Group items tagged

And then there’s the matter of the split infinitive, which some today who fancy themselves grammatical purists cannot abide. Mr. Lynch points out that the split infinitive has actually gone in and out of fashion several times, for no apparent reas

How do you collect every known word, decide between competing spellings, reflect shades of meaning, separate faddish uses from the ones that will endure, and so on?

“Too often,” he writes, “the mavens and pundits are talking through their hats. They’re guilty of turning superstitions into rules, and often their proclamations are nothing more than prejudice representing itself as principle.”

grammatical doomsayers had better find themselves some chill pills fast, because the crimes-against-the-language rate is going to skyrocket here in the electronic age. There is already much whining about the goofy truncated vocabulary of e-mail and text messaging (a phenomenon Mr. Lynch sees as good news, not bad; to mangle the rules of grammar, you first have to know the rules). And the Internet means that English is increasingly a global language.“All the signs point to a fundamentally reconfigured world,” he writes, “in which what we now think of as the English-speaking world will eventually lose its effective control of the English language.”

“it is easier to build prefabricated bits, with comparatively little grammatical processing, than from single words with much more processing”. Lewis, M. (1997): Implementing the Lexical Approach. Heinle.

Instead, they would count as ‘exemplar learning’, i.e. the learning of items, either individual words, multi-word phrases, or prototypical examples of ‘constructions’ – which might subsequently be analysed into their components. Cognitive accounts argue that both rule-learning and item-learning are implicated in language learning – with some competition between the two systems.

Emergentist accounts, on the other hand, argue that most, if not all, language learning is exemplar-based: “The knowledge underlying fluent language is not grammar in the sense of abstract rules or structure but a huge collection of memories of previous experienced utterances” (N. Ellis, 2002, p. 166).

One great example is using descriptions of situations which the learners have to categorise to help them understand the difference between “He told me he would meet the client today” vs. “He told me he will meet the client today”. I

but guiding them through examples and questions gets you to that “ah-ha!” moment. Using extracts from business emails and asking the learners to work out the relationship between the sender and receiver by looking at the complexity of language used is another example of th

’ve observed many teachers struggle to discover the best way to teach. They beg for the answers. However, I don’t believe there are right or wrong answers to their questions.

Very briefly, I wonder if the issue of how knowledge is arrived at – e.g. whether inductively or deductively – is of less importance than what you actually do with that knowledge. If it remains inert, then it’s of little use. In other words, (and I think I argued this in a comment on P is for PPP) language development is optimised through language use

Brumfit (2001) puts it: “We may learn the tokens of language formally, but we learn the system by using it through reading or writing, or conversing” (p. 12).

Good learners are ‘language detectives’. As Joan Rubin wrote, as long ago as 1981: “The good language learner is constantly looking for patterns in the language. He [sic] attends to the form in a particular way, constantly analyzing, categorizing and synthesizing. He is constantly trying to find schemes for classifying information” (Rubin, J. 1981. What the ‘good language learner’ can teach us. TESOL Quarterly, 9).

t seems to be used in our field to connote the kind of scaffolding that is able to anticipate the learner’s inductive thought processes, and pre-empt false hypothesising.

“Another name for a scaffolding-teaching process is instructional conversation… or prolepsis. I like the concept of proleptic teaching because I now have a name for what I had done as a teacher for many years. I used to think that my teaching approach was inductive. I used a discovery process — some might call it a constructivist approach — to encourage students to come to their own understanding of a particular linguistic point.

Prolepsis requires teacher and students to achieve a degree of intersubjectivity, which makes it possible for the teacher to guide the student and for the student to be guided through the process of completing a task. In other words, both teacher and student try to come to an understanding of how each of them views the task and its solution, with the goal of helping the student reshape and extend his or her use of language.” (Teaching Language: from grammar to grammaring, 2003, p.95).

in his book The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning (2004) Leo van Lier defines prolepsis as occurring when “we assume (pretend) that learners already have the abilities we and they wish to develop. Together with this assumption we create invitational structures and spaces for learners to step into and grow into” (p.162

students looked at a number of T/F questions I had written. Rather than basing these Q’s on vocab’ as so often happens, I tried to make each one relate to the verb forms. For example, the text read: ‘When the bank realised its mistake, Bill had already spent £85,000′. So the T/F Q was: ‘Bill spent £85,000 after the bank noticed the mistake’ – false of course. Students discussed Q’s together then during feedback, I asked why it was ‘true’ or ‘false’ in each case. As we went through each Q, the students got the hang of it more and more.

Your approach, based on learners’ comprehension of sentences, is very much consistent with the way that VanPatten’s ‘Input processing’ theory is applied – sometimes known as ‘processing instruction’, and mediated by what Rod Ellis calls ‘structured input activities’:

Structured-input activities are comprehension-based grammar activities that go beyond simply presenting learners with enriched input containing the target structure (the stimulus) by means of some instruction that forces them to process it (the response). …

anPatten (1996) defines this as ‘a type of grammar instruction whose purpose is to affect the ways in which learners attend to input data. It is input-based rather than output-based.’ (p. 2)

As Ellis (2008) points out, “Explicit instruction can take the form of an inductive treatment, where learners are required to induce rules from examples given to them, or an explicit treatment, where learners are given a rule which they then practise using” (p. 882). In other words both an inductive and deductive approach can lead to explicit knowledg

I think implicit and explicit make all the difference

discovery learning in which students are presented with input and work on it for the sake of meaning, interpretation, communication, and only then are led to focus explicitly on its form, by which time part of it will have been processed implicitly

ocusing on form, students are led to notice patterns and draw conclusions, which must be later confirmed by the teacher (or the grammar chart in the book!).

