A different way to teach grammar?

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Thu Jun 12, 2008 5:40 am

I have been putting off preparing for my class next semester because I want to try some new things, and yet I am not sure how to go about it. I'm reading "The English Verb" and while it makes a lot of sense to me so far, I'm not sure how to incorporate it into a class, whether I'll understand it enough to be able to use it to explain, etc.

I looked at some materials that I used to teach the same class seven years ago, and I don't want to do it that way. At that time I decided that giving students some "reference guides" of grammar explanations culled from ten or so books was a good idea, since they could check it out at home.

This time I am contemplating making a corpus of sentences and having them try to figure out what the "rules" are; what sentences fit and what sentences don't. I'm not sure this method would work well, however, and I'm rather torn about what to do. Of course I know about using grammar in context, practicing with real life conversations, etc. etc. but as an adult, I have always preferred to learn a language with some kind of grammatical underpinning, and many of our students feel the same way.

While I'm mulling it all over, I thought I'd post and see what everyone else thought. Oh, and although I have to cover certain points during the semester, it is pretty much up to me to decide how I want to do it, in what order, and with which materials.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Thu Jun 12, 2008 7:05 am

You are skating on thin ice by bringing up The English Verb in this forum, Lori

Personally I think it makes a lot of sense, but I would save it until the students are a very high level. What's more, while I see it as good at accounting for use, I'm not sure it's so good at helping students actually generate their own utterances. I use the explanations in TEV more for answering questions along the lines of "I heard such-and-such on the TV last night but by teacher at school told me it was wrong because of the rule on page X of the grammar book."

The best advice Lewis gives in TEV is to tell students that the "rules" they learn in the back of the book are more like guidelines to keep them going until they have a higher level. How can a student be said to "know" a tense or structure before he/she is able to compare it with all the others?

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Thu Jun 12, 2008 3:25 pm

Lorikeet, Scott Thornbury wrote a book called "Uncovering Grammar" (Macmillan) which apparently mentions the importance of students' "noticing" grammar. Unhelpfully, I haven't read it or even seen it but someone might be able to tell you if it's useful.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Jun 13, 2008 12:21 am

Erm, Lori, you've moderated about 100 discussions on this topic. Larry and Metal were fanatics for that approach. I can't understand why there is so little information online about it.

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Sat Jun 14, 2008 8:44 am

woodcutter wrote:Erm, Lori, you've moderated about 100 discussions on this topic. Larry and Metal were fanatics for that approach. I can't understand why there is so little information online about it.

I think they used it to explain the underpinnings of that grammar approach, but I don't recall much in the way of actual ideas about how to teach students to think differently about grammar.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Jun 14, 2008 12:37 pm

I wonder if there ever were that many practical ideas behind or from the thinking. It often all seemed to boil down to minimal pairs of sentences, which of course whilst sometimes helpful (depending on the power of the exposed contrast) for the purposes of a discussion, has never struck me as they way to go with many (at least a sizeable minority) of students, because they can tend to forget exactly which sentence should be used and when (and sometimes there would be little functional difference, meaning both could be used in a given context) - in short, it can end up confusing rather than enlightening or empowering. I am not sure what the answer is, but I for one would like to see less procrastination in actual lessons over the choice of form(s) (that is, I am sure that a well-designed course could make the relevant and most powerful choice(s), based on probabilities and/or utility, for students i.e. leave whatever apparent "choices" as just implicit, an unavoidable artifact of any complete course).

I have Thornbury's Uncovering Grammar somewhere, but haven't really read it (I've preferred to read his and Slade's book on Conversation, and look at his Natural Grammar sometimes). It will be interesting to see how it compares to his About Language (which I am assuming deals in quite a few minimal pairs of sentences in its "discovery" approach).

Basically, it seems to me that teachers place the analytical onus on the students nowadays, but I wonder if there would be quite the need for such analysis if teachers were more knowledgeable (i.e. "well-trained") and thus selective/decisive (not having a go at any of the regulars here on Dave's, just making a general observation). As it is, they seem to want to take as little time as possible in selecting materials, and entrust that someone else - the students? - will do their job for them (I think we teachers each have to at least sketch out our own individual general courses that we could teach privately. As you guys may have gathered, I am still chipping away at such a goal, with the aid of dictionaries, grammars, the COBUILD Pattern Guides etc).

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 5:31 pm

Hi Lori:
I have never made it through TEV because of the math examples but am going to try again. I will post things as I think of them.

Of course, you know what I am going to suggest - Systemic Functional Grammar. Beverly Dereiwianka has the basic books that my students in Mongolia found fascinating. We did a variation of what klaus described as a first lesson and carried on from there - it is in the SFG thread.

I really tried to keep to the student's work for examples and had them writing every day. I then typed up their work, correcting mistakes as I saw them, gave everyone copies of everyone's work and we discussed what they meant, what I had typed and how I was wrong in expressing their ideas, what was expected in an English essay versus a Mongolian one, what other vocabulary we could use, why we used the verbs we did and how we could elevate them for the IELTS, vary our sentence constrctions meaningfully, use connecting words correctly, etc.

Bernie Mohan's model was very helpful in getting them to recognize they had to move up a level in their vocabulary and constructions to be able to pass the IELTS.

