Why does grammar teaching fail for most pupils?

A little thought piece. 

The value of learning and practising grammar rules in language learning has been debated for centuries, but we still debate it. And we still repeat the same failed methods, don't we? We know for sure that the grammar-translation approach only worked for a minority of motivated pupils in selective schools, and even for them, it was more about developing skills in reading comprehension and translation. We know that descendants of the direct method which still stuck to a grammatical syllabus only worked with a minority of motivated pupils, even though there was a laudable emphasis on teaching grammar orally and aurally. The audiolingual approach of the 1950s through to 60s/70s, focused primarily on drilling through speech and listening, but also grammar at the expense of vocabulary and communication. It was seen to be a failure and is now widely discredited.

All of the above approaches assumed that grammar patterns could be explained, practised, then put into use, allowing learners to become creative language users as they slotted in the vocabulary to the system of rules. It's sometimes called a 'dictionary plus grammar' or 'words plus grammar' approach. It doesn't work for most learners, yet we repeat the same mistakes, most recently in England through the NCELP syllabus and resources.

Now, you might ask... but hang on, don't all approaches fail for most pupils, given the time we have available with them? I'll come back to that. 

Why does the grammar-based approach fail for most learners? I'm not going to quote research sources to you, but I will rehearse the common arguments put forward against the grammar syllabus, in case you are not familiar with them.

1. Teachers are still overly optimisitic about the extent to which we can 'teach a rule' and for it to become internalised ('proceduralised, automatised, acquired - depending on your preferred learning paradigm). Students don't easily acquire what we teach. They have to be developmentally ready and be exposed to structures that are learnable, probably not too different from the structures of their first language(s). Because they also tend to acquire structures in a certain order, at least somewhat immune to the teaching, many structures just don't stick. Teachers see this all the time and say "I've done this for ten lessons and they still can't use it!" This probably reflects a misunderstanding about the nature of declarative and procedural knowledge. It's hard to create the second from the first.

2. Teachers tend to believe and are sometimes encouraged to believe, that a language can be broken down into bits and built back up again like a lego model. It's tempting, isn't it? We have phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences. We just need to be able to put these bits together and language can be used. But as many have written, language is too large and complex to do that. And even if we cut right back on the number of words and rules, students still find it hard to piece together the bits, especially when they don't have the time during conversation. By the way, that's not to say that there isn't useful work to be done at each level, whether it be phonemic, lexical or syntactic, but the 'put together' (synthetic) view of language learning has few fans in the research community.

1. A motivational issue. Most pupils find grammar boring. It doesn't excite them, however much you sweeten the pill through interesting activities and games. What is more likely to interest pupils is interesting content in language they understand (you know - 'comprehensible input'), having conversations, carrying out purposeful tasks, playing games and intercultural input. They would like feasible activities which allow them to succeed at a level they can manage. They might also be interested in aspects of language awareness or linguistics, such as social aspects of language use, dialects and accents, child language acquisition and etymology.

But getting back to that question.... do any approaches work? I think the answer to that question has a lot to do with goals you set for language learning in the classroom. If we know that at least half the pupils we teach will stop learning a language in school after three years, then we have to question whether the focus on rich vocabulary, along with accurate use of a large number of morphological and syntactic rules, is the right objective. Alternative, quite reasonable goals might be:

• Hold and understand simple conversations on topics of interest using a limited range of vocabulary.
• Learn about the culture of the target language country and speakers, so developing 'cultural competence' and making more rounded, tolerant, independent persons.
• Deal with a range of 'survival' situations, e.g coping in shops, on holiday, meeting a stranger, talking about yourself, asking questions of another person.
• Become more aware of how language works, out of general interest and to prepare for future learning.
• Develop an interest in and affection for language learning.
• Explore the language experience of bilinguals in a diverse classroom.

If they were your goals, would you spend much tome learning the rules of grammar? What would you do instead?

Now of course there are a many of our pupils who will continue to learn a language up to the age of 15/16, and a much smaller number who will continue beyond that. Because their needs must be catered for, we tend to look at language learning as a long-term goal, where quick wins are not the priority. We choose, therefore, to teach grammar in the belief I mentioned above, namely that this is what will enable learners to use the language creatively.

Because of what we know from research about grammar acquisition, the needs of our longer term learners can still be met by a more communicative curriculum, taught well. This doesn't have to be 'wishy washy' or 'lacking in rigour'. If a rigorous grammar syllabus fails, there's not much point in that type of rigour. Another way of looking at rigour would be through the prism of successful communication. Don't forget those general learning principles of cognitive load, working memory limitations, spaced repetition, the retrieval practice effective, transfer-appropriate processing and the rest. These can still be applied within a communicative paradigm, where listening, speaking, reading (and to a lesser extent writing) are effectively practised.

With a sound, enjoyable foundation, our keener learners (maybe more of them?), can begin to develop more sophisticated language use later. At that point they could be a bit more 'focused on form' as well as meaning. There is support in the research literature for the idea that an early diet of constantly recycled chunks (multi-word units) can be the basis for later rule-based competence.

It has struck me for a long time, that our system has been very 'top-down'. By this I mean that universities have set the agenda for what we teach at A-level (translation, film, literature, text analysis etc). This in turn sets the agenda for what we teach at GCSE, and so on. I wonder how we would think of syllabus design if we started from the needs of the bulk of our students, not the elite few who will do languages in higher education.