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

[mesmark]

There have been several almost threads about this and it has been really interesting. Mostly because this thread title is what I write across the top of the board at the beginning of all of my nursing college classes.

"Let go of the matrix!"

I explain the first class that I want them to let go of trying to see and understand the code. (The Matrix movie has been a great help as an analogy.) I go on that I want them to work on seeing, understanding and applying meaning.

I also have private classes with children where I use what I call 'a speaking first' curriculum. I don't bother with any grammar explanation and move students along slowly speaking and using English. I later (2-4 years) go back and apply written structure to what they have been saying. So, it's not an all speaking system. The idea in my mind was to mimic a more natural (ah-oh he's going to say it) native speaker approach. So, my structure lessons usually are just the particulars; start a sentence with upper-case, end with a period, contractions are 2 words smashed together, spelling... I don't bother with grammar as a tool for teaching at any point.

I have been working with mastering simple sentences and stringing them together. Recently I have been working on putting them together to express more complex thoughts. I always feel like I'm going to run into a wall and have to start with grammar explanation, but fortunately alternatives have always presented themselves.

The reason I can do this is I don't have to test my students. Since only I quantify the amount they have learned and the progress they have made, I can use any system I like. The problem is others ask me how far along my students are and I say, "they are doing great!" I can't see how this would work in a school system where tests are the means for analysis.

So..... Does anyone else teach without grammar? What are some ideas and methodologies for getting rid of grammar as a tool for language learning? Can it be done?

[abufletcher]

First of all, GOOD FOR YOU!!! Only a very small minority of EFL teachers world-wide realize there is something to the job besides teaching grammar (with some random vocabularly thrown in for good measure).

But you also touch on one of the stubborn roots of the problem, namely "washback" from a system (I might even say "EFL culture") of synthetic testing, i.e. the idea of that language can be broken down into discrete testable items separating, for example, vocabulary and grammar.

Luckily I also teach in a "testing-free" environment (at a university in Japan) so I am also free to teach however I want. It would be much harder at the middle or high school level where students' lives revolve around grammar-translation based exams. BTW, the testing dilemma is not insurmountable, the challange is just to move to more "communicative" forms of testing.

I figured out long ago that the first step to teaching "grammarless" EFL is just to stop using any of those silly metagrammatical phrases in class. Present Progressive. Present Perfect. Past Perfect. Present Perfect Progressive. Past Perfect Progressive. Past Passive Progressive. Part Participle, active, passive, transitive, intransitive, relative pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, etc. It's just plain ridiculous when you think about it. So the first step is to throw all of that rubbish out for good. It certainly doesn't help students and it isn't even part of language per se (thus the term "meta-grammar"). I don't even use simple terms like "noun" or "verb" or "adjective" anymore.

Of course for many teachers "talking grammar" has became a sort of professional badge, the secret hand-shake of EFL, a means by which to size each other up. To that I say:

"Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!!!"

And even if I'm not a better teacher than I was during my early "meta-grammar period" I'm at least as good as I was then but now don't burden my students with this useless type of meta-knowledge.

What tends to happen when teachers stop using these sorts of terms in class is that they start getting more creative in their teaching. Most teachers, for example, can't even imagine a way to teach active/passive without using metagrammar and/or transformational diagrams.

For those interested in grammarless teaching but still feeling the need to teach structure of some sort, I think the lexical approach holds a lot of potential. The central idea is that language is inherently "chunky" and that what people actually learn is how to creatively cut 'n paste various sizes of "used language chunks" -- for example, (could ya) (gimme) (that thing) (over there) as 4 chunks linked in a fairly straight forward way vs. 8 individual words arranged according a rather complex aux. + subj. + main verb + I.O. pronoun + dem. D.O. + place adverbial. Lexical items (and collocations of lexical items) become as inseparable from "grammar" as Shylock's pound of flesh from blood in The Merchant of Venice.

