Rules, Patterns, Words and Doubts

A continuation of Rules, Patterns, Words and Quotes and What I Learnt About Rules, Patterns and Words, obviously all about the quite wrong but quite interesting book of the same name. This will probably only be of interest to those who have read the book, but it could also serve as an example of another motivation for having a blog for those who haven’t been persuaded by Karenne’s blog carnival or Burcu’s series on sharing. This might not be much of a blog post, but having the idea of writing one sure made reading the book more motivating, interesting and memorable!

Anyway, here goes:

Quotes and doubts

“Learning is a complex developmental process; it is tempting to think that we can offer a quick fix, but it is a temptation we should resist” pg 15

True, but it is possible to think of almost everything he supports, such as teaching aspect rather than tense and teaching collocations rather than expecting students to pick them up as kinds of quick fix

“We saw in the first chapter that learners go through a long period in which something is known consciously, but is not part of spontaneous language production. This seems to be particularly true of the systems of orientation” pg 36.

Orientation means tenses etc. This seems far from true to me- what about pronunciation of individual sounds, recognizing linked speech, false friends, adverb word order etc etc.

“Since [students] have already attempted to engage in those meanings [that are in the text] for themselves [in an earlier speaking activity] they will be sensitive to the way the meanings are expressed in the text” pg 58.

This seems like complete bollocks to me (to use my best academic English). In my experience as a teacher and language learner, if students have been talking about the topic before they will be more focussed on the meaning of the text and therefore will ignore the language with which it is expressed at both a conscious and unconscious level. I don’t have any research to back that up, but then he doesn’t state any in this book either (so there yah boo!)

“We have outlined a teaching sequence which begins with a communicative task, and have argued that a procedure that starts with a focus on form will not actually help learners to communicate effectively and will mean that they are concerned with form either than with meaning, and constructing sentences rather than achieving a communicative objective” pg 68

This is true for some classes and students, but most people’s main objection to PPP is that the students don’t usually produce the target language in the final Production stage, hence disproving this point. Also, quite a lot of the tasks in this book start with comprehension of a listening or reading text before examining the language and then practicing it, which as far as I can see “starts with a focus on form” just as much as the discovery version of PPP.

“One way of helping learners with phrases- polywords, frames and patterns- is to organise them into meaningful groups. The functional syllabuses of the 1970s offer useful ways of organising phrases under functional headings” pg 161

If they are so useful, why did the functional approach virtually die out??

“For an elementary or intermediate learner, one of the most valuable skills they can acquire is the ability to make the most of the little language they have, the ability to exploit their limited language to realise a wide range of meanings” pg 113.

Yes, but:

- They can’t reach the next level just by doing this

- If they only have this in class, they are not likely to be open to error correction, focus on form, being forced to be ambitious with language use etc when they reach Advanced 10 years later

- They can just as easily do this outside class with a diary, study group, working holiday etc

- Depending on the country, personality etc, quite a few students of that level can already do this adequately

“learners must learn to make choices from a range of possibilities. To enable them to do this we need to introduce the forms rapidly and encourage learners to look carefully at verb forms in context. We should therefore move on rapidly to the uses of the present tenses for future and the introduction of past tense forms” pg 114.

This was the third place I wrote “crap” in big letters in this book, but I slightly overreacted (overreacted, me??) If students are getting a lot of exposure to English outside the classroom, especially by reading or real communication, one of our main roles is to make them aware of a lot of that language that they will come across, and they will decide for themselves which forms they want to experiment with, which they are just happy they now understand the subtle meanings of, which are irrelevant and they will forget etc. Even for those students, though, another thing we can provide that they won’t get outside is intensive spoken practice of one particular point so that they can get their heads and lips round the language and start to associate it with one particular situation, type of communication etc. Students who aren’t getting a lot of exposure to English outside, in contrast, have nothing to gain from moving through the grammar quickly. For one thing, a lot of them already had that at school during their preparation for university entrance tests etc, and if it had worked we wouldn’t be teaching them. For another, there is no point being able to choose between the Present Perfect and Simple Past if you can’t remember or pronounce the irregular forms of either yet or produce the right kind of time clauses with them without pause for thought. I learnt the three past tenses in Spanish by doing them one at a time, using them in every possible situation and then putting them on the back burner until I had mastery of at least the form of the next one on my list. Only then did I start to experiment with mixing them up, and very successful it was too. No surprise there, as all the evidence on interlanguage suggests that all students naturally do the same thing by over generalising etc. There seems little point trying to shortcut this by jumping ahead to concentrating on choosing generally by working on aspect.

