What the H is a sentence?

[woodcutter]

Maybe he meant that we should use lengthy sentences as a teaching aid? The natural answer to "Are you and Nancy taking the earliest train to Manchester?" is "Uh, yeah".

Since we are bound as teachers to ask a lot of questions, then such natural answers ain't much good in the classroom.

At least I never learnt anything by saying only "Oui" to my French teacher, and nor did the other little goblins, I would imagine.

Perhaps by "vet" he means "veteran of the classroom?". He may be a language student, after all, and we never pay enough attention to that half of the equation, where we can at least taste what all the grand theories really feel like when inflicted upon us.

As to whether I think the examples are sentences, I'd usually make inane comments about looking up the meaning of sentence in the dictionary, but since it will probably say something like "an utterance with a meaning complete in itself" I don't think that it tells us all that much. Better to ask "Can we say it?" Yes we can. "Can we write it?" No, not unless we are imitating speech in some way. (Due to the reasons already stated by other posters).

[fluffyhamster]

Maybe he meant that we should use lengthy sentences as a teaching aid? The natural answer to "Are you and Nancy taking the earliest train to Manchester?" is "Uh, yeah".

Since we are bound as teachers to ask a lot of questions, then such natural answers ain't much good in the classroom.

At least I never learnt anything by saying only "Oui" to my French teacher, and nor did the other little goblins, I would imagine.

The way around this "problem" isn't insisting on full-sentence answers, is it!

Can you guess what the (an?) answer might be, then, woody? It's actually quite simple/obvious, so you shouldn't have to rack your sawdust too hard.

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... =9272#9272

[metal56]

. Better to ask "Can we say it?" Yes we can. "Can we write it?" No, not unless we are imitating speech in some way. (Due to the reasons already stated by other posters).

Mm? I wonder, after reading your statement above, whether you see us in the act of speaking on this forum, or writing. Are we imitating speech here, or are we merely speaking whilst writing? I mean, what register or genre are we involved in here?

Consider these:

written-written language
written-spoken language
spoken-written language
spoken-spoken language.

[fluffyhamster]

. Better to ask "Can we say it?" Yes we can. "Can we write it?" No, not unless we are imitating speech in some way. (Due to the reasons already stated by other posters).

Mm? I wonder, after reading your statement above, whether you see us a in the act of speaking on this forum, or writing. Are we imitating speech here, or are we merely speaking whilst writing? I mean, what register or genre are we involved in here?

I was having similar thoughts (doubts?). The stuff which we apparently could only say posed no problem in being put into print...but maybe we should just view such examples as a rough outline of a potentially fuller/clearer form; a passing thought, note or reference; perhaps a transcription of some kind.

[JuanTwoThree]

What's a sentence? Yet again we seem to be stuck with imported terminology grafted onto English. We've borrowed words like "sentence" (or "ergative" for that matter) and then can't decide what they mean, so half the discussion is semantic.

To import even more, notwithstanding, Spanish grammar distinguishes between an oración and a sentencia. An oración doesn't need a verb ( "Please!", "Sorry!" and "Whoreson!" are oraciónes) but sentences do.

I usually teach the "short" answer "Yes, pronoun aux" . When S.s realise later that you can say "Yes" without the "echo", by then they've had a load of basically harmless practice.

"Yes, it is a red ball" is plain silly. At the other extreme Completely Natural English would be to teach different intonations of "Uh-huh" to express "No" "Yes" "Really?" and "Really!" I'll settle for the "short answer" .

You have to feel sorry for that NY vet. Maybe he was trained to withstand interrogation which affected his ability to answer questions in a normal way.

Has anyone mentioned the Homeric "Very sharp-pointed, was the spear thrown at Carruthers yesterday"?

[lolwhites]

Surely I'm teaching grandma to suck eggs if I point out that we should be teaching our students that written and spoken language are different. The issue for me is that the vet, as I understand it, is telling students that they should say full sentences, regardless of how incongrous that would sound to a native speaker. In fact, there are times it would have an undesired effect e.g.

