Job Discussion Forums

[nocturnalme]

Reading another thread on here, somebody mentioned Michael Lewis and "When is a rule not a rule?" I guess most of us teachers hate when we teach a 'rule' only for it to come back and bite us on the bum later on. Sometimes there are 'rules within rules'.
Anyway, I'd love to find out some more about such things and wondered if anybody has any recommendations, such as:-
In which of Michael Lewis' books does he talk about 'When is a rule .....?' Are his books any good/use? Are there any good websites that deal with 'When is a rule ...?' etc.

Thanks in advance!

[fluffyhamster]

I'd imagine it's in The English Verb, although he could say similar things (but without quite such detailed discussion) in his later The Lexical Approach. And yes, his books are worth reading.

Michael Swan and others also talk about rules in Bygate et al's Grammar and the Language Teacher (unfortunately out of print). I'll try to dig especially the Bygate out and quote a bit from it, but in the meantime, you might want to head over to the Teacher Discussion Forums and search through its Applied Linguistics threads for these authors. The AL forum is actually mostly about formulating explanations if not watertight rules about whichever language questions come its way; and let's not forget that there are sometimes threads here on the International forums too that pertain to grammar and usage.

Edit: I've also just remembered Westney's paper ('Rules and pedagogical grammar') in Terence Odlin (ed)'s Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar (CUP 1994). Westney mentions and discusses Lewis, among others.

[Stephen Jones]

Lewis wrote two books of considerable interest: "The English Verb" and "The Lexical Approach".

"The English Verb" is excellent but spoilt because in three or four places Lewis goes into wild speculation because he feels there is such a thing as a 'core meaning'. His search for a core meaning for each modal just needed a better scriptwriter to make Monty Python. On the other hand, his basic theory, which is that the long list-based set of rules practised by Swan or Larsen-Freeman ("if they're the solution, let's stick to the problem') is innaccurate and foolish. There are certain basic concepts at play that do enable us to organize usage more elegantly and understandably.

On the other hand there are two caveats. Firstly what 'rules' you use to teach ESL students are not necessarily going to be the same as those that actually describe the language. Whilst the two tenses in English are not Present and Past but Proximal (or unmarked) and Distant, in 90%+ of the cases where the Past is used it is describing an event in the past and it is better to use that as the initial description. You're not going to talk about Grammatical, Notional, and Proximal Agreement when telling students whether to put on the 3rd person singular 's', even though you can't understand noun-verb agreement in English without those three concepts.

Another thing to remember it that what you are teaching are 'rules of thumb'. That is to say what you teach at one level, is quite likely not to be correct at another. To take my pet bane, conditionals, you can teach the students that 'if + past simple' goes with 'past modal (eg 'would', 'could') ' and not 'will' but then when they come across the sentence.
'If he left at seven he'll be here soon.'
you will have to tell them that the rule is more complicated (whether you bother to explain it or not is a different matter).

You should also bear in mind that if you teach a rigid rule of thumb for your purpose then you may well be sabotaging the next teacher. There are vast numbers of EFL teachers in the UK or US who have to deal with students complaining that sentences such as:

"Two coffees, please"
or
"How many sugars do you want"
or
"Three fried rices and two spaghettis"

are ungrammatical because coffee, sugar and rice are uncountables. So you have to make your decision (I, personally, would teach 'rice' as uncountable but 'sugar' and 'coffee' as both depending on the meaning right from the start).

The thing you must remember is that you should learn the 'rules' of English, so you can use 'rules' less and less in your teaching. You are not learning a set of rules for teaching. You are learning how English is constructed so you can devise your own teaching strategy for explaining it to your pupils.

Time and time again on these boards we come across eejits who ask 'what is the explanation for this?' and when you give them the explanation come back with, "But this is much too complicated to explain to my students; you must be a very poor teacher if you think your explanation is any use." "But dickhead," you say, "you didn't ask me how to explain it to your students; you asked me to explain why the usage is as it is. If you want me to give you instructions on how to change the oil in your car, don't ask me for the recipe for a cup of coffee."

You must always keep two things clear. Your idea of how the English language works, and what strategy or rules you are going to use to explain it to students. In general the clearer the idea you have the less rules you find you want to give to the students, and the less confused they become.

