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

[abufletcher]

It seems as though most of you are teaching children.

I've been carrying out my "experiments in language learning" with false beginners at the university level in Japan for several years now. I certainly think university EFL teachers have a lot to learn from people who spend their days teaching young children.

Obviously if you happen to have a particularly analytical group of students (like the group of Ph.D. candidates in linguistics to whom I once taught advanced ESL in the US) then you're going to have to acquiesce to their grammatical desires to some extent. But that hardly describes the vast majority of the world's EFL students (and so far I've taught in the US, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Mexico, and Japan).

[abufletcher]

I almost can't teach from the textbook I have anymore because I just don't believe in it.

I gave up using textbooks almost 10 years ago. I'd love to have one -- really I would. But I've been through a lot of book fairs and I've never seen one that fits my ideas well (unless I'm willing to have students buy a book only to use 20% of it).

[lolwhites]

Let me get this straight - are abu and mesmark saying that there is no such thing as a generalizable principle (e.g. add an -ed anding to the end of a verb and pronounce according to the final sound of the verb stem) which can be applied to a hitherto unknown language item? When the term privatise was coined in the 1980s, people had no problem conjugating it and noone spontaneously said The Thatcher government *privatose British Telecom.

Mesmark, I've used flashcards too, as have most teachers. I still maintain that if you hold up the cards you've shown here (and very nice and eye catching they are too ), most students are still going to think watch=regarder/mirar/... eat=manger/comer....

I would be very wary of drawing too close a comparison between L1 acquisition and L2 learning. In the former, the child is exposed to L1 for pretty much every waking moment and has no other language to think in or get in the way. Abu's children are the exception rather than the rule - most of us don't have parent with different L1s while growing up in a country where a third language is spoken. While I think they're very fortunate, I can't see how their situation can be comparerd to the student who gets a few hours a week of class in their own country.

Please don't get the idea that I drag my students through units of Thompson and Martinet (whose explanations, IMO, are about as readable as a text on nuclear physics and half of what they say is wrong anyway). If this is what mesmark means by "the grammar method" then I agree 100%. I'm talking about general guidance to get the students started, with a warning that they'll have to modify their principles later on as they come into contact with more language. To use an analogy, if I were a Physics teacher I wouldn't start on day 1 by introducing Quantum Theory, String Theory and General Relativity.

My concept of "gramar is less about "rules" and more about what things actually mean in different contexts; this is where the pragmatics comes in, so I will always present language that I think native speakers will actually say and explain what others will understand by it. But part of that will necessarily involve saying why a given utterance sounds wrong/weird/rude... etc to a native speaker and should therefore be avoided.

[abufletcher]

Let me get this straight - are abu and mesmark saying that there is no such thing as a generalizable principle (e.g. add an -ed anding to the end of a verb and pronounce according to the final sound of the verb stem) which can be applied to a hitherto unknown language item? When the term privatise was coined in the 1980s, people had no problem conjugating it and noone spontaneously said The Thatcher government *privatose British Telecom.

I would guess that Mark maybe not be as "radical" in this regard as I have become. My take on "generalizable principles" is that those represent the advanced skills of a "skillful plagiarist" -- akin to being able to playfully manipulate catchphrases like "Another day another dinar." Well, that's probably not a great example, but...

My position in claiming that there is no "Language" (note the capital L) is that I no longer feel certain (as I once did) that the ability to use language-in-the-world is based on an idealized set of "generalizable principles" of the kind typically posited by mainstream cognitivist linguistics. My preferred neurolinguistics learning theory would be connectionsim which sees "learning" as the dynamic laying down (through repeated experience/firing) of neuronal paths in the physical structure of the brain (as opposed to the "private ownership" of abstract rules). I would also see language learning (as a subtype of all other learning) as essentially an intimately interactive process of socialization rather than the "acquisition" of abstract knowledge.

My main goal in this thread has been to point out that there actually IS another side to the fence in linguistics and language teaching. Language as Machine is only ONE possible metaphor for language -- and in my opinion an unfortunate one. Most teachers can go through their entire careers and never realize that there are other views on the nature of language and learning. And that's truly unfortunate.

