How do we curb our addiction to grammar?

There’s every chance that you, like me, were taught a language using some sort of grammatical syllabus. There was a large degree of explanation and practice of grammatical structures - tense formation, adjective agreement, cases, inflections, conjugations and the like. You may have done well on it. You understood the rules and were able to apply them pretty quickly. I did, partly because I had pretty progressive teachers for the time, who taught grammar through the British Oral Approach, a type of direct method. Maybe, and many believe this to be the case, the foundation of knowledge the grammatical syllabus gave you, stood you in good stead when you travelled and began to use the new language for real. You reaped the benefits later, as it were.

But of course, chances are you had a particular aptitude for language learning and that from somewhere or other you had an unusual degree of motivation.

Many of the students we teach in high schools, who have mixed aptitude and are not their through choice clearly don’t thrive in the way you did. The diet of learning words, learning grammar rules and applying them doesn’t seem to work. We know this for certain and have known it for centuries. At various points in the history of language teaching, there has been a backlash against the limitations of the grammatical syllabus. It happened notably with the Reform in the late 19th century and the rise of natural and communicative approaches from the 1970s.

In modern second language acquisition research, only about 50 years old or so, the general view is that breaking a language down into bits of grammar and building it up again, from the simplest bits to the hardest, is misguided and does not align with how we acquire languages in general. David Wilkins labelled the traditional grammatical syllabus a ‘synthetic’ syllabus, i.e. we ‘synthesise’ or put together the language from its components parts. Another renowned researcher, Michael Long, used the term ‘focus on forms’ to describe the same thing. In England, the methodology of NCELP (the national ‘centre of excellence’ set up by the DfE) is an excellent example of a synthetic approach: teach the sounds, words and grammar of the language explicitly and students will get success. Language learning is like lego, they would say - and you need firm foundations of declarative knowledge (‘knowing about’ the language) for students to succeed.

Now, teachers tend to be quite addicted to and often buy into the argument that teaching words and rules and practising them will work. As I said, it seemed to work for us and does for a minority of students. (This of course raises the question of whether another approach would work faster.) I often see teachers asking for ‘a lesson the future tense’, ‘a song with past tenses’ or ‘a sentence builder on conditionals’, that sort of thing. I was the same. This is revealing. We often think of language learning in terms of learning rules.

But the more I’ve thought and read about this over the years, the more I feel that we should respect the strong research view that the main way we learn a new language is ‘implicitly’.* We ‘pick up’ language by interacting with language we understand (‘comprehensible input’). This is not, as some caricature it, leaving learning to chance, or relying on some vague notion of ‘osmosis’. It means exposing students to repeated examples of patterned, high-frequency listening and reading input (especially listening, or listening with text), giving them chances to use the language and letting the brain do its natural thing.

It’s generally (not universally) believed that explaining some rules helps. It is not believed by most researchers that organising a curriculum based primarily on grammar is the best solution.

Let’s think for a moment about those 11 year-olds who may just do a new language for three years, maybe five. What do they want from their lessons? What can they realistically achieve? For the large majority it’s probably the ability to understand a certain amount if language, to hold simple conversations and carry out some basic situational tasks. They will also be interested, we would hope, to learn a bit about the culture of the target language communities. As teachers, we would also have some grander aims for students to do with diversity, openness and countering insularity. We would also want them to enjoy their learning so they might want to learn other languages in the future.

Given the needs of learners (both practical and motivational) and what we know about how languages are learned, offering a drip-feed grammatical, synthetic, ‘focus on forms’ syllabus does not seem the best solution to me. Yet, here we are, still addicted to grammar! I believe that if teachers learn more about theory and research there is more likelihood that they will critically question syllabuses and resources, and get more tightly focused on ‘using’ meaningful language more, and talking about language less.

Is this an argument for abandoning grammar teaching? Not at all. In some schools, with some students, you’ll want to spend more time on it. The students may even demand it. The exam may require some specific attention to aspects of grammar for the highest grades to be achieved.

A few further points: within a synthetic syllabus it is still possible to use lots of meaningful input and interaction. You just need to pick and choose which grammar students are ready for and which grammar is most productive. 

Secondly, abandoning a synthetic syllabus to focus on useful task-based or plain interesting material does not mean abandoning attention to grammar. Earlier, I mentioned Long’s ‘focus on forms’. Long also coined the term ‘focus on form’ (no ‘s’). This means dealing with grammar when necessary while doing meaning-focused work. It may be through a brief reference, or to answer a student’s question, or it may involve some more focused practice or drilling. They key point, though, is that it’s not grammar that drives the curriculum and lesson planning.

Thirdly, trainee teachers sometime raise the issue of time. The argument goes: we don’t have enough time in school for implicit learning to happen, so we have to short-cut the process by focusing a good deal on rules and declarative knowledge. The trouble with that argument, is that for most learners it doesn’t work. They are simply not ready to pick up and use structures at our time of choosing. As many have pointed out, you ‘can’t short-cut acquisition’. But let me add a caveat: researchers are sometimes prepared to argue that we can ‘accelerate’ acquisition by the way we present input, for example by using repetition, recycling, flooding input with patterns, ‘enhancing’ input (e.g. highlighting key details in text), and structuring input to help students acquire key aspects such as tense usage (so-called ‘input processing’). 

Cognitive science has also reminded us about how we can organise lessons to maximise remembering, for example through spaced repetition, managing cognitive load, interleaving and retrieval practice.

In sum, given what we know from experience and research, we would do well to curb our addiction to grammar, and to focus on meaningful, useful language that students can use. Most students aren’t interested in grammar. It’s a switch-off. They are more likely to enjoy and benefit from other activities. Then you make your choice of approaches depending on your preference and context. Task-based, situational, EPI, eclectic, TPRS/CI, AIM, communicative - anything which promotes motivation and success.

Here is a really good short video to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui_JZFANBZQ

* As a teacher in my 20s I already believed that implicit learning was the most powerful route and learned about Stephen Krashen’s work during my MA studies. But, up to my retirement, I never really cured my addiction to grammar, partly due to the types of school I taught in, where students often had higher than average aptitude and motivation.