BTW, strange you should mention using The Matrix as an analogy. One of my grad students used just this analogy to think about his new found awareness of conversational structure (I teach a course on Conversation Analysis). He joked that since starting the course he couldn't stop hearing what people were actually "doing" with talk, for example, "seeing" that things like "Do you like X" are not just innocent questions about likes and dislikes (as students are taught in school) but rather are quite regularly used as "pre-invitations/pre-offers. He joked that sometimes he wished he had taken the "blue pill" instead and stayed safely within the ignorant bliss of traditional understandings of language.

[fluffyhamster]

Grammar wouldn't be so bad if it was just one quick, tried and tested (read, lazy and boring) way to organize one's thoughts regarding the (a?) syllabus (most are clones), but unfortunately what often seems like 99% of teachers never look beyond the usual slots and fillers of their beloved structures and the couple of functions that are associated with each; that being said, I would be suspicious of a teacher who avoided grammatical terminology completely, or seemed unsure of quite "basic" things, when discussing things with other teachers - there's always something (occassionally something potentially useful!) to be learnt. Ultimately, however, I agree that a well-presented course of study will develop the students' comprehension and understanding without the need for any double-checking through the imposition of a metalanguage.

Heh, I don't think one needs to have studied CA to have become aware of exchanges like the following: 'I like X...why do you ask?' 'Oh, I have a couple of free tickets...' (would be useful to teach stuff like that at e.g. high school level, though, to the non-native teachers at least, before the rots sets in: the students especially are never encouraged to think beyond the 'I like X' answer, so their powers of anticipation, comprehension, observation etc don't develop nearly as much as they could).

Some sentences that a class I "team-teach" (i.e. observe being lectured) were forced to produce after the usual grammar-translation torture (the task was to interview several classmates with a battery of basic questions, then write several sentences describing one person in particular, all as preparation for a final oral introduction, read out to the whole class):

She Art very well.

She don't has pet but she very like dog.

He's names Ryota.

He's like math.

He like's math.
Her favorite subjects is English.
Her favorite movies is Harry Potter.
His type of movies is Harry Potter.

His like movie is Harry Potter.

He likes movies is Doraemon.
He likes subject Science.
He likes sport soccer.

Her subjects like Japanese.
His type of music likes Doraemon.

Some of the sentences have gone a bit awry in the process of writing but might sound fine spoken...others betray a more serious lack of any real understanding, repeating words unnecessarily from the questions (perhaps due to unclear instructions), language interference etc; put simply, there is a little too much pressure for grammatical accuracy here given too little stimulating or comprehensible foregoing input (and/or perhaps too many stodgy indigestible dollops).

Anyway, whether we "get off" on more grammar or less, the fact is, English is tricky for Japanese students, and a teacher would do well to not understimate the difficulties (I can imagine some ostensibly more "communicative" (so-called) approaches actually producing less in the way of "results", even after an appreciably longer time).

Comments?

[abufletcher]

Heh, I don't think one needs to have studied CA to have become aware of exchanges like the following: 'I like X...why do you ask?' 'Oh, I have a couple of free tickets...'

The great thing about a lot of the "discoveries" of CA is that once pointed out they are often entirely obvious to proficient speakers. And why wouldn't they be, since it is by virtual of our orientation to these spoken norms that we display membership in our community.

The example I picked is, however, a particularly obvious example but one that still somehow hasn't managed to make it into the vast majority of published ESL/EFL materials.

A (just) slightly less obvious example would be that the so called "short answers" to yes/no questions taught in just about every beginners level EFL book on the planet are blatantly out of sync with conversational reality.

Do you like pizza?
Yes, I do.

While this is not too horribly wrong it does not reflect the facts of conversation as found in naturally occurring conversational materials. First yeah and yes are not necessarily the same in the sort of interactional work they do. It may not be as simple as "informal" vs. "formal."

Are you busy tonight.
Yes.

