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

[abufletcher]

'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).

I've recently started to realize that I've given "cognitive" researchers as a whole a bum rap! I'm particularly interested in cognitive theories that argue for a "mind-body-world" continuum (i.e. not boundaries) or in Bateson's terms "an ecology of the mind." This is very seriously "matrix" stuff where cognition is not seen as privately "owned" but rather shared and interactionally situated. It's more "out there" than "in here." As far as where "linguistics" belongs, most of the top CA people are actually located in Sociology departments rather than Linguistics departments. Of my two supervisors one was in Linguistics and the other in Sociology.

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).

I don't have this but have been meaning to take a look at it. But from what I've read from Larsen-Freeman and Celce-Murcia I expect that most of this would be what I might term "enlightened traditional grammar." Celce-Murcia was at UCLA and clearly was exposed to Schegloff's CA thinking. Hatch too. But neither really took it fully on-board. In terms of discourse influence on applied linguistics, more of that has come from Birmingham School DA than from CA.

I'm off now to watch Matrix Revolutions (heh, only kiddin').

BTW, there's really nothing very new about the "sound bite" philosophies of Matrix. It's just basically Plato's Cave all over again, i.e. "all we see are the shadows on the wall which we take to be the reality."

[mesmark]

Here's a good example:


This is abu's picture of what language might look like. I could explain to you that:
- you need to set up your ftp access program to ftp access port ftp .'url'
- ID is the main user email address for your ftp account, password - same
- port is pobably 21 but you may need to check with your provider
- upload your image to your server
- write the following code into the webpage remembering to type the address to the image perfectly or you will see nothing. The code should look something like this

Code: Select all

<a href="http&#58;//www.abufletcher.com"><img border="0" src="http&#58;//www.mes-english.com/misc/net-small.jpeg" align="left" width="600" height="600" alt="Abu's picture of what language should be" hspace="10"></a><font size="2" face="Comic Sans MS"> 

It's really quite simple.

Now I skipped a couple steps in there because we've covered them before and you had those down pat on that day. Now, remember that if you want the file to open in the same window or new window you'll need to enter that after the <a href> tags! Go!

Also, abu, .jpg is really heavy in this case and .gif images really are the norm for what you want to do here. So, you should go back and save the image again and repeat because that's not really the best way to do it.

OR
I could show abu how to do what he wants to do without burdening him with baggage he may never need but definitely doesn't need to know now. I could show him how to open a yahoo bucket account. Upload the image. go to the image. copy and paste the url in his post. Done! For his purpose of showing the image, this is all he needs to do.

[abufletcher]

Yes, cut 'n paste, I can do that! Thanks for posting the image for me.

[fluffyhamster]

BTW, there's really nothing very new about the "sound bite" philosophies of Matrix. It's just basically Plato's Cave all over again, i.e. "all we see are the shadows on the wall which we take to be the reality."

Some discussion of allegory (but more often than not connotation) here:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/job/viewtopic.php?t=32579

The wide view of connotation taken by Trask (leading as it does into association, collocation etc) brings to mind (well, mine at least) images like the one posted above (pulsating interconnected pathways).

[mesmark]

... 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)...

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.

With total beginners is when this is easiest. they are not set in their learning ways and you can guide them in the way you see fit. Like Abu said earlier, you'll have to try it to see how it might work.

It's definitely not rocket science or anything complex. It's the exact opposite as I see it. Without grammar, you are just looking at Language and language use, or just language use

Bruce Lee stunned the martial arts world when he rejected form. He tossed all the structure to the side. He used and taught a system without form, which many still argue is the best 'form' of martial arts.

I've given a lower level example of how I would do it but the main goal would be at more advanced levels to see the meaning, not see the code. In my nursing college classes I use some articles I made for grammar-less instruction like this on for example www.hospitalenglish.com/teachers/files/ ... betes2.pdf I use these 2 articles to get students to talk about type 2 diabetes. I first introduce the topic and discuss it (if they will.) We then go over the key words. I have some activities we do, crossword and matching sheet not included. Now that we have the keywords down, I give one article to 2 students and one article to 2 other students. They read the article for content and main points. They shouldn't be translating sentences or breaking down grammar. At their level and level of nursing knowledge these are clear enough. (They have already covered the disease and are not learning something new but learning how to express in English something they already know.) They then have to relay the main points or meaning to the other 2 students. At the end there are some comprehension questions for each group that can be used as game type points for competition or just as is.

The idea is to get this kind of material into each lesson so that grammar is not needed, whether it's a children's beginner class or an adult false beginner class. The problem, as I see it, is you are going have to go out there and find/make relevant, building, individual use, specific class centered materials to do it. Another problem is getting the students to let go or at least let grammar go for the sake of class instruction.

So far all of the examples have been micro-grammarless instruction. The question, it seems, on most people's minds is how do we make macro jumps using this. The answer is long periods of constant language use. long may have to be defined by use. I have a student who has been with me and in 3 years is near fluent enough starting from flase beginner, (but she is obsessed.) She studies on her own, teaches and has given in to the non-grammar approach. For the first few years she survived with the cut 'n paste language she knew. Now, she has passed the plagiarist stage and creates. For her it has been lots of exposure, lots of language, lot of language use.

Everyone keeps asking how do we teach without grammar. My question is why do we need to teach using grammar. Is it because it is needed? or is it because that's an easy/quick way to teach it?

[abufletcher]

The image above, BTW, is a computer generated illustration of the notes and connections of the global World Wide Web. I would imagine that most Connectionists would also see in it a reasonable depiction of neuronal pathways in the brain.