[abufletcher]

When the term privatise was coined in the 1980s, people had no problem conjugating it and noone spontaneously said The Thatcher government *privatose British Telecom.

A different perspective on this phenomenon would be that no generalizable principle at all was at work here, i.e. no one said to themselves "now here is a new regular verb so I will form its past tense with "ed" (pronounced as /d/ because of its occurrence after a voiced phoneme other than /d/). Instead people simply recognized the common chunk "-ize" in "privatize" and having heard and used lots and lots of words with "ized" as in, well, "recognized" they creatively cut 'n pasted that. No great cognitive mysteries here or even a need for "generalizable principles."

[mesmark]

I would guess that Mark maybe not be as "radical" in this regard as I have become.

Not yet anyway

Mesmark, I've used flashcards too, as have most teachers. I still maintain that if you hold up the cards you've shown here (and very nice and eye catching they are too Very Happy ), most students are still going to think watch=regarder/mirar/... eat=manger/comer....

I went back and read and guess I may have mislead you. I don't take away meaning. If the students want to translate for themselves I say OK, as long as they're translating meaning. When working with such simple sentences it's probably grammatically exact. If they are asking me to break down the grammar for them, I will if THEY JUST WON'T TAKE THE 'RED PILL.'

If they want to look up a word that's fine. If they want to equate something to a word in L1 or meaning in L1 that's fine with me. I'm just trying not to lable it with grammar or use grammar to teach it to them.

For me this all started about 4 years ago when my oldest son was first beginning to speak and use language. When he didn't uderstand something, my reflex reaction was ... translate it for him! ... explain its usage! Seriously. But obviously, telling him the same thing in japanese or explaining the grammar wasn't going to help. I had to help him understand or just accept that he won't understand now, that's OK and with time he will. He had to try to understand or just let go and hope it didn't mean candy.

That was when I thought maybe we don't NEED to do that for students either. And maybe, they don't NEED us to.

[lolwhites]

Isn't "cutting and pasting" bits of words normally known as Morphology? Can we, IYO, randomly cut and paste any bit of any word or are there are recognisable "chunks" (otherwise known as morphemes).

[abufletcher]

Is the interaction in classrooms therefore pretty much all the same (boring) institutionalized "talk", then, or is there a glimmering of hope (due to truly natural discourse somehow reasserting itself despite the lashings of whatever pedagogy the teacher has been trained to inflict)? I'm an optimist, so I'm trying to hold out for the latter interpretation of your words, but I can't help but feel pessimistic already that the "nature" of the classroom, T-S relationship, the "language" (grammar, structures etc > lockstep syllabus) is still perceived to be such that little real understanding of discourse, let alone genuine discourse itself (other than the purely incidental/accidental/to-be-frowned-upon-cos-we-need-to-get-back-to-something-serious-dammit), ever enters into the "learning" environment.

Sorry, I sort of skipped over this. I think the answer is that we're only just beginning to understand the fine-grained details of how we (Ts and Ss) do classroom interaction. There have been a few papers describing success stories like one paper entitled "Mr. Wonder-ful" which detailed the ways that one particular HS biology teacher was able to draw students into the lesson by his largely unconscious practice of producing "I wonder why..." sorts of things instead of asking display questions.

Personally, I think one concrete move would be learn to go beyond the usual I(nitiation)R(esponse)F(feedback) sequences. And of course the more a teacher knows about how casual conversation is structured the better -- hence the need to include an introduction to CA in more MATESOL programs.

Also I wasnt' meaning to be negative. The point was that there is some really WONDERFUL interaction happening in some (admittedly few) grammar-translation classes -- and an equal number of totally stoggy "communicative" classroom in which IRFs still rule supreme. Choice of stated methodology is just not the determining factor.

[abufletcher]

Isn't "cutting and pasting" bits of words normally known as Morphology? Can we, IYO, randomly cut and paste any bit of any word or are there are recognisable "chunks" (otherwise known as morphemes).