Second, yeah-tokens are more regularly followed in such contexts by "second assessments" rather than the grammar-mirroring "I do":

Do you like pizza?
Yeah, I love it. <-- actually this is an UPGRADED second assessment.

Where these short answers gets really bad is in the negative:

Do you like pizza?
No. I don't.

This is not just factually wrong but likely to produce a very negative interpretation. Again anyone who really thinks about this immediately recognizes this social reality. And while recipients of novice L2 talk are surprisingly forgiving of grammatical errors, they are less likely to recognize pragmatic/interactional ones and thus will interpret this as they would if it had been spoken by a fluent speaker.

In a technical sense, using CA terminology, what's wrong (you could even say "grammatically wrong") with this response is that it is doing a "dispreferred response" (negation/disagreement) but has the "turn shape" of a preferred response type (in this case agreement). Dispreferred responses to yes/no questions, invitations, and requests are regularly built so as to delay, soften, and ideally avoid all together the doing of the dispreferred action.

Do you like pizza?
(silence)
um...well...not that much...

There's all kind of grammar. I teach lots and lots of grammar. Just the the usual kind.

[mesmark]

"Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!!!"

I was thinking of the same line. You beat me to the punch.

whether we "get off" on more grammar or less, the fact is, English is tricky for Japanese students, and a teacher would do well to not understimate the difficulties (I can imagine some ostensibly more "communicative" (so-called) approaches actually producing less in the way of "results", even after an appreciably longer time).

I would disagree. English is not any more difficult for Japanese students than Japanese is difficult for others. I learned it. Quite fluently. In 2 years.

I think English is complicated for the Japanese student by the method and expectations. If you have team teached or worked in the schools, you must have seen it.

I still team teach part-time at a JHS and I love it. I'm bored out of my mind but it's great study. I look out and watch the lights turn out in students. I can sometimes point to the exact lesson where a particular student was left behind/they gave up for good. It also just feeds the matrix-less drive.

My 3rd-4th graders can produce your example of 'poor' English, verbally, in less than 2-3 minutes, after studying with me for 2-3 years. That example would take how long in high school? 15-20minutes?

The point is not time spent learning or time spent creating. It's more a matter of freedom. The high school students composing the above are bogged down by rules, perfection and structure. They study grammar to the point that I want to cup my hands over my ears and start shouting "la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-"

I'm not a hippie by any means and I don't think the pendulum needs to swing full the other way. But, it just seems grammar translation is the easy road. There is immediate perceived progress but the effects are not sustaining. To be ignorant isn't anything to be ashamed of. To continue to be ingnorant in the light of information is stupidity.

edited to make sure we understand I'm not calling anyone stupid but the continued use of methodology with poor results after 6-10 years stupid.

[fluffyhamster]

Oh, don't get me wrong, mes, I think we're on pretty much the same wavelength here (I've sat up whenever I've seen mention of your "speaking first" curriculum*): although I might have sounded like I was saying I was in favour of grammar-translation, I was just trying to elicit further discussion. As long as a person is thinking beyond CELTA soundbites and developing an approach beyond potentially disconnected activities, materials and methods, then I won't be tarring them with the "communicative" brush much if at all.

Hmm, I'd still say that English is somewhat more complex than Japanese, especially for unmotivated high school students...that being said, although the students may have been given 15-20 minutes to complete the writing stage of that activity, bear in mind that the smarter students among them completed it in well under 5 minutes, and made few if any mistakes (the stuff I posted is from the presumably weaker students, not that I think the mistakes are so serious, or that I know the students well enough yet - thanks to a totally unaccommodating and uncommunicative/"unavailable" lecturer oops I mean JTE - to be leaping to any conclusions).

Interesting that you should mention the forms that answers to Y/N Qs take, Abu, 'cos there were a few threads a year or so ago where the "Drillerkillers" tried to take on the "The real difficulties lie elsewhere" crowd (the former clearly lost the debate, to my mind).
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2620
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2642

I mentioned Carter and McCarthy on the first page of the first thread there - what do you think of their research, Abu?