Everyone in the class of 10 (morning) an 11 out of 12 (afternoon) was able to go up a full level on the practice exams. (November to February)

Interestingly, they did an intensive one hour a day course with the Mongolian Grammar teacher who had an excellent workbook developed by a Turkish program for Mongolia with translation. It was mainly drill and kill exercises. I didn't notice any improvement in the student's grammar after that progrm and most of the adults didn't do the exercises for homework as asked, found them really frustrating and were thorougly discouraged about their abilities to learn English. We had a great debate about "traditional" methods of teaching and what they perceived my way as "communicative". In the debate the "traditional" side won but in my classes they were more involved in the communicative activities and their writing got better. Speaking was more problamatic. I didn't see much improvement from November to February and the listening scores didn't move.

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 5:09 am

Thanks, Sally. I just read the whole Applied Systemic Functional Linguistics thread, and noted some other webpages and books for further reference. Somehow the color-coded aspect doesn't seem suitable for the class I will be teaching, and I don't want to get into more explanatory words. I will check into it some more, however, and soon I will have to decide what I'm going to do. I'm leaning toward a combination of things, because in the end I have to understand and be able to explain whatever I decide to use. I think a lot of the success that occurs with various methods is due to the teacher's enthusiasm and understanding. I'm trying not to be totally traditional, and certainly would like to introduce the idea of prescriptive vs descriptive grammar, the fact that languages change, that most "rules" aren't, and that native speakers choose various forms for a reason. Now if I can only figure out how...

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 5:01 pm

Keep us posted. The colour coding is not part of SFG although I was taught with that method and it suits my visual style. I understand the objection to new vocabulary for grammar but it did make sense to my students.

I usually give the "Short History of English" lesson with lots of visuals for my first lesson. You can find it at the front of any good dictionary but there is one on line too - will try to find it. That helps you cover the explanation for roots of words, sentence structure and why rules change. When something comes up later that they don't understand we just refer back to the day we studied the history - usually someone says something funny during the story that can be a catch phrase to remind them.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 11:29 pm

When I have tried to read about SFG it always seems far away from something that would make anything easier, or would lend itself to heuristic color coding. Know a good online introduction for that?

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 1:20 am

I have never seen anything written about the colours. I just took a course with Rhondda Fahey, et al one summer at Carleton University and they introduced me to the idea which pleased me because I learn easily with colour in my world.

Beverly Derewianka and others developed a curriculum for Hong Kong and she might let you look at that. I hasn't gone public yet but starts kids off from a very early age examining language with SFG.

I think there are some books developed for the Australian state education system - New South Wales?

Beverly's books are my favourite and she has a summer course she gives with a big handout that will one day be a book I'm sure. I have some extra copies if you are interested.

As you know I am not great in this area but am always surprised at how the students seem to lap it up and understand more than I do. Perhaps I am loaded down with traditional names of things and ways of looking at them and will never see the full picture. I hope not.

John from this thread has some information from Kathryn Humprhies which we might persuade her to share.

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 5:14 pm

Thanks for all your ideas. I've been searching on the Internet and following links, and found something by Diane Larsen, and one by Hugh Dellar both of which had some ideas about teaching grammar. I read some more of "The English Verb" and have decided while the explanations of the perfect and progressive forms make a lot of sense to me, the explanation of modals was less so.

I am still driving myself nuts trying to decide what to do for the next semester. Since it is a CALL class, we will have two days a week in the computer lab. I am thinking of doing a Blog so they can respond on line. I was thinking of writing some ideas about what "grammar" is or isn't to me and see how much they disagree. (I will have some very old and well-educated Russians in that class. We shall see!) I am leaning toward explaining the present perfect more in line with Lewis, but I haven't decided yet. I am thinking about doing less "overt" grammatical work. I never liked "explaining" because I talk too much then. (Explaining to answer student questions is a different thing entirely.)

I'm trying to balance the grammar thing, because I think it's a legitimate and important part of language learning for adults, but it's not the only thing, nor the most important thing. If I ever get this class together, it will be either a total failure or something good.

kittykoo · Post by **kittykoo** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 7:56 pm

I have tried to use a corpus approach with first year university students in Hong Kong, but my students were not English majors, and did not really put what I showed them to use. I pulled some ideas from a book called Exploring Academic English: a workbook fro essay writing, by Jennifer Thurstun and Christopher Candlin, 1997. I found it to be well-organized and ingenious at showing students how different words can be used differently, and the appropriate grammar and context for each of these uses, but it was totally wasted on my students who just want to know what will be on the exam so that they can study that to the exclusion of everything else. Only the most dedicated students can gain from this approach, but it would be very useful for conscientious second language students.

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Wed Jun 25, 2008 4:10 pm

I guess you know Betty Azar's books. I know that adults like to have a book and those ones worked for my students iin Ottawa.

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Thu Jun 26, 2008 3:46 pm

Sally Olsen wrote:I guess you know Betty Azar's books. I know that adults like to have a book and those ones worked for my students iin Ottawa.

Yes, I think I used one of those quite a few years ago. I guess I gradually gave up using books, and haven't used one in ten or fifteen years. At least I don't get upset about the examples and the material. On the other hand, I spend a lot more time. My own fault!