I'm going to add a few tabloid-style headlines to break up the text a bit.... you'll see ...
CYNNYDD
LEARNING GRAMMAR WITHOUT A GRAMMAR BOOK! In previous posts and articles, I have written about the need to get away from learning grammar rules and studying vocabulary as a way to improve the language you are studying. I have made a few suggestions about what can be done. Here, in this post, I am going to talk about an example of a young Korean woman (YHK) I have worked with who made some phenomenal progress through reading more carefully than most language learners do.
There are various reasons why she has made such progress and so what I going to talk about here is not the whole picture BUT it will give you an insight into what has contributed, in no small way, to her progress.
I asked her to write down in her words how she goes about improving her English. She gave me the following summary describing one way she goes about improving her language:
Yn Torri Brawddegau
“First, I read a lot, because personally I think by reading a lot, I am actually getting ideas how I use the words, and the verbs in right way. Also when I read, I tried to break sentences in to pieces. By doing so, I can get much more clears ideas what author is trying to say. Also rather than just jumping in to writing, I’d have a bit of time to think about definitions of the words.
CYNGOR DA !
Here is an example, I go to a website of my choice, and find an article or thread that interests me, and repeatedly read them until I am 100% sure what the article is about. If there was a new word or new verb, I did not try to memorize them, rather I tried to understand why this particular word was used in the sentence. In grammar wise, I did not look at the books, I just looked at the grammars carefully.”
Dim Amau
Clearly she still has a way to go before she is error free, but the difference in her level of writing now to what it was a few months back is enormous. Not only the grammar side of things but also her feel for the language.
When I saw her I asked her to reflect if there is anything else she does apart from what she wrote. She then related that she also looked at the phrases in the sentence to see how they related to each other. Then she says she has a very close look at how the first phrase of a sentence (or the sentence itself) related to the previous sentence and then examined how the last phrase or the whole sentence related to the next sentence. She said she did this until she had no doubt in her mind at all about the meanings, relationships and the structures and forms used. She went on to say that she doesn’t like learning grammar and usage through grammar books as she does not find them useful.
This kind of work may not appeal to everyone and indeed might not be the way some people find useful. But it certainly does provide a perspective on ways to learn a language without using grammar books.
The other matter that is important to note here is that this young woman is learning English in Australia and she had made the necessary effort to have many opportunities to use English. So whilst she did not say it, I would postulate that her speaking and listening is also helping her to make sense of and test what she is learning in her analysis of what she reads.
Here's the second one ... again, lots of questions you could ask, but some interesting and useful ideas in there ... this is from the Ramses site ..
DYN CNAU
How to Ignore Grammar
When I tell people I’d be better if they ignore grammar fully, they generally say I’m nuts. How could someone learn Spanish (or any other language) without ever looking into a grammar book or trying to understand the rules? For them, that’s next to impossible. Unfortunately they forget how we learned our mother-tongue. Most people really think that grammar study can help you move faster, but in reality; it holds you back. Yes, it holds you back. Why? Because if you don’t know any rule but you can more or less understand the Spanish input you’re getting, you don’t worry and just enjoy the conversation/movie/song/audiobook/etc., whereas knowing the rules will let you think about them and will cause you to miss a lot of the input (read Keith’s interesting article about this).
Dewis Arall
But because I go to college and am confronted with old-school teaching methods almost every day, it’s easy to fall in the trap of actually caring about grammar. A positive side-effect is that it made me thing about how to ignore grammar. It’s just a pity to see that many people in the pro-grammar and anti-grammar camp just focus on LEARN grammar or DON’T LEARN grammar, and don’t come up with alternatives. But I’ve come up with a plan to ignore grammar (better said: HOW to ignore grammar and how to free yourself from thinking: “Am I doing something wrong that I ignore the rules?“).
When learning Spanish, people don’t find it weird to learn words in context. On the other hand, they insist on learning grammar and in particular the verb-endings. For long, I thought that learning the verb forms helps you because it helped me. But I actually think that I could have learned Spanish faster if I just ignored them all together. This may be a shocker, but I have to say it: Ignore the verb-endings! From now on, they’re seperated words. Yes, they’re words with a different meaning. Don’t agree with me? Well, let’s see:
The verb: Saber.
I know: sé.
They know: saben.