*I assume you provide a fair bit of considered, quality input too!

[Metamorfose]

English is not any more difficult for Japanese students than Japanese is difficult for others. I learned it. Quite fluently. In 2 years.

The question is where have you learnt it? You must agree that learning the target language in the environment it is used in every modality one can think of 24 hours a day is a given condition; learning a foregin language in one's own country, maybe with 2-4 hours in language classroom, and if the person doesn't study or go through what they've been taught is something different. isn't it?

José

[abufletcher]

I mentioned Carter and McCarthy on the first page of the first thread there - what do you think of their research, Abu?

It was a presentation by McCarthy at TESOL 1995 that first got me headed down the discourse analysis path. Prior to that time I'd been playing with meaning-based grammar and "semantics" but his talk really got me going. On the bus ride back down to my job in Mexico I read A Grammar of Speech" by Brazil and this really got me thinking about how much I had been hogwashed by Chomskyan linguistics during my MA.

So I defintely off McCarthy (and Sinclair) a debt of gratitude. That having been said, I'll now say that theirs ("the Birmingham School") is not my preferred brand of discourse analysis. As I got deeper and deeper in this area I regularly found the ethnomethodological CA papers (SSJ-style for short) much more satisfying and the methodology both more rigourous and flexible. To the extent that the EFL world has been influenced at all by discourse analysis, it has been the Birmingham school that has done the influencing. I'd say there aren't more any a few dozen language teachers in the whole world who know anything about SSJ-style CA.

[abufletcher]

"communicative" (so-called) approaches actually producing less in the way of "results", even after an appreciably longer time).

One interesting outcome of all the work that has been done (and is still being done) on classroom interaction is the realization that the methodology claimed to be in use by the teacher whether it be grammar-translation or communicative approach doesn't always seem to have much of an effect on the structure of the interaction. Some have referred to this observation as "The End of Methodology."

We've all experienced really engaging grammar classes (well at least I have, though not in Japan) and really really boring communicative classes (I've seen lots of those in Japan). In short the methodology in use isn't nearly as important to the processes of learning as the dynamics of the interaction created between teachers and students and students and students.

BTW, when I first started out in EFL, CA stood for "contrastive analysis" then later became "communicative approach" and now has been taken over by "conversation analysis."

Unless of course you're a fan of Mexican football, in which case it's obviously "Club Americas"!!

[mesmark]

The question is where have you learnt it? You must agree that learning the target language in the environment it is used in every modality one can think of 24 hours a day is a given condition; learning a foregin language in one's own country, maybe with 2-4 hours in language classroom, and if the person doesn't study or go through what they've been taught is something different. isn't it?

I probably shouldn't have even bothered with adding that in. Yes, I agree that learning Japanese in Japan is different from learning Japanese in the States.

My question about the matrix is:
Is there a good argument for why we can't just toss grammar? Or at least move it to the perimeter?

Where are the holes in this approach?

[abufletcher]

I don't think it's a matter of "tossing grammar" but rather reconceptualizing what you take grammar to be. Pedagogic grammar rules may allow students to artificially construct sentences that are well beyond the level of their actual competence in the language -- sort of like a paint-by-number painting. I'm not sure this sort of grammar has any lasting effect of L2 competence.

Descriptive/formalist grammars of the type that typify mainstream linguistics are all predicated on the belief (metaphor?) that Language (with a capital L) is a coherent, rule-governed system that resides in the mind of the individual speaker. We can call this belief the "Language as Machine" metaphor.

However, work in the fields of corpus linguistics, interactional linguistics, emegent grammar, connectionism, and conversation analysis (among others) is beginning to paint a very different picture of what language might, in reality, be and what sort(s) of grammar(s) might stick it together. This view is far more chaotic, fragmented, local, non-rule governed, etc.

