Why do we teach prescriptive grammar?

[Scott.Sommers]

Steven's description of linguistic geography accurately describes only the most recent history. Prior to the invention of modern nations (around 1800), there was no national schooling, there were no national languages, and there was no way for anyone to learn what could be a national language. In fact, large numbers of people were illiterate.

The chaos that existed in this 'natural' state was enormous. Communication was so difficult that it was a serious impediment to economic development and national security. For nations to be able to compete successfully against one another, citizens had to adopt standard and homogeneous language patterns. National languages were created and schools were established to teach these languages.

The vast majority of people who speak second languages, perhaps even still, learn from speaking with others. I personally know large numbers of Italian, Ukrainian, and Chinese immigrants to Canada who could speak no English when they arrived as adults and received no classroom instruction. Classroom instruction of second or foreign language as it exists today is a notoriously poor source of fluency, unless it is immersion instruction. For example, English is widely taught in Asia where virtually no one can speak or read more than rudimentary sentences.

[JuanTwoThree]

I wasn't explicitly taught any English grammar at any time before university. Of course we were often corrected when we spoke and wrote, but there was no terminology or explanation given.

There was huge quantities of Latin, French and German grammar which may have rubbed off a bit, though the terminology was bewildering and depended on which century the teacher had been born in.

Learning a second language "naturally" after one has learnt a first is, by one definition of "naturally", a contradiction. "Naturally " would mean going back to pointing and making googoo noises while only drinking liquids for the first couple of years ( though come to think of it my first steps in Spanish were pretty much just that).

More progress than this should be made because the learner has already learnt to speak once and acquired notions of past, future, non-reality etc, if not whatever names are in vogue for these at the time. There is no escaping the fact that the learner has developed his/her intellect and learnt to read and write. Usually. This of course is "natural" too. As is the L1 intererence that is produced. But it's not fast either.

If by "unnatural" we mean "with teaching techniques" then I have to say that miracles occur everyday in the classroom. Comparing my progress in Spanish with that of my students in English then give me "unnatural" any day. Remember that I was and am under, for something like 12 hours a day, a bombardment of Spanish.

Even given my previous experiences of L2, 3 and 4, which I could read, write and (except Latin) speak and understand upper-intermediately well, I got nowhere for two or three years in Spain without classes. I was unafraid of making mistakes, uninhibited about using gestures or little drawings, so it wasn't any kind of reticence on my part. And I am not unintelligent.

I expect I was soaking it all up along with the liquids. I finally began to understand more and more. Thoroughly natural of course, but painfully slooooow compared with what we achieve in 100 hours in the classroom. 96 hours of class works out at 8 days of "natural" learning, during which time you'd learn nothing.

I could have done with tons of intervention even to communicate effectively, let alone correctly or aesthetically. The biggy is not whether this facilitation is necessary or not, but how best to do it.

[fluffyhamster]

All interesting stuff, but what JTT said, especially things like 'I am no not unintelligent', 'I expect I was soaking it all up along with the liquids' (before he finally took and accelerated ahead with formal lessons), and 'I could have done with tons of intervention even to communicate effectively, let alone correctly or aesthetically. The biggy is not whether this facilitation is necessary or not, but how best to do it' especially got me thinking.

I suspect that an almost zero-level learner will find progress very slow because they have not got used to more than the disembodied sounds as printed in the textbook's chart - certainly not the sound patterns, "routines" in the language etc. This, I suspect, is why JTT could and indeed did feel like he accelerated - because a substantial foundation had been laid, even though, or indeed because he was not forcing anything too fast (that is, I believe a learner's auditory memory will be miles ahead of truly "zero" learners who pack themselves off to the nearest school ASAP). I myself am hoping to capitalize upon having spent years (=many many nights) in bars in Japan in much the same way - but I will be using self-study courses first and seeing how they go, rather than rushing off to a school straight away - see below.

But obviously, not everyone has the time to or inclination to pickle their liver to clean their ears out for lengthy periods, so off to the school ASAP it is in most cases. Once there, the immersion is usually total, and little thought is given to differentiating natural from unnatural dicourse, even in subtly unnatural so-called "conversation classes", where the teacher is still free to break up the "script" with all manner of ad-hoc asides, tips and pointers (if and when they occur to the teacher, or are totally unforseen i.e. a problem and need to be given a quick, pat "answer" before moving on quickly). The only time the student gets a relatively uncluttered and streamlined look at naturally connected stretches of the language is when the dialogue in the textbook is being played or read, all without the aid/help of explicit translation (it is usually left to the student to translate - on a word-by-word basis, thus potentially and likely missing the presence and point of many things that should be accorded their status within a phrase rather than alone).