(Another type of eejit is one that has read a rule in Swan or Azar or elsewhere, and presumes that describes how the language actually is. This is a particular problem with non-native speakers as the only 'rules' for the language they have are the ones they have been taught; I can't remember how many times I've had to argue with non-native speakers that the conditional sentence I gave above is correct, despite what they'd read in their grammar book at university.

The third type of course is one that has got a rule from their English teacher at Grade School, who got it from their English teacher at Grade School. They have been taught that this is 'correct English' and no amount of evidence will persuade them of the contrary. Still, these are not specific to EFL, so we'll ignore them for now.)

[nocturnalme]

Thanks for that, very useful and some very good points made.

[johnslat]

Dear Stephen,
I have a feeling I'm going to regret asking this but . . .

"the clearer the idea you have the less rules you find you want to give to the students, and the less confused they become."

shouldn't it be "the fewer rules?"


or am I being too "ruly?"
(after all, if there's an "unruly", shouldn't there be a "ruly?")

Regards,
John

[nocturnalme]

John - Don't be so uncouth and gormless )

[Sgt Bilko]

As you're referring to my post on the Poland forum, I feel i should write. It was The English Verb which I was talking about, an excellent book in my opinion although there are places where he is obviously trying to find examples to fit his theories (and ignoring others that don't)

Mind you, whilst a lot of what he says makes excellent sense, when you get into your beginner/elementary class you still end up teaching the simplified rules because it's easier and because, a lot of the time, that's what students need. I remember helping a student with some Reported Speech homework from his school and telling him not to put the tense 'one back' because of the context (I can't remember what it was but it sounded much better to say "He says that he is....") He was most upset when he got the homework back with everything marked wrong! I hadn't followed the 'rules'.

[basiltherat]

I learned the hard way to never say 'never' or 'always' when trying to present grammatical rules. Whenever in doubt, the word is 'generally' or 'usually' or 'hardly ever' etc.
I've been bitten a few times, too.
basil

[Justin Trullinger]

A "rule" is never actually a rule- just a guideline to help your students be able to practice. (So "hardly ever" is always better than "never". )

Languages are organic, and have evolved to be the way they are; they aren't constructed according to rules anymore than your body is.

Students often expect rules, and used cautiously and without undue dogma, I believe they can be useful to support student learning. But you need to help your students to see that rules aren't going to be inviolable or permanent. THere are plenty of rules that I teach to beginners only to ask them to forget them as they get more advanced.


Best,
justin

[MO39]

[fluffyhamster]

Hmm, I think a rule should hold at all levels. What's the point of giving students rules that you know will need to be modified or indeed scrapped later? That would seem to smack of a course that isn't too well thought out or is trying to rush things with half measures, which won't be easier in the long run. I prefer to find what I feel are maximally relevant and "strong" examples (mainly the stuff of everyday speech) and let them speak for themselves; students are by all means welcome to form hypotheses if they want, but there shouldn't really be a need for them to do so that often. But obviously I do look at what rules there are and consider if and exactly when they might be useful, and often it is fine to follow what a dependable grammar has to say.

[Stephen Jones]

[johnslat]

Dear Stephen,
Maybe we're doing it differently, but on a Google search, I got

1,090,000 hits for fewer rules

but

12,900,000 hits for less rules.

which surprises me less than you might think since it seems that fewer and fewer people are using fewer as an adjective with countable plurals, especially when the noun has an irregular plural.


fewer children: 1,440,000 hits

less children: 20,100,000 hits

Perhaps, in less time than it takes to say less fewers, there will be even fewer fewers.

Regards,
John

[fluffyhamster]

John, the difference in Google results is due to you doing a raw search (where the results can be separated by a span of n words, in either direction), as opposed to putting the words (A+B) into double quotation marks (thus: "A B") or using the Advanced Search's 'exact word or phrase' box (note that such an Advanced Search then shows an ordinary Google page again but with the phrase in those double quotation marks just mentioned). Obviously allowing the words in any order and with however large a gap between them will greatly increase the number of resulting hits.

[johnslat]

Dear fluffyhamster,
Aha - thank you for that information. That should make researching certain things easier for me in the future.
It'll take fewer time and there will be less mistakes.
Regards,
John