What I'm thinking of certainly doesn't fit the confines of what is traditionally taught as "morphology" (within the orthodox phonology/morphology/syntax/semantics/pragmatics hierarchy). Within my view chunks are inseparable from the "grammar" they regularly contain - which is to say that none of these "levels" of the so-called language hieracrchy actual exist as separate fields. BTW, one of my Ph.D. supervisors does work that might be best described as "discourse phonetics."

BTW, I don't for a minute believe that any actual speaker of English actually understands "atheist" as three morphemes (a/theo/ist) - bound or otherwise. What members of a community take to be a "live morpheme" is as much an issue of social negotiation as anything else.

I certainly haven't thought everything out completely but I think my use of "cut 'n paste" is meant to capture a looser, less unitary sense of how chunks get stuck together. There is no grand system -- just islands of relatively greater order and a sea of chaos. BTW, Diane Larson-Freeeman, one of the leading figures in "grammar and EFL" has recently proposed a conceptual framework for grammar based on scientific work on Chaos Theory.

[abufletcher]

"chunks" (otherwise known as morphemes).

Chunks come in all sizes. "Yoroshiku onegai shimasu" is a SINGLE chunk even if it can analysably be said to consist of smaller chunks. Chunks are chunks by virtue of their recognizability as recurrent units with socio-historical associations (this the the Bakhtinian view).

So, for example, while "red wine" is a single chunk, "red chair" is not. On a larger scale "See ya on Monday" may be a chunk with a certain social resonance (in the Western world) while "See ya on Thurday" is not or at least not to the same degree.

Reduced to its simplest level (and therefore almost certainly becoming too simplistic) the idea is that there is just no separating what's "grammar" and what's "vocabulary." There's just no point in teaching "Do you" questions out of the context of the lexical items that regularly "inhabit" such questions OR the actions such questions perform. It's all there together at the same time.

[abufletcher]

He's another interesting insight into the "chunkiness" of conversational language. The other day my students and I were looking over bits from EFL dialogs and came across the following two items:

glad to meet you.
good to meet you.

Many nonnative speakers probably assume these to be essentially the same thing. But just about every native speaker in the class agreed that while "glad to meet you" was likely to occur very early in a conversation (when it is relevant at all) "good to meet you" would most likely occur in the closing section of a conversation.

[abufletcher]

...

[Lorikeet]

I almost can't teach from the textbook I have anymore because I just don't believe in it.

I gave up using textbooks almost 10 years ago. I'd love to have one -- really I would. But I've been through a lot of book fairs and I've never seen one that fits my ideas well (unless I'm willing to have students buy a book only to use 20% of it).

I gave up using textbooks about 20 years ago, but I still teach grammar. *grin* There was a period when all the textbooks ignored grammar completely, and just went to "communicative competence." I was not fond of that approach. As an adult learner, I've always appreciated some grammar to hang my hat on, although an overly rigid approach or one that involves grammar translation is not what I'm advocating.

[fluffyhamster]

Some related discussion kind of inadvertently cropped up on another thread:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 5297#25297

Lori, you've gotta rent the first Matrix movie! The most interesting thing about it for me was that in the movie, the "enemy" was there to see, meet and fight: in real life, we mostly have only ourselves to do battle with and vanquish (don't know why, but that bit of fluffy "wisdom" seemed to blow my last boss's mind).

I try as best I can to use a system that builds language based on
- what students want to say and ask (primary objective)
- what students need to say and ask (secondary objective)
- what I want them to be able to say (teriary objective)

There is perhaps a tendency for teachers to leave the ball in the student's court too much (asian students can complain if you do a needs "analysis"!), and not bother preparing much as a consequence. I think if the teacher is serious, he or she will be able to accurately anticipate what the students need to say, lead them into a context where they need to say it, and thus create a feeling in them that they do indeed not only need that language but want to say it; the objectives will tend to converge in the minds of both teacher and student are on the same wavelength (and which of them wouldn't be if they're meeting each other at least halfway).