I think for formal instruction to succeed as well as it should, the learner has to be up to speed already, have completed a good basic meat and potatoes bilingual course, have (had) access to a good bilingual dictionary, have or be considering buying or getting access to more of the language (audio-*beep*-printed texts e.g. bilingual movie screenplays, cable TV with subtitles, helpfully patient and possibly even bilingual friends etc) to help them see and understand how more genuine communication unfolds. Having done all that, the obvious question is, would it then be worth going to a language school for whatever sort of "immersion" they could offer (the opportunity to try things out, hone hypotheses regarding the language etc)?

I think not. Teachers in "Direct Method" (and that includes "communicative" approach) schools simply (usually) do not have the time, expertise, resources or (importantly) the power to do anything as undoubtedly helpful as even the above, and students who believe they will be getting dollops of maximally helpful language in a fully understandable form should be made aware (if they aren't already) of the limitations of the actually very bare, basic and inflexible schools/methods. Schools do not offer a rich, deep or clearly rewarding experience beyond that which transpires by pure luck and/or the "hard", improvised work of the teacher, the students, or both. Nothing about them says "surefire". I mean, take a look at just the textbook that is sold at the start of most courses (even when, perhaps BECAUSE it is part of a "structured" 3 or 4 or 5 part "series") and you'll see how thin and strung out it all really is. It is left to the teacher to muddle through and hope for the best (still, if you're the sort of teacher who LOVES supplementing and thinks it is an essential skill, a natural part of the job much like clearing up scenes of disaster is the emergency services, you might want to quibble with me on this point).

By the way, I've always wanted to ask what people's opinions are of "characterization" in textbooks. Self-study ones (at least, of those for English learners of whatever L2) often seem to opt for a clearer cast of characters, centred upon the British/American etc arriving in, immersing into and gradually "succeeding" in a foreign country, whereas ESL ones present a much more random series of encounters. Although the self-study type can appear to disempower the character, and may therefore patronize and irritate, they can end up being more enjoyable and seemingly connected than ESL ones. I suppose the best compromize are those self-study types that leave the foreigner stranded at the airport, and get into following Mr Wang home where he argues with his wife/his wife argues with him over whether to buy two bottles of booze, or only one and a fish for the hungry family. In the next unit, the scene subtly shifts to a young couple remarking on how much their neighbours argue, and about how the police had to be called last week to get the meat cleaver off of the wife.

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2726

[Lorikeet]

Ah Fluffy--I have to remember that most of you who are regulars here on Dave's teach in a very different environment than I do. My current classes have students whose language backgrounds are Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese), Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Amharic, German, and French. (I probably forgot a few too :p) It makes some things easier (speak English in class!) and some things harder (I may know a smattering of a lot of languages, but I sure couldn't explain anything well in most of them.) However, the students can get varying levels of "immersion" from their every day lives, depending on where they work, what they do, and who their significant other is. (The last one being the most helpful .)

I don't think most of them want to spend the time soaking up the language by themselves when they can come to school and have some help. Yes, I think I help them--particularly in explaining the way we speak so they can improve their listening skills. As I said before, I gave up books years ago because none of them did anything the way I wanted. heh. Hrmm--I think I'm probably off topic, but oh well.

[Stephen Jones]

Steven's description of linguistic geography accurately describes only the most recent history.

Whatever makes you think that? What particular aspect of my last posting only applies to more recent history? The teaching of Latin in seventh century monasteries, or Arabic in ninth century madrassas, Sanskrit if first century Tamil Indian temples or the mix ot Tamils and Sinhalas on the Western coast of Sri Lanka (the karavas came from Bengal in the 10th century AD and the Tamil kingdom of Jaffna is normally dated to the 13th, and as far as we know the mix of Tamils and Sinhala speakers has been going on since before the Portugeese occupation in the 16th century).

Your potted history of world languages in one paragraph doesn't make it at all clear if you are talking the homogenization of dialects or the suppression of other languages. It's certainly over simplistic. Standard English was established in the mid 17th century, and although speakers in rural Devon would find it difficult to communcate with those in rural Yorkshire the standard variety would be understood by most. Even though illiteracy might have been as high as 80% it was common for those who were literate to read to those who weren't and the popularitya amongst all classes of pot boilers as well as more serious works of serialized fiction such as Moll Flanders or Pamela, not to mention the Kng James translation of the Bible suggests.