“These activities will, however, make students aware of the use of these tense forms and will make them more sensitive to the forms when they meet them in future input” pg 115

Yes, but… How many of those many forms can they be more sensitive to at a time??

“very frequently the subject of says is it, as in: it says on his T-shirt…; it says here…; it says somewhere…” pg 141

But is this a classic example of a form revealed by a corpus of native speakers that we were right to never teach our students because we were accidentally teaching English as an International Language (sometimes known as All the World Speaking Headway English Except Native Speakers) all along?

“As far as possible in such exercises we should use examples which are familiar to the learners, examples taken from the texts that they have already studied” pg 156

This was the third time I wrote “crap”. It could theoretically be useful, especially if they remember the text well and the sentences are very good examples in other ways. Generally, though:

- Even if the sentence is a nearly perfect example, and interesting, motivating and memorable to boot, surely it could be made absolutely perfect by changing it at least a little from the form it was originally in

- If they have been reading the way we want them to, they shouldn’t remember every sentence at all

- Do we want them mining the same texts over and over, or do we want them to read as widely as possible?

- This is the perfect excuse to bring a new reading text into class, so why use an old one?

- You could waste a lot of time trying to remember the context of the old text

- What about the students who missed that lesson or have the worst memories? Surely these are the students who you least want to be putting at a further disadvantage when introducing a new point

Continuing from that point:

“It is possible that they will detract from the main point, but, on the other hand, learners are much more likely to recall a citation that has a real meaning for them than a decontextualized example which is made up simply to illustrate a language point” pg 167

Again, no proof given. And who is to say that having seen it in the textbook makes it have “real meaning for them”, more than, for example, a true sentence the teacher has created about themselves, someone in the class, or something in the news- let alone a memorable and interesting joke, quote or famous line from a song or movie?

“in the short term, complex systems like tense are not affected at all, even by careful teaching” pg 212

While there is obviously some truth in this, it is an exaggeration. While students might not produce the new form more accurately in real time communication soon after classroom presentation and/ or practice, there are likely to be the following positive effects:

- If there is a breakdown in communication, they can pause, think back on their grammar lessons and try again. This is also true for pronunciation points like individual sounds and tones in tonal languages. In a similar way, they are more likely after studying a tense to spot when they have made a mistake and to know whether it will have led to a breakdown in communication and therefore whether it is worth going back and correcting themselves.

- They are at least a little more likely to get right when writing, which is just as important to some of our students as speaking and could lead to useful practice to help them eventually reach the point of being able to produce it quickly and accurately when speaking

- They are likely to try and use it more often, often even using it when the previous form they were using would have been a better choice. This is well established as a necessary step in the interlanguage of both native speaking children and L2 learners.

- They are more likely to notice it from then on, which is also generally considered to be a vital stage and is also one that teaching is clearly useful for

- It can help individual students decide on their own particular problems and priorities

The other thing is that I can’t see how that is any less true for things he claims are more teachable like verb patterns and adverb word order.

He seems to be saying that points like tenses need to be partly replaced by more work on phrase building, and yet describes the best teaching method for tenses etc as needing “long exposure and constant teacher support”

Conclusion/ half- arsed attempt at a review coming up soon

Tags: Quotes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 7:15 am and is filed under Alternative teaching techniques, Collocations, Functional language, Grammar, Grammar books, Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA, PPP (Presentation practice production), TBA (Task Based Approach), Teaching methods and methodologies, Test teach test, Vocabulary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.