A: May I open the window?
B: No, you may not.
(A thinks "No need to be like that, I was only asking!")

A:Did you go out last night?
B:Yes, I went out last night
A:Did you have a good time
B:Yes, I had a good time
A:Did your teacher tell you to repeat everything I say?
B:Yes, my teacher told me to repeat every word you say
(Conversation continues until A smacks B for being so patronising)

Pragmatic failure?

[metal56]

I was having similar thoughts (doubts?). The stuff which we apparently could only say posed no problem in being put into print...but maybe we should just view such examples as a rough outline of a potentially fuller/clearer form; a passing thought, note or reference; perhaps a transcription of some kind.

Fuller? Yes. Clearer? For a native speaker or intermediate level ESL learner, not necessarily.

[fluffyhamster]

Fuller? Yes. Clearer? For a native speaker or intermediate level ESL learner, not necessarily.

Yes, length is no indication or guarantee of clarity - it may in fact obscure or frustrate, in the short term at least.

[woodcutter]

I read your post Fluffy, but the secrets of the universe were not exposed! I didn't think you were one of the eliciting junkies - I thought maybe I was allowed to have my own free-ranging thoughts?

(Maybe this isn't the moment for a rhetorical Q and A session, but anyway)

Have you ever met a student who had a big problem - they continually formed over long, parrot-like sentences in conversation? No you haven't. It isn't even an issue. So if we make students come out with artificially long sentences in class, as many, many people do, then it can't be a problem. Furthermore I simply cannot understand how anyone who has ever studied a language cannot recognize the benefit of doing so.

Is this forum an imagined chat? Absolutely! I admit that my comment about "imitating speech" must be taken in the very broadest sense.

[LarryLatham]

Have you ever met a student who had a big problem - they continually formed over long, parrot-like sentences in conversation? No you haven't. It isn't even an issue. So if we make students come out with artificially long sentences in class, as many, many people do, then it can't be a problem.

I certainly have met students who converse in a most unnatural way, presumably, at least in part, because their teachers have failed to expose them to natural English. Quite a high percentage of EFL/ESL students converse unnaturally in fact, maybe because, as you pointed out, many, many teachers show them, and expect them to produce unnatural language. I suspect you have met them too...

Furthermore I simply cannot understand how anyone who has ever studied a language cannot recognize the benefit of doing so.

It is difficult for me to understand how you can say this, woodcutter. Learners of a first language are certainly not required to produce artificially long sentences. Why should it be beneficial for learners of a second language? Precisely what is it that we're trying to have them learn?

Larry Latham

[woodcutter]

Unnatural English may be encountered, but there are no students who have a problem with shortening their sentences where necessary. Even if there were, it would hardly be a big deal.

Again we are not to examine our experience as adult learners, but we are supposed to reflect on what pre-schoolers do. (Even though they are supposed to have genetic magic learning powers that we do not)

I've been waiting for Atreju to kick off his/her promised thread on natural language learning, where he said he would outline the benefits of "no grammar". Since this has not been forthcoming, a quick word here.

I spent 4 months in Mexico. At tht end of it I could chat in bar, after a fashion. I have been two years in Korea, and I am hardly at the same level. This is because I already knew a huge amount of Spanish - ie I knew English (and a little French). My task as an adult learner was to
knock the edges off my English and replace them with Spanish ones. It was an artificial process, and I did it with a grammar keen teacher in an artificial setting. I feel that explicit grammar study and teacher correction was a great help in the process, and I did better than any pre-schooler would do in the same time. Research shows that little kids are only better than us adults in one way - accent. A good accent is acheived by NOT running everything through the foreign system you already have in place. A good accent is not, however, everything.

Anyway, I am a human being with a functional brain, as all students are, and I am able to tell the difference between stretching out an answer in order to practice composition, and answering naturally.

[LarryLatham]

I am impressed by your passion on this, woodcutter, and, perhaps surprisingly, not entirely unsympathetic to your argument. Your point that my allusion to first language learners is not entirely fair is, I'll have to admit, valid. Child language learners are indeed different than adults, and because of that, different methods may be needed.

