Let Go of the Matrix! - the non-grammar approach

[abufletcher]

...and make uncomfortable bosses. As do you, perhaps!

Luckily, I don't have to wear that hat!

[abufletcher]

And BTW, I'd consider any teacher who doesn't know the terms listed in my course outline above to be as ill-prepared to teach a conversation course as a "grammar teacher" who can't tell the simple past from the past perfect. Stuff like "preference organization" is at the very core of conversational interaction.

But I don't suppose anyone ever taught this stuff in that "pedagogic grammar" class back in grad school.

[lolwhites]

I think you'll find most posters here get ill when exposed to Krashenite, abu I agree that Chomsky's theories have had an impact on EFL, but agree with you that it hasn't necessarily been a good thing.

As for skills, like you I'm not confortable with splitting EFL up into 4 or 5 skills, though courses will often emphasise one or two of them. Having said that, I'm keen to point out to students that developing one skill will almost always help the others; when a student asks me "how can I improve my listening?" my first response is "widen your vocabulary".

[abufletcher]

I think you'll find most posters here get ill when exposed to Krashenite, abu

Krashen's also one of the "love to hate" sort of figures but I'm not sure many teachers have really moved beyond this sort of thing. There just aren't many alternatives in SLA to, at some level, accepting the "black box" principle that "presented with input, humans learn language." Connectionism IS one viable, though clearly underdeveloped, under-researched alternative. Again in terms of my preferred learning theories, I'm partial to Vygostyan appraoches (e.g. "socio-cultural theory") and recent ideas on "legitimate peripheral participation." The articles in the recent special issue of MLJ (2004) are particularly interesting in this regard (as well as a now famous series of debate articles that was published in 1997/1998 in response to Firth and Wagner 1997).

Warning though: You're going to find some uncomfortably "Matrix" sorts of ideas in these papers.

As for skills, like you I'm not confortable with splitting EFL up into 4 or 5 skills, though courses will often emphasise one or two of them.

I remember seeing a show about teaching math skills where they showed the sorts of micro-skills that students actually needed to do basic math operations. These were things like "recognizing that one number is smaller than another number" and "being able to count backwards." Loose clusterings of a certain set of these micro-skills could be listed as "subtraction" for example, but these were overlapping sets and the macro-skill labels were really just occassionally convenient and occassionally confusing cover terms.

Same with the "langauge skils" (which IMHO have a lot in common with the ancient Greek's "Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water)." At this point, I'm feeling that "vocab" and "grammar" should really just be taken as one indivisible area (maybe "lexico-syntax" if you have to have a label). Thus my disinterest in teaching "grammar" in isolation. And this is why I'm always spouting off about "chunkiness." I don't mind teaching "reading" as a skills-based class or "process writing" but I feel it's a mistake to try artificiallly to separate "receptive vs. productive modes". It's just all the same stuff.

[fluffyhamster]

Let me give one example from my own teaching: I won't give students lists of "verbs not normally used in the Continuous", but I will encourage students to think about why the meaning of certain verbs make it highly unlikely that they will be used in "BE + V-ing" type constructions. My favourite example is to ask them why they think I've been cutting wood for the fire sounds OK but I've been cutting my finger with a bread knife is odd (i.e. meanings, not rules).

Eh? But you've used 'to cut' in a '(have) BE(-EN) + V-ing' construction there ("I've been cutting up wood").

Sampson's Educating Eve: The "Language Instinct" Debate is a good read, no doubt about it. I'm now thinking of getting his Empirical Linguistics. It's a shame I left his much earlier Schools of Linguistics behind somewhere... (I can't remember exactly who said it, but they mentioned Sampson as being one of the most high-profile linguists to have totally "switched paradigms" (apparently he was once quite a Chomskyan, or at least not quite the outspoken critic of Chomsky that he has now become)).

I'll also try to dig up a review/(counter-)criticisms of 'Educating Eve'.

[abufletcher]

BTW, on certain editions of Sampson's book, you'll find my real name on the rear cover -- one of those reviewer's comments intended to convince you to buy the book.

