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Experiential Skills for Future Grammar Teachers: Feedback from the ESL Classroom
1. FGTs must be able to work from real data, making accurate guesses about what S's intended to say and why they may have used the forms that they did, and determine what could be done to affect students' systems.
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I was lucky in high school in that I had one English teacher who cared
deeply about grammar and who, in the short time she taught me (she became
sick, I believe, and did not even teach an entire semester), instilled in
me a love of grammar. I was similar to most American college graduates,
also, in the sense that although I had reasonably good grammar myself, I
had had almost no discreet grammar taught to me outside of what I had
learned indirectly by studying other languages.
So it was that, like other teachers, on my first day of teaching, some of
my students had had seven to ten years MORE of grammar instruction than I
had, and my only advantage was being a native speaker. Needless to say,
the explanations I gave to them, on demand, were sometimes inaccurate,
unclear to them, inappropriate, and even in a different language than what
they were used to. It was a frustrating experience, especially for them,
but also for me, because I knew even then how sorely I was lacking. And my
MA program, fairly typically, did not change that much.
My first full-time professional experience was in Korea, where I remember
trying in vain to explain to intelligent professional Koreans, why very few
English sentences begin with "In my case," or "As for me..." My Korean
students would use these expressions so much that one day I fairly exploded
and tried to unravel it, on the spot, in class. It turns out that it's a
fairly complicated story, since overt topicalization allows Korean to be
more subtle in its main sentences, whereas understood topicalization, as we
have in English, makes our language blunt in a way that is hard to see if
you've been speaking it all your life, as I had. I was somewhat set back by
the profound implications of a fairly simple habit: how was one to teach a
Korean speaker to change a system that included overt topicalization? Of
course, those students on that day learned to avoid those expressions, for
the time being, just to keep me at bay. But the problem persisted, and I
continued to pay attention to problems that seemed to stem from deeply
different grammatical priorities that existed in each language.
A wave of inductive teaching came over the land, and I noticed that some
teachers used it to justify not having to explain these things at all:
after all, no one ever explains rules to a native speaker baby. The adult
students that I taught, both in Korea and the US, continued to demand
explanations, and I myself continued to try to make mine more accurate.
But the inductive approach had its appeal: why describe rules, when one can
clearly see that they are often broken? Why not direct the learner's
attention to meaningful communicative situations where he/she is forced to
USE what he/she knows and encounter more English in an interactive,
meaningful framework?
I don't think this question has ever been answered, and it's really a
question of how best to use one's time. For the simple truth is that most
learning IS inductive, and yet adults continue to need and demand
reasonable explanations of how things are ordered and formed in a language.
So the teacher, regardless of the situation he/she finds himself/herself
in, will be balancing these tendencies regardless. But there are a number
of reasons that a good teacher will be better if he/she can more accurately
analyze the grammatical processes of the student.
First, all communication, even between two native speakers, involves a
fair amount of assumption and guessing about the intent of the speakers.
With NNSs, the amount of guessing is naturally greater. It is often quite
difficult to find out what our students are trying to say. For example, on
a recent paper about the effects of the television program "The Simpsons,"
a student wrote the following:
So, I believable some of those programs will influence children's behavior,
such as cartoon "the Simpsons," Because this cartoon includes many
characters with different colors.
I tend to read for meaning first, and thus was most quickly struck by the
word "colors," and the question of whether this was some kind of racial
comment, which it probably wasn't. So there is some kind of word choice
problem which is impeding meaning, which is, strictly speaking, not grammar
(the question remains: how do we find out what the student really meant,
and how do we help the student clear up the confusion? -but these are the
least of our worries). Second, the fussy grammarian in me immediately
picks up on the misplaced "such as" clause, the capital B in "because," and
the noun form of the word "believe" (where could this have come from?)...
but after correcting ALL of these relatively minor infractions, I'm left with
one final problem: that, to me,
the cause and effect clauses are not clearly connected; that, no matter the
intent or meaning of the expression involving the characters, I don't
really see a REASON that the program would influence children's behavior.
And yet, I know that there is a reason in there somewhere. How can I
explain THIS to the student? Finally, in a given evening of paper grading,
I have perhaps 2000 sentences of this nature, each providing challenges and
opportunities to teach.
How should I set my priorities? What should I say, and when?
Through this example I have shown that there is indeed a lot of analytical
practice that could go into the practice of helping our students
communicate more clearly, and I think that, regardless of our orientation
on the inductive/deductive spectrum, we all would want to be able to do
this better. I remember vividly one day when I was called to the police
station of the small town I was living in, because a fairly high-level student
of mine had lost his passport and was unable to explain to the police
effectively what had happened...not that I knew
his language, but I was much better able to interpret what he was saying
than they were, and it was mostly due to the grammatical density of his
expressions.
Through practice, we become better at interpretation, and unraveling the
intent of the speaker/writer. In fact, we sometimes lose sight of the fact
that what we have unraveled would be completely opaque to the novice NS;
that, in fact, some of what our students write/say begins to sound normal to
us, due to our own environment as teachers (this, I think, is more crucial to
the EFL teacher, who is often learning or fluent in the local language).
This brings me to my second point, which is that we should always be able
to interpret from the eyes of the novice NS, and give our students accurate
assessment of the degree to which what they have produced is opaque to the
average NS. WHY would they be unable to communicate, in a NS environment,
using that kind of grammar? Why would the average novice NS have no idea
what they meant? In what ways has their grammar impeded their meaning?
Another point is that certain grammatical errors do impede meaning more
than others. There is a definite hierarchy of importance, and learners are
naturally aware that some problems are more urgent than others. The
teacher must order the priorities, and by example direct the learner's
attention to the most urgent of them. An example of this problem is verb
tenses, which attract possibly undue attention from native grammar teachers
and interviewers, but which speakers of some languages find difficult to
attach any importance to whatsoever, since their languages manage perfectly
well without them. "A/the" is a problem that is almost universally
regarded as minor, yet the near-fluent will go to great lengths to master
it, knowing by hard experience that failure to do so will impede meaning in
some subtle but crucial ways. Even in a communicative situation the
teacher must prioritize and decide how best to spend time.
Finally, the veteran teacher eventually directs attention toward the
student's system. It does little good to make any correction at all, if
the student fails to apply any effort to using the information in more than
the immediate situation. On the other hand, students become ready to learn
and acquire; they make that known; they fix their systems when given
appropriate feedback. The teacher must provoke the appropriate changes, at
the same time holding the student accountable for making changes that will
show and hold steady in the future; in other words, the teacher must make
this kind of successful learning possible. We are kidding ourselves, if we
believe that by simply putting the student in enough communicative
situations, that student will absorb fluent English by osmosis.
The Pedagogical Grammar teacher has the unique opportunity to prepare the
new teacher for the dilemmas of the classroom. The PG teacher should not
have to feel responsible for making sure MATESOL students understand the
grammar of the language, grasp the abstract structure of language, or
understand the fundamentals of teaching. It may be true that most teachers
will learn more on the job than they could possibly hope to be trained for,
but PG teachers, given a more complete picture of the skills that will be
required of their students in the future, will presumably be in a better position,
when planning their classes and making curricular decisions, to make their
classes more practical and meaningful for the students whose careers they
affect so strongly. We hope these pages will be of service to you.
-TL
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The above page is in progress. Contributions are welcome (click here).
*Comments of graduate students, novice and veteran teachers, and employers are collected in full on their own page and are anonymous here.
Major contributors to this page:
TL-Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIU-Carbondale, Carbondale IL USA.
Last updated 1-10-99
River Li, by Jim Leverett
Page made and maintained by
Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
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