"C'mon Present Perfect Continuous - submit!" Image: icantcu
The image above could be a little representative of how some learners feel about grammar in a second language (or even their first language!), but in a lot of ways I think "grapple" is also a good way to describe many teachers' mixed feelings about the role of grammar teaching in their overall instructional approach.
I got to thinking about this issue of grammar recently (okay, when do most teachers not ponder, wonder and wander on the issue of grammar teaching?) when reading Scott Thornbury's recent post about G is for Grammar McNuggets, but also as a result of thinking my way through some of the ways I handle (and soon intend to handle, given I am due back in classroom settings next week) emergent language during more or less unplugged lessons. I also found myself thinking about the way I had approached grammar in the specific strand of Boost! dedicated to this area.
In the midst of all these ruminations, I suddenly found myself putting on the learner's boots again, and out of the blue the example of "Wes" (in a longitudinal study by Schmidt, I think it was) came to mind. Wes was a fairly prominent example of a learner who Krashen might have termed a chronic under-user of the monitor... he was highly experimental, not much at all concerned with grammatical accuracy, and generally an enormous risk-taker during his communicative forays with native speakers.
This then turned my mind to my own experience as a second language learner, during my university days when I was learning Swedish.
And that's when a problem flag went up...
You see, I was taught Swedish in a bit of an old fashioned combination of the grammar translation and audio-lingual methods - at least, for most of the first year. I was drilled in grammar, in rather disproportionate amounts compared to the amount of accessible vocabulary I had at my disposal. I couldn't explain (in any sort of depth) how I felt about a movie, but I could reel off several perfect (and completely decontextualised) sentences using the past perfect passive. Our Australian Swedish instructor was a bit of a grammar fiend (though a really friendly and entertaining one) while the native Swedish instructors tended to avoid much in the way of grammar teaching and really worked on encouraging us to communicate. Which we tried our very best to avoid doing...
This is not unlike the situation we see with English language learners (and teachers) in many contexts today, and it is the sort of approach I myself have learned to dislike using in my classroom, no doubt like a lot of the other teachers out there reading this blog.
But the problem is... that method actually worked. For me, anyway. And for several other classmates, too.
After a couple of years of learning Swedish, and despite some huge holes in my vocabulary and communicative confidence, I had really strong grammar skills. The Swedes I met and talked to were invariably impressed -- partly because someone other than a Swede would bother to learn Swedish! -- but also because, as they often put it, my spoken and written Swedish came across as very "clean". Accurate. Not fluent yet error-ridden like the Swedish produced by exchange students who had spent a year there in Sweden, or some of the longer-term migrants.
And when I eventually moved to Sweden to live there for a year, I found the language sort of "fell" onto those bones the grammar had already formed. I used to think of it as flesh forming on and around a skeleton that was comprehensive and ready to support muscles and sinews. New words and expressions were easily sorted and put to use, based on that instinctive awareness about the grammar. With some tweaking and stumbles here and there, of course, but it was still a far cry from the Swedish being produced by the "immersion" based exchange students, which seemed to fly out and about in all sorts of weird chunks, often incomprehensible without further probing from the native speakers they were talking to.
But here's the thing that sort of bothers me the most... A close Swedish friend once told me that when I spoke or wrote Swedish, despite some holes and mistakes with some vocabulary here and there, I sounded educated. Proper. Well-spoken. Whereas some other speakers of Swedish (picking it up as they went by living in the context, whether migrant or visiting student) sounded, well - a little... dumb.
A little... dumb. Why?
According to my friend, these people did not use very accurate grammar when they spoke, and it made them sound less educated or less intelligent. He was remorseful and embarrassed as he admitted this impression, but said there it was. As he put it, these users of Swedish often managed to come across as comical, but very often in situations where they really weren't trying to be funny, and the "survivors" were the ones who didn't mind sounding funny even if they didn't intend to sound funny in front of people they hardly knew.
Now, we as teachers do not (I hope!) allow ourselves to form this impression of learners who can't yet speak English with perfect or even mildly accurate grammar. Right?
But what about other native speakers out there in the general community? When a foreigner says to them "Weekend... I go beach!" is it not at least partially true that at least some of these native speakers draw conclusions and make instinctive assumptions about a person who speaks like this (and not always the most obvious or kind one, namely: this person is a second language speaker!)?
I mean, it's all well and good for us as teachers to say "Good job, Tom - yes, you're going to the beach this weekend. Good on you! You're really communicating. I understand you!" when the average native speaker on the street might react with "that's nice..." (thinking "yes, go to beach, Tarzan meet, Jane like too banana!").
And is it not that very impression and feeling that many second language speakers most dread causing (and experiencing)? Schmidt's Wes not included, of course...
Could this account -- at least in part -- for some learners' rigid determination to master grammar, perhaps at all costs? And for those that don't intend or need to use English in real communicative settings, the looming shadow of the grammar-based school tests provides the rest of the impetus?
Essentially, do we have a right to deprive them of a classroom approach that really emphasises grammatical competence -- perhaps even at the expense of certain other aspects of language development -- if that's what they really want and that's what results in better social reactions from the general population of native speakers of the language?
I don't know...
What I do know is that I may need to question and probe my own feelings and presumptions about the way grammar is perceived and taught in my general teaching approach. Beyond all the "science" and political correctness about what is or isn't the most appropriate way to handle grammar, I need to remind myself that certain old-style attitudes and methods to grammar not only work (in some or many cases), but also work towards goals many learners really aspire to.
In the end, I'll probably settle (remembering some of those classmates from the Swedish class who loathed the grammar teaching and could never really seem to get a grip on it) for a sliding spot somewhere in the middle.
And continue to grapple with grammar...
:-)