Spanish was fairly well established as a national language by the 17th century. It was not the only language in the country as large parts of Spain spoke Catalan, Galician (a dialect of Portugeese) and Basque (a non-indo European language with no known sister languages). Catalan incidentally was a national language in the 13th and 14th centuries and was understood from Perpinya in the North to Valencia in the South. In fact it is impossible to tell whether a 14th century text was written in the southrnmost or the nothernmost tip of the area.

The vast majority of people who speak second languages, perhaps even still, learn from speaking with others

And here's silly me thinking they learnt from buying bumper packets of spelling macaroni.

I presume what you are saying is that the vast majority of people learned a second language from interacting on a daily basis with speakers of another language. That would probably be true of people learning a second modern language, though not so for those learning a bridge language such as Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic. However the majority of the population were not in contact with speakers of other languages. Tnis would only happen in port cities or where you had migrant communities meeting, often in a kind of economic symbiosis. And where you had two language communites intermixing, there would be a definite tendency for the two languages to merge. Whether the consequent creole became a language its own right, or became subsumed in the language spectrum of the dominant language group would depend on exterior political factors.

Of course the most common way in which people come into intensive contact with another language is through immigration. It is true that many adult immigrants learn the language of the host counrty without any formal tuition. For this to happen however certain conditons must be met, the most important of which is that the immigrant must be relatively isolated from other speakers of his L1. Where this is not true failure to learn the host language is much more common (50% of the immigrants to the States in the period 1870-1920 returned home because they failed in the States) and what is even more common is learning just enough to get by and keep a low-paid manual job. I suspect that few if any of the immigrants who ended up working as doctors or teachers or engineers in the States or the Uk did so without any formal tuition in their new language. Indeed if it were so easy to pick up a new language by osmosis, why do so large a number of immigrants enroll in language classes at considerable personal cost in terms of time and money.

The truth is that whilst there are a certain number of people who learn a language without formal teaching, and a smaller number who reach near fluency in a language with almost no direct contact with native speakers of the language, most learners require both to progress.

Immersion which you appear to be so fond of, was developed as a technique in Quebec province to deal with the problem of a large English speaking community that was not learning French. The idea was to do nearly all schooling in French from an early age so that the children would pick up French as a first language. The polidy was then adopted by the Generalitat of Catalunya to deal with the same problem amongst the Spanish speaking immigrants in its industrial suburbs. The method had mixed results. The children did succeed in understanding the language, whether French or Catalan, but in most cases the production of the second language was strongly marked by the influence of the L1. This is seen even more clearly in the case of Indians or Africans who are educated in English; the artificiality of plonking together a load of speakers of one language and expecting it to speak another effects the learning both of other material and of the target language.

And once again, I have to point out that we are talking of a pretty inefficient way of learning a language, and as Juan as pointed out, many of us can live in a foreign culture for years and only pick up the language when we force ourself to take lessons.

For example, English is widely taught in Asia where virtually no one can speak or read more than rudimentary sentences.

Virtually no-one? And how much of this is the fault of inadequate teaching methods and materials as opposed to being caused by the inadequacy of the idea of trying to teach in the first place? At one time nearly every English schoolboy studied French, yet the proportion of the English capable of speaking French was small. On the other hand people in Spain, including factory workers and taxi drivers, have invested a large amount of money over the last twenty years in language classes from native speakers, whether in language academies or privately, and it has paid off. There is a signifcant minority of the Spanish who now can get by in English.

Indeed if you bear in mind that nearly all the world's scientific literature is published in English (including about 90% of that published by the French) it should be clear that people have reached a considerable degree of mastery in English without having had to emigrate to Australia, or clean toilets in Canada.

And one last comment. Both in this and your other post you appear to be mixing up many separate issues

• The validity of the prescriptivism for standard English as espoused by the authors of the SATS, the Queens English society, Lous Menand et al
  The validity of any kind of prescriptivism for the standard language, even that with a firm descriptivist basis.
  The validity of having a standard variety of the language in the first place.
  The necessity of being prescriptivist when dealing with non-native teachers utterances.
  The validity of teaching non-native speakers the standard language as a variety of regional dialects.
  The validity of correcting foreign students' utterances.
  The validity of teaching foreign students anything at all, iinstead of simply providing the opportunity for them to practise and listen to the target language.
  The validity of students attempting to learn a foreign language in their country of origin.