I myself was a bit torn between saying students' wants versus needs:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 3361#13361
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 0827#20827

The aversion to textbooks is natural when you know or feel that the students aren't total beginners and you can therefore elicit halfway stuff from then (re. the 'cycling' examples), but with total beginners there is surely a need for a nice clear basic course (I'm not saying it needs to be a particularly long one - selected units from something like Murphy's Essential Grammar in Use might do the trick); that being said, I totally agree with this:

I always feel a need to remind them that finishing the textbook doesn't mean they will be able to speak English. It's a false sense of progress in my mind.

There has to be something beyond and/or after the book.

Hmm, regular past tense inflections, it's all very well to make students generally aware of them, and this information should will be recorded and easily available somewhere, but all that will in no way compensate for learning/encountering/acquiring (call it what you will, but it'll presumably be contextualized, the better the better!) individual verbs (not that you have said anything to the contray, lol)...so, I like the 'no language, only language use' line, Abu (why dissect something that's pickled when you can at least try to animate things with a dose or two of electricity (again, see the 'Dogme' thread and various other writings of mine).

I deal with simple past when talking-in-the-simple-past emerges as a relevantly thing to be doing. And in a relevant context I'm only going to be working with this tense indexed and co-taught with relevant verbs. Frequency of use vs. an abstract ability to "form the past tense" would be my guiding light.

I'm interested in how exactly the contexts ripe for learning-use emerge. Do you have lots of conversation templates, flowcharts, likely vocab lined up, or are you just winging it and hoping the students will think of something interesting to say? Do you talk about something first and expect them to add their own thoughts, experiences etc?

I guess we're all ultimately just looking for that "killer" example, to either present to the students or to build up(on) from their contributions, so that more can be inferred than from lesser (less stellar, "grammary") examples.

Breaking down chunks or contextualize real-world-language is something that will naturally come about LATER in the language learning process. This is the difference between a crude plagiarist and a skilled writer. But EVERYONE has to go through the crude plagiarst stage first -- or risk producing eccentric nonsense (as do so many L2 student writers who've been taught using synthetic approaches)

Have you read the excerpt that Widdowson quotes from Nabokov's autobiography?
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 1827#21827

Skipping ahead to examples of 'skilful plagiarism', I love the examples of variation on Idioms in the Longman Idioms Dictionary (I'll post some soon).

'cognitivist linguistics' - I'm with John Taylor (Cognitive Grammar, Oxford 2002) in saying that the "revolution" inspired by Chomsky perhaps doesn't deserve to be called 'cognitive' (at least not with a capital C). Chomsky reminds me of a proponent of strong AI still trying to program a computer from the top down, yet without much of a clue about statistics, ontologies, or the scientific method in general, and unwilling to accept or simply unaware that e.g. Markovian approaches have already delivered the goods in many ways. Add human intelligence to the mix and who really needs grammar (of that persuasion at least)? Linguistics doesn't really belong in the biological sciences, it's more a social science (notwithstanding the contributions from and to harder science e.g. NLP).

Hey Abu, you've mentioned Diane Larsen-Freeman several times...what do you think of The Grammar Book (co-authored with Marianne Celce-Murcia)? It's got discourse analysis aplenty, and thus often good discussion of meaning-uses, and also mentions grammaring, but couples all this with some somewhat offputting phrase structure rules and often quite involved discussion of 'form' (as if the spoken or written 'surface' form was not transparent enough).

Right, this has gotten long and bitty enough as it is, I'm off now to watch Matrix Revolutions (heh, only kiddin').

[mesmark]

My HTML skills are pretty crude but here's a glimspe of what language might really look like:
file://localhost/Volumes/dcarroll2/Public/the%20net.jpg
Last edited by abufletcher on Sat Apr 29, 2006 12:17 am; edited 9 times in total

I can totally relate to the frustration 9 times would cause.
Here is your problem >> "file://localhost/..." (links to a file on your computer/server)
It should be >> http: //www.url to server.com/... (If it's uploaded to a public server.)

If you email it to me i'll post it.