As Nick Ellis (2006) reminds us “Not only are many grammatical meaning-form relationships low in salience, but they can also be redundant in the understanding of the meaning of an utterance. It is often unnecessary to interpret inflections marking grammatical meanings such as tense because they are usually accompanied by adverbs that indicate temporal reference”.

ick Schmidt (2001) argues, therefore, that “since many features of L2 input are likely to be infrequent, non-salient, and communicatively redundant, intentionally focused attention may be a practical (though not theoretical) necessity for successful language learning”.

umphrey’s role would seem to be one that teachers might adopt — drawing learners’ attention to features of their output that are still non-target like, or that threaten their communicative effectiveness – but granting the learner a degree of autonomy in terms of whether and how they deal with the issue

the central misunderstanding of language of language teaching to assume that grammar (rules and terminology) is the basis of language and that the mastery of the grammatical system is a prerequisite for effective communication” (Michael Lewis, 1997, p. 133).

I think using consciousness-raising activities with learners to prime their minds for noticing grammar works in the same vein. We want them to be conscious, with a great deal of logical precision, of the rule-based patterns we are showing them so that they can work it out for themselves (thus promoting autonomy!) However, when a CR task is finished, it only makes sense that we check to make sure that learners have gone through the process in the intended way, a sort of confirmation that yes, indeed, they have got the rule right – and this IS the rule. In the end, where do we draw the line? We either start with the rule or end with i

. In fact, I’m not even that bothered if their rules are ‘wrong’, so long as that they are ‘heuristic’ — that is that they provide a learning ‘hook’ – or the kind of self-scaffolding materials that I mentioned in my post. Dick Schmidt’s ‘rule-of-thumb’ for the imperfect in Portuguese probably worked better for him than the dozen or so grammar book rules his teacher was trying to teach him.

CRITICISM, YESTERDAY, “ne nado bylo”. That’s it. Nothing really new. The keywords are labels, can we call them rules? I think we can. Have I explained it? Yes, since they understood and used it appropriately.

I would say that your ‘shorthand’ rules do qualify as rules, in the sense of being rules-of-thumb, reminders, or mnemonics, rather than fully descriptive rules, and are all the more effective for being so

Diane Larsen-Freeman distinguishes between rules and reasons: “It is important for learners not only to know the rules, but also to know why they exist. I’m not referring to how the language came to be; I am referring to what I call the ‘reasons’ underlying the rules”. As an example she gives the rule that prohibits using the progressive with stative verbs (as in *I am owning a car). “The reason for the rule is due to the semantic incompatibility between processes depicted by the progressive, which typically involve change, and unchanging states embodied in stative verbs… Knowing the reason for a rule… gives language students an understanding of the logic that speakers of another language use” (pp. 50-51).

ules about language are seldom watertight, and are often fuzzy at the edges — not least because there is so much variability in language, due to factors such as geography, register and style, and mode (e.g. speaking versus writing)

A quick corpus search reveals many so-called exceptions (all from the British National Corpus):

“rules of production”, as opposed to rules of accuracy. E.g. if expressing future meaning, when in doubt, use ‘will’ (you have a statistcally very favorable chance of being right). Or, use ‘Really?’ or ‘…no?’ instead of short questions and question tags – they’ll save you a lot of bother!

is that it conflates both prescriptive rules (what you should say) and descriptive ones, (what people in fact do say) without making a distinction. As language teachers, the assumption is that we are more interested in the latter, but the distinction is not always that clear cut

So, if we’re going to use rules, maybe we should raise learners’ consciousness about language in general, including their own language, before we even start.

teaching using very simplified, one-word rules (I call them “keyword rules”) introduced through situations and contexts and immediately practiced in situations, with subsequent abundant exposure to the structures within broader contexts (reading, listening) – so the rule is there to provide a sense of security, yet it is so minimal that it does not in any way dominate the teaching/learning.

teaching the students to notice, process, verify and acquire language odds and ends independently

letting go of them and not teaching anything, but simply immersing them in the language

It’s not the rules as such that are to blame for the learner’s struggle – it’s the abstract and obscure meta-language used to formulate the rules, along with the lack of situation-based practice

Teaching rules as part of a process of acquisition has always seemed pointless to me, and as Mr Lewis points out in The English Verb, most of the rules we have to describe grammar (where grammar means the verb phrase) are inadequate and just plain wrong.

learners uncovering rules allows learners the chance to notice regularities and patterns in the language

They also allow learners to reflect on their own language. It helps them notice. They’ll take the language they said/wrote and compare it to the rules they know. Without a knowledge of rules, this self-reflection may not happen for some students. In effect, it encourages a second look and even a reformulation. There is also the point made above of students noticing the rules when seeing/hearing the language used.

As far as acquisition goes, rules have little direct impact. However, in their ability to instill comfort in many students and their aid in allowing students to notice language (their own and others) they can have a indirect impact on acquisition.