That said, I respectfully disagree with your conclusions. Your experiences with Spanish notwithstanding (it seems to me that you may be an atypical student, keen, as you are, with languages, and possessing a talent for learning them that most others may not share with you), I believe if we want our students to learn natural English, the most efficient way to do that is by exposing them to natural English. I am not opposed to the grammar keenness of your Spanish teacher. In fact, I am willing to suspect that your focus on the grammatical principles of Spanish may be largely responsible for your excellent progress in learning it. I am not against grammar in teaching; I am against "correctness" when teachers insist upon it at the expense of naturalness. In any particular speaking situation, there are thousands of possible responses which may be grammatically correct. Only a very few of them, however, will be seen by native speakers as appropriate. Why encourage the others?

As for your final point, I agree that students have brains, and may, if they are far enough along with their English studies, be able to tell that long, unnatural sentences are just that. But how are they to distinguish between them and natural language when they do not know what is natural?

Larry Latham

Oh, and by the way, can you point me to the research that shows children differ from adult language learners only in the matter of accent? I have never heard of any research results like that.

[woodcutter]

I do not think I am especially talented at languages, and indeed at high school I was rather poor, so I am alive to the potential for growth in anyone. And that people have different needs at different times. (and I've forgotten a huge amount of Spanish, before you all test me on it!)

The research was mentioned in H Douglas Brown's overview of the current state of language teaching (2000 edition), if I remember rightly, which is quite good at putting some of Pinker's more extreme positions into perspective (and much as I love Pinker's style, is it really sensible to compare language learning to spider web weaving, which requires not one jot of outside input?).

The vet guy seems to be saying the long sentences are "correct", and that is unfortunate. However, students benefit from being made to make them, even though the process is artificial - it is a chance to formulate complex structures while trying to communicate. That is far different from "repeat after me".

How do they know what is natural? We are only talking here about short sentences. The pedantic teacher is only one input source. Short answers to long questions are everywhere to be seen. (nor can anyone expel them entirely from class!) It will be obvious that the teacher is trying to make the students jump through useful hoops. If you learnt Spanish with a pedantic sentence making teacher, don't you feel that you could make shorter sentences too? Would it really be necessary to be a linguistic expert?

[LarryLatham]

...much as I love Pinker's style, is it really sensible to compare language learning to spider web weaving, which requires not one jot of outside input?

Indeed it is, if you are talking (as Pinker is) about first language learning in young children. Perhaps not, however, with second language learning in adults, as Dr. Pinker would be the first to say. There is a great deal of real evidence that humans are born with a genetically engineered instinct for universal grammar, upon which they map the particular grammar of the language they hear around them. They have an instinctive sense for parsing what they hear, and coming to a deep (if sometimes not entirely accurate...which is why you hear children say, "Daddy goed to the office today.") understanding of the way the language works by the end of their third year. How else would you explain it? Are parents universally great teachers to kids with no language at all? Actually, if you take the trouble to examine the "mistakes" young kids make, they turn out to be entirely logical and consistent with grammatical rules.* Irregulars are not logical on their face, until you examine the history of the language, and realize the influence that grammar mavens have had on English over the decades.

I am not familiar with H. Douglas Brown, so I looked at the list of his publications on Amazon.com. Didn't see anything there that I'd care to buy, but I don't know him from anywhere else.

It will be obvious that the teacher is trying to make the students jump through useful hoops. [Referring, presumably, to the insistance on students making full sentence responses in class]

Obvious to whom? It is certainly not obvious to me, at least not obvious that it is useful, but then, I am not a student. I have been a language student, however, and I came to a different conclusion than you have.

Larry Latham

*I was thrilled when adult students made these kinds of "mistakes" in my classes. It meant that they got it! They had the rule correctly internalized. I'd have been a fool to "correct" them before they had that rule firmly entrenched in their minds. It would have been many class sessions later before I introduced irregulars. I am amazed and disheartened that so many coursebooks present lists of irregular nouns and verbs at the beginning of the students' exposure to those units. What are the authors thinking?