[lolwhites]

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'm not so sure. You're probably right about the a- in atheist but there are enough words ending in -ist (communist, Buddhist, environmentalist...) in everyday use for a native speaker to infer that it's a morpheme meaning something either "one who believes" (e.g. a fascist) or "associated with or connected to" (e.g. Calvinist doctrine). Likewise for -ise/ize and -ed to name but two examples. Surely noone's going to suggest that every -ed form is learned independently, so there must be a generalizable (general+ize+able) principle in operation. How else would young children (and students) come out with forms like goed, swimmed and mans as they acquire the language?

BTW to be fair to Chomsky he has always said that he can't see how his theories can be applied to the teaching and learning of a second language.

[mesmark]

Surely noone's going to suggest that every -ed form is learned independently, so there must be a generalizable (general+ize+able) principle in operation. How else would young children (and students) come out with forms like goed, swimmed and mans as they acquire the language?

I'm not implying there's nothing there. I think we're both taking about the same thing but we're using different words. You keep using 'principle' which sounds a lot like truth, rule and law. I'm choosing to look at it as 'pattern.'

For instruction, I see language as worn paths aound town. People tend to go to some places on a particular route and the result is a path worn into the earth. Eventually you get a pattern of movement. You can't deny it's there. However, I think it's easier to teach Ss how to get where they want to go by taking them there. At low levels you're not directing people very far so grammar is an easy quick way to get them just a bit ahead from start. But as they get further in and the paths get more complex, run together, difficult to separate or define, people get lost!

Continuing with the same analogy, I think trying to nail it down with grammar is like paving those paths and throwing up barriers on either side.

[mesmark]

I'm really liking the whole no Language just language use concept.

Maybe for this beaten path example, we could see that there really is no path at all.

[abufletcher]

Mark, I think the "ruts and paths" anology is right on the money. Plus it has the added advantage of being roughly analogous to what Connectionists argue might actually be going on in the brain. It's also essentially the same as the "Language is a River" metaphor we talked about in another thread (i.e. the flow of water creates the riverbed).

In my field of conversation analysis we talk about "practices" instead of paths but I think it's largely the same thing. However, I think both "practices" and "paths" are fundamentally different than "rules" as defined within "rules and units" approaches to analysis. Both paths and practices are better understood as normative rather than delimiting. The term "paths" may incorporate a greater a sense of freqeuncy, while "practices" captures a social perspective.

To address lolwhite's point, to me the -ed form is just one of the deepest ruts in English and, for this reason, certainly appears extremely "rule-like" -- imagine a wagon wheel rolling along in a 6" deep rut. It would take something pretty dramatic to break out of this rut. That sort of dramatic interactional event does occassionally (purposely) occur in talk but we can count this as a pretty stable aspect of langauge use. The problem with using -ed as a tool of argumentaton is that it just isn't representative of the much more casual organization of language use as a whole. Think of -ed use as being akin to one of the bright spots in the photos posted earlier -- one of the islands of order in the chaos.

I can understand how the idea that there may not be any such thing as "Language with a capital L" might be a truly shocking thought to many people (especially "Language-with-a-capital-C" teachers). But the potential of exploring this idea is just too great to turn away from it in fear.

[fluffyhamster]

I sometimes started forgetting that this thread is more about not explicitly teaching grammar, rather than saying that there is no grammar; the reason for forgetting is that I (and I suspect many other teachers) don't really draw that much attention to the formalities (unless students are having particular problems), so mesmark's method's aren't so alien that they really stick in our minds...but that's not to say that I (we) don't use grammar in our thinking and planning (the question then is, do mes and abu make much continuing use of, or reference to, grammar? How about corpus-based ones e.g. the COBUILD Grammar, or Biber et al's LGSWE).

Actually, we haven't defined grammar (probably we're all sick of being asked to do so by task-based AL books etc), but here's what I came up with recently:

Grammar is what we can potentially describe in texts (or construct ourselves on the basis of a functional familiarity with a language), from the level of morphemes right on through the discourse level. What we actually choose to describe often is around the morphosyntactic, or, slightly higher up, the lexicogrammatical level, and not because we feel that every detail, frequent as well as infrequent, needs annotating, but because there is a presumed functional difference from the "norm" in the current point of focus (of some import to at least some students), that we feel we cannot in good conscience pass over without giving it some clear analysis and thought; ultimately we are using grammar to decide, at least to ourselves as teachers, what to teach (which will involve a consideration of what students are to learn). Whether students need to think in the same terms is ultimately up to them, and they will probably become aware of certain (regular) linguistic features regardless of whether their teachers draw explicit attention to anything.

[abufletcher]

Certainly the images we hold in our heads matter hugely:

“Our ‘picture’ of language is the single most important factor…in determining the way we choose to teach one.”  -- Becker (1983)

Definitions of grammar? Here's one:

"Grammar, of course, is the model of closely ordered, routinely observable social activities."  (Sacks, 1992:31[Fall 1964, lecture 4])

Here's another by Hatch on the "origins" of grammar:

“...one learns how to do conversation, one learns how to interact verbally and out of this interaction syntactic structures are developed...” (Hatch, 1978, p. 404)

[mesmark]

Could we simplify it down to 'the form language takes'

If the picture before was language...
Could this possibly be grammar?

[fluffyhamster]

'The form language takes'? The question then would be why you weren't studying grammar in earnest! Perhaps you meant something more along the lines of 'A partial inventory of forms identified within (a) language'?

[mesmark]

I actually want to say like a protein ever forming and folding upon itself, making a globulous structure like the picture.

Also assuming the 'language image' is ever changing, so is the form language takes. The meaning and use are inside, not the outward appearance.

I might need a better picture.