LEARNING GRAMMAR (Cameron, chapter 5)

A place for grammar

We must remember that grammar is more than the lists of labels and rules found in books.
Grammar is closely tied into meaning and use of language, and is inter-connected with
vocabulary. There are five points to take into account:

- Grammar is necessary to express precise meanings in discourse.

- Grammar ties closely into vocabulary in learning and using the foreign language.

- Grammar learning can evolve from the learning of chunks of language.

- Talking about something meaningful with the child can be a useful way to introduce new
grammar.

- Grammar can be taught without technical labels.

Different meanings of grammar

The word grammar is often used to refer to the structure or system of a particular language. But
it is also used to refer to the way that system is described by linguists, and to the internal mental
representation of the language that an individual has built up.

A language does not really exist as an object or entity, separate from people. A language is
constantly changing, it’s dynamic. To teach a language to non-native speakers, we need to fix it
so that we can understand it as a more static set of ways of talking, and break it into bits to offer
to learners. Breaking a language into word-sized bits produces “vocabulary”, finding patterns in
how words are put together produces “grammar”. These patterns are often called “rules”, but we
should notice that patterns are rules in so far as they describe what people usually do.

Theoretical and pedagogic grammars

Chomskyan linguists aim to describe language as it is internalised in the mind, rather than as it
is produced by speakers. Their main goal is to explore, and unify, on a theoretical level,
similarities in syntax across all languages. This is called generative grammar. Hallidayan
linguists view language as a tool for expressing meaning, and so they categorise language in
terms of how meaning is expressed, and produce functional grammars. Now that computers can
hold very large samples of a language, a new generation of “corpus linguists” are producing
grammars based on real data about frequency and patterns of use.
These various descriptive grammars need to be adapted with learning and teaching in mind if
they are to be used in the classroom. Such adapted and adjusted grammars are known as
pedagogical grammars. Pedagogical grammars are explicit descriptions of patterns in a
language, presented in ways that are helpful to teachers and to learners.

Internal grammars

Learners will meet pedagogical grammar either directly through a book or indirectly through
lessons. This grammar is different from what any individual learner actually learns about the
patterns of the language: his or her internal grammar of the language. Every learner’s internal
grammar is different from every other’s because each has a unique learning experience.
Internal grammar is sometimes referred to as interlanguage or as linguistic competence.

Development of the internal grammar

In the beginning stages, learners seem to use words or chunks strung together to get their
meaning across, with little attention paid to grammar. Our brains work always with a limited
amount of attentional capacity that is available to concentrate on getting a task achieved. When
communicating an idea or message through the foreign language, finding the right words takes
up attention early on, but once those words are well known, using them takes up less capacity,
and attention is freed for grammar. But paying attention to grammatical features is not
something that happens automatically, and this is why teaching is necessary.

Children somehow work out how to use the language and then try out their hypotheses in
saying things, amending them when they hear alternative versions. This is called hypothesis
testing. Children sometimes come up with creative utterances (e.g. tookened) that they can
never have heard anyone say, and these forms will change to the conventional forms (e.g. took)
as they get more input. Changes can be steady and continuous, or can involve more dramatic
shifts as whole sections are re-organised in the light of new information, which is called
restructuring.

Constructing hypotheses about the foreign language is much more difficult than for the first
language, simply because the learner has relatively little data to work on. When data is limited,
learners are more likely to use the first language to fill the gaps. Hence, learners assume that
the foreign language grammar works like the first language grammar. Learners instinctively
listen out for cues to meaning in word order or word form that work for them in the first
language, and they may miss cues that the foreign language offers. If the foreign language cues
are nor particularly obvious, the probability of them being noticed are used is even smaller.
A learning-centred approach to teaching grammar: background

Teaching grammar as explicit rules

Underlying traditional grammar-translation methodology is the notion that language learning is

the accumulation of mastered rules of the grammar. Rules are introduced one-by-one, explicitly,
to the learners. Learners are expected to learn the rules and to practise using the rules to
construct sentences. After more practice, the assumption is that the rules get to be used
automatically. The structures or rules are sorted into a sequence, assumed to progress from
“easy” to “difficult”. This “building block sequencing” is difficult for younger children. Grammar
grows like a plant, watered by meaningful language use. Children notice patterns as they make
sense of the world around them and it may be fruitful to make use of curiosity and
pattern-noticing in foreign language learning.

No grammar needed

The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach stated that learners would learn the
language by using it to communicate with others. The process of foreign language learning was
supposed to resemble first language acquisition, where it all just happens without any direct or
explicit teaching. The importance of grammar teaching suffered a downgrading. A form of CLT is
the Total Physical Response (TRP) method. Students listen to commands in the foreign
language and respond only through movement and action. The difficulty of the input is gradually
increased and eventually students take over the teacher’s role and give commands in the
foreign language.