[fluffyhamster]

I'm surprised the answer wasn't obvious, woody (but then, there is a difference between being Socratic and eliciting a painfully obvious answer/language form, even if both sorts of questions are ultimately rhetorical).

To sumarize my post on the other thread, then, basically, if students are being given input that reflects real-world ratios, and encouraged to say only so much as seems appropiate, they will sooner rather than later figure out where they need to "expand" upon their answers to achieve successful communication (that is, meet genuine expectations and curiosity on the part of the teacher and other questioners).

A pedantic teacher who insists otherwise, on supposedly "fuller" answers, is not only wasting time that could be better spent, but might actually be making the student think they are somehow not cut out for this whole English malarky. I have actually met many students (especially those in class, under the watchful eye of a Japanese team-teacher) who most certainly do pause and seem to feel they absolutely have to add at least the auxiliary, and such students do not automatically expand into ever fuller answers when they really are required to do so (they seem stuck at then at the "full" yes/no+auxiliary stage), as if they really don't have any idea of the communication that is (or rather, could be) taking place around of and almost in spite of them.

I agree that motivated learners will soon work out what is what, so it isn't such a big problem for, what, the 10% or so of schoolkids who go on to confidently using the language for their own purposes as adults, but I doubt if they will, in the final analysis, thank a teacher for making things harder for them than were necessary, and possibly for neglecting to focus on some essential or other, so preoccupied were they with silly drills and flogging every dead horse for all it was worth (do such teachers actually have anything to teach besides the simplest, most "obvious", groan-inducing things?).

I myself am always on the lookout for things that will make life easier, so I try to present "shortcuts", in addition to the standard form that students may be expected to unfailingly reproduce in tests (I might hold off on giving them the shortcut until they have practised the more difficult forms for a while; they can then try the simpler form and see if it is indeed easier!). For example, "reactions": So/neither can/am/do/have I > Me too/neither. Long or short, this is obviously a functionally useful form that I feel the students do need to spend some time on (whenever people who are comparative strangers are finding out about each other's interests). I am not looking to add where there is no need to; rather, I am looking to add whatever is not to be found in most courses, or to correct that which I consider is wrong or gives a quite false impression, and whichever way you look at them, "full" answers do not show us the true challenges of natural (non-textbook, "neat") conversations. (That being said, I am not a great fan of Carter and McCarthy's approach/materials, they don't always select very clear or interesting conversations, old people talking about the price of carrots or some students watching paint dry or putting up a set of shelves, compared to say, the first "cumulative" conversation (about a "peeping tom" who isn't one, really!) in Neil Mercer's Words and Minds. Mercer's examples are short, and make you feel excited about the things you could say, and how you might say them, for immediate, maximum impact/effect, which is probably what students want to achieve whenever they open their mouths; they don't want to just be droning on, do they!).

I was tempted to allude to my experience of learning (trying to learn some) Japanese, but as the polite verb forms are used in polite conversation, and the verb the one thing that is often not ellipted, I thought better of it (and besides, I am sure they can say "Yes" or "No" when they feel like it, despite the cliches that have built up about oriental inscrutability etc). That being said, the sort of language I've heard in bars uses simpler core forms (and is less mechanical and boring) than the drills I've slogged through in the earlier units of more ambitious books such as Jorden's Japanese: The Spoken Language 1 (maybe she gets onto hell-raising or "familiar" insults in volume 2? I probably need more patience when I get back to her). It's hard for me to tell just how much of my "understanding" in the less formal encounters proceeded upon the basis of the textbook, but as the forms I heard were quite different (e.g. "drink, v": nomimasu, nomimash*ta vs. nomu, nonda, nonde nonde nonde nonde nonde nonde!), I have to presume it was the context, and the genuine communication therein, that helped me pick things up in bars (I mean pick up language, not hot drunken chicks).

Edit: Glad to see I seemed to have got you and Larry talking, I have read what you've both been saying with interest and reckon that Larry is saying a lot of what I would've, had I replied to you before him; I hope my post here isn't too repetitive or taking things a step back again rather than forwards, anyway.