While I do feel the book is a very nice counterpoint to Pinker's enormously more widely read book, you do get the feeling that's it's more like a point by point deconstruction of Pinker/Chomsky rather than any concrete proposal for something better. But I think the book does a good job at illustrating some of the ways that achival literature (if not critically examined in light of subsequent research) can appear as "uncontravertable" proof of this or that theory.

In many ways though Sampson is still very much of a traditional linguist.

[lolwhites]

Eh? But you've used 'to cut' in a '(have) BE(-EN) + V-ing' construction there ("I've been cutting up wood").

"But Sir! Cut was on the list of "verbs not used in the Continuous" that my last teacher gave me"

If I had a pound for every time I'd heard that one I could have retired by now.

[mesmark]

I don't think I've argued anywhere on this thread, or any other, for standing in front of a class and prattling about "grammar rules" - I consider lesson time far too precious for stuff students can get from a book if they want it that badly. But I'm still not clear what abu and mesmark count as "teaching grammar". Let me give one example from my own teaching: I won't give students lists of "verbs not normally used in the Continuous", but I will encourage students to think about why the meaning of certain verbs make it highly unlikely that they will be used in "BE + V-ing" type constructions. My favourite example is to ask them why they think I've been cutting wood for the fire sounds OK but I've been cutting my finger with a bread knife is odd (i.e. meanings, not rules). Personally, I'd call that "grammar teaching". Do abu and mesmark consider that to be off-limits?

That's pretty gray. I could see it being argued either way. It seems more meaning and usage rather than grammar as a template for building, but I don't know why you were giving that example or what followed. However, you are clearly trying to draw attention to the grammar, not the meaning. I'd say it's off limits in the grammar-less design if I have to pick a side of the fence. However, I'd rather say, it wouldn't be necessary.

A few of the things I do are still grammar based even though I don't explain the grammar. Those fall into my own gray area, for example trying to work with singular/plurals. Or trying to work with anything for that matter. There are things I still feel I need to 'teach' but I haven't worked out how to do it all yet. My biggest issues deal with fundamentals or fundamental chunks. I deal with them isolated right now and it seems very grammar-like to me. The matrix-less instruction deals more with putting those together to form more complex sentences without grammar. I'm finding with no grammar explanation in the begin (gray or not) the students take the second part much better without grammar and understand better than the grammar groups.

Sometimes I just have to teach grammar-translation because I work in Japan and my JHS and SHS students are going to have to know it, not English, for the their tests. Some of my adult students expect it. It's much easier but the reason I'd lkike to go the other way is that it appears to be better in the long run for my students.

You have ignored my question regarding Japanese. How good are you, and how do you feel you would have got on with no grammatical explanations at all (and don't you think you would you would have provided yourself with some anyway, crudely?). Don't you find that you wish to make your own sentences up even at a low level?

I was chastised earlier in the thread for even mentioning this but ignored it because it wasn't what I wanted to talk about. However, I learned Japanese, and I found that ignoring the grammar was the best way to understand for me. That's why I started to think it was best if I could get my students to do the same. Basically, I'm trying to teach how I learned.

Since we clearly come from two very different camps I expect we're just going to have to agree to disagree on just about all the major issues.

The great: 'Tastes great!' ... 'Less filling!' debate I guess...

This has really helped me out and I've kind of gotten a better hold on what I'm doing and looking to do. So, I'd like to thank everyone for their insight into this.

[abufletcher]

"uncontravertable"

Ugh! And how come the edit button floats in and out of existence?

[fluffyhamster]

Heh, I'm having to make do with hurried browses using the workplace (school) computer (no ISP at the moment), so forgive me if I sometimes ignore things or get hold of the wrong end of the stick; that is, lol, I could sort of see what you were on about (your woodcutting example is good counterevidence to the "not on the list" way of thinking). What I more wanted to say was, do you think that our mentioning things like '?I've been cutting my finger with a breadknife' will make students develop an aversion to (producing) sentences such as 'I cut my finger with a breadknife' (even when we've stressed that the semantics are only awry in the former context/construction)?