It is in my perspective these new conceptualizations of grammar that have the greatest potential for teaching language. So the question you can ask yourself is this: Are you just not teaching your students grammar but still assuming that language is a grammar-governed machine? Is so, this is the "hole" in your approach.

[Metamorfose]

I probably shouldn't have even bothered with adding that in. Yes, I agree that learning Japanese in Japan is different from learning Japanese in the States.

I guess you should if you are to teach foreigners and assume that the phenomenum works the same way in any given condition, like learning mathematics, for example where the place and environmental you are surrounded won't intefere that much in your learning.

José

[lolwhites]

I agree that grammar has traditionally be given far too much importance at the expense of other aspects, but I'm unclear what a "non-grammar" approach would look like in the classroom. Does it mean students should never be explicitly told about -ed endings or inversion for question formation, for example?

I'm asking out of genuine interest and not to pick holes.

[abufletcher]

inversion for question formation, for example?

Yes. Absolutely. Question invertion is one of those things that should be forever relegated to the methodological trashcan -- along with active passive transformation drills. There is no indication whatsoever that question inversion is "real" to participants and even less that questions produced by inversion serve any authentic purpose. I personally have strong doubts about whether the "chunked form" of real-world questions parallels artificially created, transformational arrived at "question formats" as found in EFL classrooms.

This statement > questions transformation may have had some apparent legitimacy back in the 60's when transformations of "kernal sentences" was all the rage linguistically. but as I understand things, even Chomsky dropped the idea of transformations of kernals from his later versions of his theories.

The only way to figure out how to teach English without teaching grammar is to try it for a day or a week or a month - or a decade!

[fluffyhamster]

Jose raised a valid point, but let's give mesmark the benefit of the doubt/his due (that is, although it would obviously be beneficial for most students to have an opportunity to be immersed at some point, I believe his private students here in Japan must still be progressing faster than they would(n't) be with the more traditional methods).

Hmm, getting into this Matrix deal a bit...okay, I'm Neo. To beat the agents at their own game, I should be concentrating on bending teaspoons with my mind or something, and forget all about learning and then bending the rules ('Do you think that's air you're breathing?' etc)? (Jumping onto lol's line of questioning a bit here).

There is no indication whatsoever that question inversion is "real" to participants

Yes, but is there any indication that it is totally unreal (that is, that they are unaware of the change in position of the auxiliary)? You probably just mean that there is no need to start off with the kernel and go through the range of drills, right? Or are you perhaps implying that even glancing quickly at the auxilary sideways on can e.g. blind students to other ways of asking questions?

I sense a subthread...re. entrusting to authentic data versus ...well, I'm not quite sure what they consistently favour, but guys like Guy Cook, and especially Widdowson, have given corpus linguists a hard time: in the case of Cook vs Carter, I feel that the criticisms are perhaps justified (because the "genre" level approach of the CANCODE project has meant that quite lengthy and "messy" texts have found their way into the analysis - fine perhaps if you want to try to get your head around full-on native ramblings and mutterings, but perhaps not the best basis for learner production); with Widdowson vs Sinclair, I feel that W is being a little unreasonable (that is, if there really is such a noticeable difference between COBUILD's and Oxford's example sentences - due to their differing editorial policies - are there accordingly no gains at all to be had from the COBUILD ones? I think not, and it is not as if students have ever been so stupid as to blindly parrot e.g. examples that are clearly from writing in their speech, even if their teacher has been swamping them with authentic texts and demanding that they learn from them).

You can find out more about the abovementioned debates on the 'Cliches' thread:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=1139

Unfortunately, even if you delete the final full stop after the 'htm' extension of the De Beaugrande site's links, the papers won't appear (it seems the site has been suspended). The paper that used to be available at the first link can however now be found in McEnery et al's Corpus-Based Language Studies (Routledge 2006):
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 4997#24997

Probably better to go for Seidlhofer's book, though (it's more wide-ranging/interesting).