Focus on form

Second language learning could follow the same route as first language acquisition. But in
grammar, children do not develop the same levels of accuracy as native speakers and, without
attention to the form of the language, problems with basic structures continue. Focusing on
meaning is not enough. Attention to form is vital and learners need to be helped to notice the
grammatical patterns of the foreign language, before they can make those patterns part of their
internal grammar. Batsone helpfully brings some of these ideas together in a suggested
sequencing of grammar learning activities around particular patterns or structures:

(re) noticing

(re) structuring

proceduralizing
Noticing is an active process in which learners become aware of the structure, notice
connections between form and meaning, but do not themselves manipulate language.

Structuring involves bringing the new grammar pattern into the learner’s internal grammar and, if
necessary, recognising the internal grammar. Structuring usually requires controlled practice
around form and meanings, and the learner must be actively involved in constructing language
to convey precise meaning, thus perhaps prompting further noticing at a more detailed level.

Proceduralisation is the stage of making the new grammar ready for instant and fluent use in
communication, and requires practice in choosing and using the form to express meaning.
Learners must pay attention to grammar as well as effective communication. By gradually
adjusting task pressures, teachers can help push proceduralisation forward.

Principles for learning-centred grammar teaching

1. The need for grammar: attention to form is necessary to learn accurately. Form-focused
instruction is particularly relevant for those features of the foreign language that are
different from the first language or are not very noticeable.

2. Potential conflict between meaning and grammar: if learners’ attention is directed to

expressing meaning, they may neglect attention to accuracy and precision.

3. Importance of attention in the learning process: teaching can help learners notice and
attend to features of grammar in the target language.

4. Learning grammar as the development of internal grammar: grammar learning can work
outwards from participation in discourse, from vocabulary and from learnt chunks.
Learners’ errors can give teachers useful information about their learning processes and
their internal grammars.

5. The role of explicit teaching of grammar rules: teaching grammar explicitly requires the
learner to think about language in very abstract, formal ways. Children can master
metalanguage if it is well taught.

Teaching techniques for supporting grammar learning

Working from discourse to grammar

Many types of discourse that occur in young learner classrooms have grammatical patterns that
occur naturally, but that can be exploited for grammatical teaching. The language of classroom
management can thus act as a meaningful discourse context within which certain patterns arise
regularly and help with building the internal grammar.

Conversations with individual children can be very powerful for language development, because
teachers can pick up exactly on what an individual child needs to know next to talk about what
interests him or her. If a child volunteers something, the teacher can respond in the foreign
language, offering a fuller or more correct way of saying it. This is called corrective feedback.
Talk with children can also offer incidental focusing on form.

Guided noticing activities

- Listen and notice: pupils listen to sentences or to a connected piece of talk and complete
a table or grid using what they hear.

- Presentation of new language with puppets: the teacher can construct a dialogue with a
story-line that uses a “repetition plus contrast” pattern to be played out by puppets.

Language practice activities that offer structuring activities

- Questionnaires, surveys and quizzes: the teacher needs to plan which language forms
the students will be encouraged to use. Preparation and rehearsal of the questions is
necessary to ensure accuracy, and the activity must be managed so that the questions
are asked in full each time.

- Information gap activities: children work in pairs. Each has a calendar covering the same
month but with different entries. Without looking, they have to find a time when they are
both free and decide what they want to do.

- Helping hands: children draw round their hands and cut out the hand shape. On each
finger, they write one sentence describing something they do to help at home.

- Drills and chants: repetition drills, in which the children repeat what the teacher says, can
help a familiarising a new form, but substitution drills are the ones that offer more for
grammar structuring. In a substitution drill, the learners may transform the teacher’s line
to practise a specific piece of grammar.

Proceduralising activities

- Polar animal description re-visited: the production of a description to the whole class
might be a useful proceduralising activity for those items of grammar. Because it is a
public performance, it will justify attention to getting forms exactly right through
rehearsing and perhaps writing down a text. The pupils could choose their animal, so
that they will have to select and adapt the grammatical forms for their own particular
choices.

- Dictogloss: the teacher reads out a text several times, the pupils listen and make notes
between readings, and then reconstruct the text in pairs or small groups, aiming to be as
close as possible to the original and as accurate as possible. During the collaborative
 reconstruction, learners will talk to each other about the language, as well as the
content, drawing on and making their internal grammatical knowledge. Through this talk,
a pupil may learn from another about some aspect of grammar.

Introducing metalanguage

- Explicit teacher talk: it is both useful and quite possible to talk about language without
using technical terms. For example, while explaining the plural forms in English, the
teacher can use repetition + contrast pattern before he formulates the “rule” at the end,
after the specific example.

- Cloze activities for word class: a new rhyme, song or poem could give a discourse
context to focus on word classes. The song is written out with gaps; in one version, all
the nouns are omitted, in another, all the verbs, and in a third, all the pronouns. The
pupils would hear and sing the song a few times and then would be divided into three
groups, each given one of the three cloze versions.