Getting back to the whole grammar/antigrammar thing, take a look at the following thread:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=5061

Not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but as Stromfi said, I think I gave a pretty thorough answer there, and believe that this kind of thinking and labelling can really help TEACHERS better prepare (get their thoughts in order); certainly, it would seem a helpful (first?) step in approaching and organizing the reams of possible examples.

I'm not saying that any of the posters on this thread here aren't familiar with the terminology, but if we forget it or refuse to continue using/"recommending" it, then there's one less possible answer or approach that we can offer to beginning teachers, and links to a possibly useful body of pre-existing knowledge aren't provided (read: we risk reinventing the wheel).

Whethere we like it or not, classifying things seems to be a natural preoccupation of humans, and students will probably start doing it themselves at some level even if we the teachers aren't doing all we could to systematize at least parts of the input.

Note that I am referring to a teacher's underlying knowledge, not to anything that a student should be expected to explicitly know.

[abufletcher]

a teacher's underlying knowledge

That's where this whole grammar mess gets started. Time to throw out the old grammar wheel and start over IMHO!

[lolwhites]

do you think that our mentioning things like '?I've been cutting my finger with a breadknife' will make students develop an aversion to (producing) sentences such as 'I cut my finger with a breadknife' (even when we've stressed that the semantics are only awry in the former context/construction)?

No, I don't. What I usually find is that I've been cutting my finger with a simple mime usually raises a few giggles, which shows the students have got the meaning.

[fluffyhamster]

I guess I tend to avoid introducing "silly" examples into classes - students can come up with enough of them themselves (e.g. 'I almost ate the dinner my wife made for me last night' - a student giving 'almost' a shot. Me: Is she trying to poison you or something?); reading Close, and Lewis, and Richards' paper on present prefect etc early on in my career are also factors. But I'm not really arguing with your selection, lol.

Abu, I don't think the grammar terms mentioned on that other thread are so complex that they wouldn't be worthwhile for the OP there to become more familiar with. Grammar is a shorthand that can help one get or give a quick handle on things, and what I came up with and wrote there only took fifteen minutes or so and affords me a reasonable view over that part of English; that being said, I'd agree that it's no substitute for actually looking at numerous actual utterances, sentences, texts etc.

The problem is not so much that teachers (esp. newbies) aren't familar enough with grammar, or with lexicogrammar, and discourse processes etc, but that quite a few confine themselves to and skulk around somewhere "in the middle", covering just what's in the textbook and little more. Whichever way they later turn (if and when they become more serious about languages and committed to teaching/learning), I think they stand to gain - the basics in the various subfields of (A)L often complement each other.

[fluffyhamster]

I don't think the grammar terms mentioned on that other thread are so complex that they wouldn't be worthwhile for the OP there to become more familiar with. Grammar is a shorthand that can help one get or give a quick handle on things, and what I came up with and wrote there only took fifteen minutes or so and affords me a reasonable view over that part of English

'Complement' (that is, processes of complementation) would be worth a teacher investigating further/becoming more familiar with, because there is quite a range of patterns.

[abufletcher]

Back during my "semantics period" I was quite impressed with the concept "verb valency" that has to do with the number and type of NPs that are "projected" by a specific verb. I think what appealed to me was the idea of a single word, in this case the verb, being the lynch-pin for an entire utterance structure.

BTW, I used the term "verb" today in class and it didn't help a bit! We had been talking about dreams vs. plans for the future which phrases like "I plan to..." vs. "My dream would be to..." I had been emphasizing that the "My dream..." formula is better suited to "wide dreams about things that aren't going to be happening" as in "My dream would be to be a starting forward on the Lakers." I had them make of list of "real" and "crazy" things they'd do over the next 20 years. Too often they wrote things like "2012 -- marriage." I put up a list of useful verbs but I found that as often as not there was some chunky verbal phrase that was needed rather than just a verb, e.g. "get married" "find a job."

Next week I'm showing the movie "Rudy" about one small guy pursuing his dream of playing football for Notre Dame.