It would facilitate discussion on this forum considerably if you would try and disentangle the various points and put them in separate threads, since otherwise it is difficult to avoid talking at cross-purposes.

[fluffyhamster]

I think we can take it that you aren't annoyed with me, then, Stephen.

[fluffyhamster]

Of the separate issues you mentioned, Stephen, I guess I find the following the most interesting/stimulating/valuable (hence my brief comments):

The validity of having a standard variety of the language in the first place: I don't think validity is an issue, it's just an inevitability (that we should all accept, and that almost everyone is aware of and thus does "accept" i.e. use when it is more appropriate to do so e.g. in writing a thoughtful post).

The necessity of being prescriptivist when dealing with non-native teachers utterances: non-native teachers', or a non-native teacher's? Sure, if their English sucks totally - then they are little more than students still.

The validity of teaching non-native speakers the standard language as a variety of regional dialects: to do so would be to do them a disservice, I think (if the focus on the dialect or dialects was to the detriment of mastering the more widely used, understood and thus useful standard).

The validity of correcting foreign students' utterances: yawn!

The validity of teaching foreign students anything at all, instead of simply providing the opportunity for them to practise and listen to the target language: feel a bit like yawning but not asleep just yet.

The validity of students attempting to learn a foreign language in their country of origin: sh*t happens. Like, why was this website not called Dave's EFL Cafe? Or Dave's ESOL Cafe?! Ah, ee-ess-elle sounds better than ee-ess-owe-elle, although they could both be shortened down to ess-all. Leaves poor eff-all/ee-eff-elle a bit out of it though, eh.

(=I sometimes despair even of myself, with all the "fun" I have).

[woodcutter]

Oh, I like it when Stephen isn't curt! No yawning allowed.

[Tara B]

I would argue that most of the rules that belong to "prescriptive grammar" are actually rules for formal (or written) grammatical situations. People who teach grammar prescriptively, though they may not understand it, believe that formal grammar is the only correct grammar, and that everything else is incorrect.

In other words, prescriptivists believe that FORMAL = GOOD. As we all know, that's not always true. That kind of teaching leads to some very unnatural language, especially in ESL students. Descriptivists, on the other hand, say that the test of correctness is "what native speakers do."

If you use this test, you discover that there are several registers in English, all of which are correct--meaning that monolingual, native speakers use them. However, they are NOT all correct in all situations. Using informal (or vulgar!) grammar and vocabulary in formal situations is a mistake, and vice versa.

For this reason, even native speakers sometimes have to be "taught" grammar. In reality, we are not teaching them grammar, but rather a formal dialect of their own language that they may not have had the opportunity to learn.

As ESL teachers, part of our job is to help our students wade through the fine distinctions in meaning of English, and make good decisions about what kind of grammar is appropriate, when. These decisions are linked to cultural information about which situations are formal and which ones aren't--not always the same across cultures. In my opinion, a major part of advanced grammar classes ought to be dedicated to helping students recognize control these distinctions in thier own English, instead of studying obscure tenses that they will never use.

[Stephen Jones]

instead of studying obscure tenses that they will never use.

As there are only two tenses in English, Present and Past, perhaps you would be so kind as to tell us which one you think they won't need.

[woodcutter]

Is it just me, or it is the case that whatever we say to defend teaching some rules, the same kind of cloth-eared anything-goes trendy thinking reminiscent of tired 1960s doctrines gets thrown back at us? Tara, do you think I should be teaching your local slang, or my local slang (and regional dialect), in the classes I have here in Korea? Since I don't, does that mean I think FORMAL = GOOD?

Stephen, you seem to think that what you write is obviously true, and that immersion experiments have proved that copying children is not the way forward. While I agree with most of what you have written, you never seem to have much awareness of how unusual your opinions are. Most people I have come across who write about ESL seem to believe that copying first language learning is exactly what to do, and that children learn very well, not by a 15 year period of osmosis. Many people also feel quite free to make general attacks on anyone who dares to even mention "prescriptive grammar", in whatever sense.

[stephen]

Hi everyone,

Interesting thread. If I can go off on a bit of tangent, isn't all classroom language taught in an EFL classroom prescriptive? We (or the textbook writers) have afterall selected it at the expense of other alternative linguistic items; therefore, it is being prescribed as a correct model to our students.

