Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Approaches to English Grammar

Fall 2006

Week 13; Answers

Thornbury (1999) Chapter 10: How NOT to teach grammar, pp. 151-155.

1. What are some of the main problems of the sample lesson plan in this chapter?

It's hard to see what isn't a problem in this lesson plan or in this lesson. Not only is there no context given, but even the contrastive forms are not really explained. To top it all off he winds up to doing something totally unrelated as a closing activity. Just don't see anything good in this activity.

2. Of the six rules he gives us which do you think is the most useful? Why?

The rule of Context

The rule of Use

The rule of Economy

The rule of Relevance

The rule of Nurture

The rule of Appropriacy

The one rule which I think we can benefit from the most and really which Thornbury doesn't mention very much in this book itself is the rule of nurture. This is an extremely important point to focus on. Basically means that we need to put students in situations where they can and hopefully will learn, but forcing learning or what we think will wind up being learning is often a huge mistake.

3. Of the six rules he gives us which do you think is the least useful? Why?

From the list of rules he gives us I think the rule of relevance is possibly important but also virtually impossible to implement in the way he describes it. In classes with any students we simply won't know exactly what grammar problems they all face. It is hard to know exactly what they know and don`t know. But we surely should try Even taking this idea into consideration the specific area of grammar may have different aspects, some of which the students will have somewhat come to terms with the others which they have problems with. I honestly don't think it is possible to teach them only the areas that they might have difficulty with. Delving deeper into this we also the need to rethink the idea of teaching. It grammar is everywhere and our focus is on having students practice grammar for usage then obviously it is quite impossible for them to only practice things that they don't know. So, in thinking about this rule we need to really think deeper about grammar and grammar teaching.

4. What are some of the basic and most important conclusions we can draw from all this?

I think the most important conclusion we can draw from this is that grammar teaching is relatively easy but actually getting our students to learn grammar is hard and may not involve actual teaching in a more traditional sense. One thing about this book and Thornbury's approach in general is it seems to be the contradictory. He gives us things like the rule of nurture, but he frames that in a rule-based system that focuses on different ways of actually teaching. I think we need to go beyond the idea of teaching and really try to focus on the idea of exposing students to situations where they can learn and provide them with effective feedback so that they can begin to self-evaluate their own learning and get a feel for both how the language works and for what they themselves are doing with that language.

In important way of doing this, again which Thornbury doesn't necessarily mention because he seems to be too fixated on preserving tradition, is through some simple ideas from the lexical approach. The idea of usage is extremely important especially when we think about patterns. The more grammar we actually trying to teach our students more possibilities they have for making mistakes. The teaching of unanalyzed chunks in highly contextualize situations make sense, particularly when we're trying to get our students to develop intuitions about grammaticality or acceptability within English.

Lewis (1997) Chapter 9: Language content, pp. 177-191.

5. Which of the nine areas deserving more attention did you find most useful?

Modality

Vague language

Polyword phrases

Discourse-organizing language

Complex noun phrases

Event-reporting verbs

Events described in double clause sentences

Responding and initiating

Lexical patterns

The basic idea here is that for all of us think these things which we can but don't teach often enough. Many of them seem like strange considerations in the classroom and maybe we are not even sure about how we'd go about doing them. Hopefully through the time we've spent in this course I managed to show you that such concerns are really part of language and that we can really help our students by drawing their attention to exactly these times of things, because they are grammatical phenomenon and not just lexical phenomenon. At the same time, however, we need to worry about testing and assessment. It's nice to know these things and try to get our students into them but at the same time they are not necessarily going to be on the test. Student might therefore become somewhat upset. Again, as we discussed earlier, we might be doing things that don't necessarily fit the students, or their parents assumptions about what is going to happen or what should have in the class. This can be a problem, but our role as responsible teachers is to try to teach our students as best we can and sometimes this means shaking the system a bit.

6. How accurately did they describe elements of your own teaching?

The basic idea here was that, as described above, I think that discussing each of these nine areas Lewis does a surprisingly good job of pinpointing what teachers do and often don't do in relation to teaching grammar.

7. What does Lewis mean by `real English` ?

By `real English` Lewis means the English not necessarily that native speakers are going to use but the English that language learners need to and can use. This may or may not need to vary from an actual native speaker usage. An important aspect of this possibility. Lewis quite correctly mentions that knowing whether a particular structure is possible English is not nearly as important as knowing whether it is probable. And of course probability is tremendously variable. It will depend on level, purpose, audience and a whole different range of other determinants. This is the trick. We need to understand what is necessary and probable for our students in the English that they are going to have to produce and understand in the future.

The bottom line is that English is an international language and as such people learn English for a tremendous variety of different purposes. These different purposes bring them into different types of contact with different types of people as well as very different subject areas which they need to be able to use English in and for. The reality of the situation is that most English users are not native speakers and that many of these English users will not need to use English in any way, shape, or form similar to that of native speakers. That is real English.

8. What conclusions can be drawn from this section on `real English`?

If we look generally at the section on real English we find that Lewis is actually advocating something quite close to what we often find in ESP or English for Specific Purposes. At the same time it also overlaps with what has been found in bilingual research about actual language usage. The bottom line is that people probably (of course there are exceptions) rarely use their second language in the same way they use the first. They don't talk to the same people using that language, they don't talk for the same purposes, and the language involves quite different content areas that might be expected for first language use. The basic argument is that most students probably don't actually need any general English proficiency. They need English which focuses on specific content areas which they will need in the future. Now, when dealing with younger children obviously it is hard to use in ESP approach, but certain concessions can be made.

One of the advantages of `thinking` in ESP terms is that it supplies both the teacher and the learner with attainable goals. A main problem with generalized English is that the goals associated with that are not only vague but also generally unattainable. At some point we as English teachers need to concede the fact that we are not trying to turn our students into native speakers of English. At best we're trying to make them functional users of English in this means being able to describe the particular functions in which they need to have proficiency and also the degree of proficiency they need to survive in that function. These are extremely important points, particularly from a lexical point of view because as we find by looking at different functions, different functions actually rely on different linguistic structures and patterns. To get our students to survive in these functions we need to draw their attention to the specific patterns and structures of those functions.