Most people learn these two words in one go, because they’re two forms of the same verb. Yeah, okay. Would you learn comunión and comunista in one go, because they both start with “com”? No, that would be weird! You only learn words (in context and with Anki, of course) because you want to learn that particular word/expression. Séand saben don’t even look like each other! So why would you learn them both if you only need sé at the moment? Why would you learn them at the same time? Why not making a sentence item in your SRS for sé and later for saben. It just makes more sense, as they’re two distinct words. Distinct words? Yes! They have two totally different meanings. Look: I know. They know. Only 50% of the words have the same meaning: know.
So it’s totally possible to ignore grammar, and the verb forms in particular. Just treat them as different words and you’re good. Sure, in the beginning you won’t even know what the vosotros form is of most verbs, but who cares anyway? You probably don’t know how to say many things, but you don’t worry too much about them either. Right? Time and input will solve all your problems.
...and here's a sort of reply/modification that that one ...
PWYNT NODEDIG
Learning Without Grammar?
Ramses has a nice post on language learning without grammar. He makes a very important point:It’s just a pity to see that many people in the pro-grammar and anti-grammar camp just focus on LEARN grammar orDON’T LEARN grammar, and don’t come up with alternatives.Indeed, it sometimes seems like some people make a fetish of not learning or teaching grammar, as though how you learn a language is more important than whether you learn it.
I personally favor the use of grammar for decoding, but am more reluctant to use it for encoding. That is, it's good to find out what's going on with a language when you're getting frustrated trying to "just take it in." But the more I play with Assimil programs, phrasebooks and Pimsleur, the more convinced I am that the way you master grammatical patterns is to say a lot of sentences the right way and let your brain do the grammar processing based on habits formed rather than through deliberate conscious processing.
PARTHAU ANODD !
One of the hard parts with learning grammar without explicit study is getting enough exposure to those different sentences. It's easy to memorize a table with six endings. Maybe easier than finding time to do enough reading to be exposed to the same verb form in fifty contexts a hundred times. One of my suggestions would be to learn whole phrases (with Anki or flashcards) from phrase books, not just individual words, or even the kinds of sentences you find in beginning grammar books. Ramses has some other ideas, starting with letting go of the idea that, eg, sé and saben are two forms of the same word, and learning them individually since your brain is going to need them for different things in different circumstances. Check out his post for more, including a comment from Thomas ofBabelhut about how letting go of grammar makes grammatically complex languages like Pali easier.
Some interesting ideas in those two... especially the last bit about verb endings .... I know I tend to do the same thing in Spanish and French ... learning at least the more obscure endings almost as separate words .... estuve, soyons etc. Certainly I reckon that's the way to treat stuff like the more wayward parts of bod, cael etc. Also what he said about the difference between decoding and encoding.
Coming up .... my last extract for the day .. here's a sort of balanced approach ... basically saying yes to grammar but a big no to the way is it generally presented by teachers.....
..Julio Foppoli shares his views on why the approach to teaching grammar is more important than the question of whether or not it should be taught......
¡ YN WIR !
This is a typical question that I receive from many new students and website visitors. My answer is clear and simple: "indeed." Grammar is the backbone of a language and without it any single thing you know may be flux, in a sort of jelly without much consistency. In a nutshell, grammar provides you with the structure you need in order to organize and put your messages and ideas across. It is the railway through which your messages will be transported. Without it, in the same way as a train cannot move without railways, you won’t be able to convey your ideas to their full extension without a good command of the underlying grammar patterns and structures of the language.
I understand that many students ask this question simply because in their own experience they have always been presented with two main scenarios, and nothing in between. They want to know where they are going to be standing as regards to their learning.
Which are those two scenarios? Well, in one extreme we have those language courses that teach grammar almost exclusively, as if preparing the students to be grammarians of the second language rather than users. In the other extreme we have those “communicative” courses in which the only thing that is done is to talk about something or to read an article and comment on it. In many cases, what is seen in one class has no resemblance to what is done in the next.
ANADDAS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In my experience, both scenarios may seem good for very specific purposes but I personally feel both are inappropriate for most language learners. For starters, by itself, a good command of the grammar of a language does not imply that the person is able to communicate effectively, as we usually see with students who have only been exposed to an all-grammar-oriented approach sometimes for many years. Many could recite the grammar by heart but if asked to express basic information, they would hesitate too much and browse through all the grammar rules in their heads before making an utterance, or simply dry up.
Secondly, just talking in class without anything else done in order to learn from the actual conversation is not good enough either. It may be helpful of course, but up to a certain point. This approach may be more useful for very advanced students who just need to brush up their second language, but for those in need of building up the foundations of a new language, it is certainly too vague and flux, without any consistency.