For me, the biggest, problem with most textbooks is in fact their focus on a pescriptive set of grammatical items rather than focusing on linguistic functions or objectives (eg. agreeing, comparing, contrasting, stating probability.) This is because, for a lot of these, we frequently (in our own spoken English) use lexical phrases rather than discrete grammar rules. An undue focus on grammatical rather than lexical items tends to produce students who do exceptionally well on grammar tests but have a shocking level of oral fluency.

In my opinion, whether grammar is prescriptive is not so important, as the balance between grammar and lexical items. The key issue is what grammar and lexical items best meet student's needs. Other correct language can be acknowledged as such whilst the reasons for its unsuitability can be pointed out. For example, It should be explained that whilst "It's s**t" is used in English, "I'm not keen on it would be better".

While descriptive grammarians tells us that any form of grammar naturally used by native speakers is correct, this does not imply that we should be teaching our students to use all of them. They should be taught to use English based upon the way they will need to comunicate in English. This implies that as classroom teachers we must be prescriptive.

Well, that's pretty much all I have to say.

Cheers
Stephen

[Metamorfose]

Galician (a dialect of Portugeese)

I don't want to pull off the thread, but just for the sake of information...Galician and Portuguese were the very same language in the past, so how can one define one dialect and the other a language?

José

[Stephen Jones]

It is impossible for a language to have only one dialect. It must have at least two or none at all.

There is a hierarchy here. The normal hierarchy is language family/sub-family/language/dialect. You can have sub-sub-fanilys and there are languages, such as basque which are have no other members of the family.

Where the confusion arises is when one dialect is considered the standard, or when the name of the language is the same as the name of one of its dialects. People then tend to think that the dialect with the same name as the language is somehow superior or higher up in the hierarchy than other dialects.

I don't know too much about Portuguese but I believe that there are at least three main dialects; Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese Portuguese and Galicain Portuguese (it is quite possible that in fact there is a gradual shift form the north of Portugal through Galicia and that the idea of two clearly separate dialects is the result of separate standarizations by the respective academies, but that is another matter). Each of these three varieties is mutually intelligible (if they weren't they would be separate languages and not separate dialects) and each has morphological, lexical and phonologiical differences.

To repeat: - the fact that the language is called Portuguese and not Galician does not mean that the variety spoken in Lisbon is a language and that spoken in Vigo a dialect. Equally the fact that the commonly accepted name for the language spoken in Perpignan, Barcelona and Alacant is Catalan does not mean that in Valencia they speak a dialect and in Barcelona a language. Indded in the 15th century the name for the language was more commonly Valencian but the language was still the same. This was clearly realized by many Catalan politicians who, in reply to the Valencian Parliaments claim that the official language was Valencian, suggested that Catalonia should change the name of their official language to Valencian also to outsmart the linguistic separatists.

[Metamorfose]

It is impossible for a language to have only one dialect. It must have at least two or none at all.

And no one said so

Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese Portuguese and Galicain Portuguese

To avoid the cacophony they don't call it Portuguese Portuguese but rather Continental Portuguese. For historic resons Galician is considered a different language, not a dialect of Portuguese (Galicia or Galiza doesn't belong to the CPLP - The Communite of the Portuguese-speaking Countries.) and again just because they're alike, are they the same language?

The Galician-Portuguese language

When Christians started to reconquer the peninsula in the XIth century, the Arabs were expelled to the South, where the contact between Arabic and Latin created the Mozarabic dialects. Galician-Portuguese became the spoken and written language of Lusitania. The first regional official documents and literary texts that were not in Latin were written in Galician-Portuguese. These included the Cancioneiros (collections of medieval poems) da Ajuda, da Vaticana and Colocci-Brancutti , now in Lisbon's National Library.

As the Christians advanced southward, the northern dialects interacted with the Mozarabic dialects of the South, producing a Portuguese which was different from the Galician-Portuguese. The separation between the Galician and Portuguese languages, which began with Portugal's independence in 1185, was consolidated after the Moors were expelled in 1249, and also by the defeat in 1385 of the Castilians, who sought unsuccessfully to conquer Portugal. The literary prose in Portuguese appeared in the 14th century, with Crónica Geral de Espanha (1344), and Livro de Linhagens (Book of Lineages), by Dom Pedro, Count of Barcelona.

from: http://www.linguaportuguesa.ufrn.br/english.html

I agree with you that a language coincides with the name of a country is not necessarily the language and the other forms only a dialect, I only wanted to point out that Galician and Portuguese were one simple language in the past, they got apart, it wasn't like Latin which derivated the other Romance languages.

In the end it's only a controversal matter that is somehow funny to dicuss


José
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