “errors” when speaking that not only reflect their level of language development, but also are real variants in many spoken dialects? Or How do you respond to this question from a beginning English speaker, “What happens if I forget the –s on the verb? Won’t people understand me?” I always tell them that they will be understood, but they will probably be branded as a being at a beginning level. This is probably a good thing if they are just learning the language since the person they are speaking too will probably speak more slowly and clearly and use simpler vocabulary. Of course, if the student isn’t a beginner, it isn’t the impression they want to convey. So, certain errors that are acceptable at one level, might be taken negatively if the student is more advanced.

5. In what order are “grammar” items taught and in what order are they learned? A few years ago I helped organize an Academic Panel at the Annual TESOL convention. Our topic related to why textbooks don’t always reflect what we want them too. On our panel we had some highly qualified writers and editors, including the prolific Jack Richards of Cambridge University Press and Sue Jones, an editor from Macmillan. The audience was free to ask them questions. We discussed regional vs. “global” texts and other relevant issues. One question I made was, “Why do all textbooks present grammar structures in the same order (BE, present, present continuous, past, etc.) even though research has shown that this order does not reflect the order in which these structures are acquired by the learner?” For example, research has shown that the –s on the present tense is an extremely complex form that is acquired late and how many of your students take years to use his/her correctly in speech? However, it appears in most Beginning Level texts. I asked why a text begins with the present and then much later teaches the past tense when most students are more interested in talking about the past (and future) from the beginning and many situations related to the present tense are really forced (How often do you tell someone what you do every day?). Besides, the past or going to future formation is much easier than that of the present. Sue Jones gave me an answer which, while it really didn’t answer my questions, limited further discussion with those commercial publishers…she said, “It won’t sell.”

A related question…should all grammar be included in textbooks? Many structures that students are expected to master at a beginning or intermediate level, either aren’t commonly used in speech these days (If I were you…, sequence of tenses (He said he would be late) or are really never acquired: I’ve never heard one of my students spontaneously use tag questions in their speech…unless they are doing a grammar exercise, of course.

To be continued….

The following few comments will be dedicated to the questions that have popped into my mind recently. A few clarifications before we begin. When I refer to “grammar”, I am referring to prescriptive grammar, not descriptive grammar and I will be referring to beginning and low intermediate students. I haven’t gotten around to thinking about more advanced ones yet.

I began my introspection with some research. I discovered that whether grammar exists or not has been asked before. In fact, in 1972 H. Douglas Brown questioned the “psychological reality of grammar in the ESL classroom.” He thought “grammar” was a very abstract concept, “a rather ill-conceived notion in many textbooks and curricula.”

Knowing I wasn’t the only one questioning grammar, I decided to investigate definitions of grammar. The Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines it as “the study or use of the rules about how words change their form and combine with other words to express meaning.” I liked that part about including the word “meaning”. Too often do we forget that all of what we are doing in the classroom is directed at helping students learn how to communicate meaning in a new language.

The Encyclopedia Britannica says grammar is the “rules of a language governing the sounds, words, sentences and other elements, as well as their combination and interpretation.” This is more a definition of descriptive grammar…not what we use to teach English in class.

For my research I delved into the Encyclopedia Britannica, root of all knowledge. I discovered that grammar isn’t new. The Chinese had scholars who were interested in phonetics, writing and lexicography, but they considered grammatical problems to be more related to the study of logic. I guess they never used it in a classroom to teach another language. Sanskrit speakers considered the study of grammar to be an intellectual end in itself and began studying it over 2500 years ago. Again…an intellectual pursuit, not a teaching instrument.

My research then led me to Europe. I discovered the Greeks had grammars which they used to study literature or, in Alexandria in the first century BC, to preserve the purity of the language. The Romans applied the Greek system to Latin, again to preserve their language (It didn’t work very well…if it had, we wouldn’t have French, Spanish, Portuguese or any of the other Romance Languages.) Grammar wasn’t used to teach languages until the Middle Ages when it was used to teach Latin, the Lingua Franca of the era. In the 11^th century, a British abbot (Aelfric) wrote the first Latin grammar in Anglo-Saxon and proposed that it serve as a model for an English grammar…thus sticking us with the Latinate-grammar definitions, parts of speech, irrational conjugations that have plagued English for centuries.

After probing the historical roots of grammar, I will in the next installment look at vocabulary and lexicon and talk a bit about Michael Lewis’ theories before we move on to other iconoclastic musings.

References:

Brown, H. Douglas. The Psychological Reality of “Grammar” in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 1972. Vol. 6, No. 3, 263-269, Sep 72. (Paper presented at the TESOL Convention, February 29, 1972, in Washington, D.C.)

grammar. (2005). Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved November 23, 2005, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9037632

Lewis, Michael. The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. LTP. 1993.

—–, Implementing the Lexical Approach: Putting Theory into Practice. LTP. 1997.

—–, Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. LTP 2000.