So then, when asked: "is grammar really important for a second language learner?" I always say "yes", but, the real question, or issue here is not whether grammar is important or not but rather how we should present grammar to our students. You may be surprised to hear that most of my own students, even advanced ones, have very little awareness of grammar jargon and terminology, in spite of the fact that they can make a pretty good use of the second language. "How is that possible?" you may ask. First and foremost, teachers need to know precisely what they are trying to prepare their students for. I do know that what I want is to "create" users of a new language.
RHESTRAU MEDDYLIOL ?
I want to prepare people to actually engage in communicative situations using appropriate language and patterns. I am definitely not interested in their explaining to me or making a mental list of all the grammar uses that a certain pattern has.
For example, think of your own native language. Name all the tenses that you can find in your own native tongue with their corresponding uses and structures. Unless you are a teacher, a translator or someone who needs to have a very good grasp of this meta-language, more likely than not you may feel at a loss to answer that question. And that does NOT mean in any sense that you are not a terrific user of that language. After all, you can understand and express whatever you want with ease. What is more, by being able to do so, you show an awesome command of the internal grammar of the language. If you knew no grammar patterns you would not be able to make a single sentence but you can. This means that although you may lack the conscious ability to describe how your language works (i.e. its grammar) you can use it perfectly. You are a user of the language. You make a perfect use of the grammar of your native language intuitively or unconsciously.
Again, our primary goal as second language teachers must be to create users of the language, not linguists! It escapes the aim of this article to describe how we can achieve this but basically we are going to name the main elements to consider to create "language users."
PATRWMAU
To begin with, it should be noted that whatever we present our students with should follow a progression from the very general meaning to the very specific pattern or structure we want them to learn (or that they need to learn of course). I would like to highlight that all this takes place within the same class.
Before we start to use the material we have selected, it would be good to introduce the students to the topic you are going to work on. You can have them guess or infer what the material will say about it, they can make predictions and when they fail to use appropriate language, you may provide it. This is good to elicit vocabulary that may be necessary for them to know in order to understand the topic. After you have created curiosity in the topic and provided students with key terms on the topic, make sure you follow a progression such as the one that follows:
RHESTR WAEDLYD ARALL
- Provide them with exposure to real language and real situations IN CONTEXT.
- Initial focus on gist, not form.
- Focus on more specific meaning.
- We can then focus on very specific meaning.
- Analysis and systematization: after we make sure the students have a good understanding of the whole material, you can have them focus on particular items or patterns that may be important for them to learn at their stage (i.e. grammar) You can systematize it more formally and teach them how it works. After all, they have already seen it in practice and they have also worked around meaning, now it is time for them to learn how to use it.
- Give them exercises for them to practice the new structure. Do not be afraid of using grammar drills and patterns. They could be VERY useful for them to fix the new structures in their brains.
- Give them homework to force them to revise this at a later time. The homework does not necessarily need to be communicative in nature. Profit from the time in class to communicate and interact. If possible, avoid drilling activities while you are with them in class. However, the time they are on their own could be very well used to do all the drilling and rote practice that may prove useful for them to gain a good command of the grammar form you are trying to teach them. Personally I feel that the time in class must be used for providing learners with as many communicative situations as possible, rather than making them focus on drills and patterns that they could easily practise on their own.
- Provide them with ample opportunities to practice what they have learned in REAL or REALISTIC communicative situations. Create situations so that they can make lots of mistakes and encourage them to improve on them by reminding them of what they have studied.
- Recycle and mention the topic again as many times as necessary, time and again.
As you can see, I am not condemning grammar at all as some readers may feel when in my articles I complain about teachers working almost exclusively with a grammar-oriented approach. On the contrary, I feel it is essential in order to master a language. However, how grammar is presented to the students is what really matters. I utterly disagree with those teachers who come to class and tell the class: “Open your books. Today we will learn the “Simple Present Tense.”
In the suggested steps to follow in any class, you will have noticed that I have used a quite eclectic approach, starting from a communicative situation (steps 1-4) with the focus on understanding the message from the gist up to very detailed info and later, and only later, once meaning is clearly understood, we reach the grammar item we may need our students to learn at their stage. The obvious advantage of this approach is that while dealing with grammar, the students will have a clear idea of the context in which it was used and the communicative need it satisfied.
Recently I described a song ( by Edrych am Jiwlia ) as real front-room music ... but this one is really really real front-room music ... it's Ceri Rhys Mathews, but I'm not quite sure what the song is .... I think the words are from some ancient poems collected and published by T H Parry-Williams ... I' m bound to find something on the net about them. Whatever it is, I like it ...