Grammar teaching? Try it, observe & convince yourself

I don't think I ever stated people should not teach grammar. I only said it does not work.

I never teach grammar rules. My students have had enough of that and after about 10 years they still don't have their grammar straight.

However, I do correct incorrect grammar when I hear it. So does that indicate that I believe teaching grammar works? No, to the contrary. I have students that I have corrected for over a year on pronouns of gender and they still are frequently getting the pronouns of gender wrong.

So I will not tell you to take my word for it. Don't take Krashen's word for it. Don't take Truscott's word for it. Just do it. Do it yourself. Go ahead and correct your students. Make it Action Research. Do it and observe and after you observe then reflect and you will convince yourself. Choose a clearly observeable grammar point like pronouns of gender and correct your student everytime in everyway everywhere. Keep track of how many times your student gets it right and how many times he gets it wrong.

I suggest all teachers do this.

Why I teach grammar

Why do I continue to correct their grammar? I consider it a form of Comprehensible Input. It is a feedback of their own sentence. I believe they will NOT benefit in a conscious grammar rule way: "Oh, right! Grammar rule #27: Pronouns of gender. Females = she & her, Males = he & his." Krashen brought this out very clearly in his description of learning French which I published previously.

But students will benefit from experiencing an extensive amount of correct Comprehensible English Input at a level of i+1 as explained by Krashen:

"Language acquisition is very similar to the process children use in acquiring first and second languages. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language-- natural communication--in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding. Error correction and explicit teaching of rules are not relevant to language acquisition (Brown and Hanlon, 1970; Brown, Cazden, and Bellugi, 1973), but caretakers and native speakers can modify their utterances addressed to acquirers to help them understand, and these modifications are thought to help the acquisition process (Snow and Ferguson, 1977). It has been hypothesized that there is a fairly stable order of acquisition of structures in language acquisition, that is, one can see clear similarities across acquirers as to which structures tend to be acquired early and which tend to be acquired late (Brown, 1973; Dulay and Burt, 1975). Acquirers need not have a conscious awareness of the "rules" they possess, and may selfcorrect only on the basis of a 'feel' for grammaticality."

And despite what the calculator punchers say (as one teacher said to me about acquisition through Comprehensible Input, "the number of YEARS required is going to be well into the triple digits. Your student's great-great-grandchildren will all be retired before your students will have acquired the ability to write like a 15-year-old"), students actually can learn to an intermediate level in two years if they have wife of that language (as did Guy Brook-Hart and Mert Bland) or sufficient alternative input.

What can teaching students pronouns of gender teach teachers?

A teacher, implying the near impossibility of the effectiveness of Comprehensible Input, wrote:

"How many hours of standard, educated English will a native speaker have been exposed to by, say, age 15. Whatever number you pick, if you expect an EFL student to use the language at an equivalent level without error correction or grammar instruction, you'll have to find a way to get that student an equal amount of exposure. Get out your calculators, folks at ten hours exposure to English per week (a generous amount for a Chinese EFL student), the number of YEARS required is going to be well into the triple digits. Your students great-great-grandchildren will all be retired before your students will have acquired the ability to write like a 15-year-old."

Krashen's theories on the "acquisition" of language facilitated through "comprehensible input" at a level of "i+1" is not just something that sounds like a good idea until someone pulls out a calculator and does the math. Although the subject is widely debated, there is a lot of evidence that it works and you can read research after research on Krashen's website at: http://www.sdkrashen.com/.

Also, in what the teacher said, is the implied assumption that grammar teaching actually does work. There is no evidence that teaching grammar results in the student truly acquiring the grammar. A certain degree of retention is possible in the student's conscious "monitor" (an internal editor), remembering some grammar rules, but this is limited.

Clearly grammar cannot be acquired in such a conscious way. One of my favorite examples of this, which I have brought out many times before is pronouns of gender ("he", "she", "his", "hers"), a grammar rule that can be taught in ten minutes it is so simple but can take a student a year or two to master.

Grammar "teaching" doesn't work.

Grammar teaching teacher challenge!

To settle this point and answer the question, I would like to invite teachers who support grammar teaching to design a lesson or series of lessons to teach pronouns of gender in such a way that a student could "learn" it in one week or even one month in such a way that a student will use it correctly more or less consistently.

Then I suggest that teachers who do not support grammar teaching, with an open mind, try this lesson or these series of lessons with their students and see what the results are.

I have no special interests in showing that teaching grammar does not work. I receive no royalties or benefits one way or the other. My special interest in all of this is language acquisition. I want my students to have the fastest results possible. If teaching grammar brings the fastest results then I am all for it.

Welcome to my party!...Or is grammar teaching necessary?

To answer those who argue that grammar teaching is necessary, I would like you to engage in a thought experiment.

Imagine that I am having a party. There is music, snacks, drinks and many guests. All of the guests are my friends. I am delighted when you arrive.

"Hi! I'm so happy you could make it! Here, have a drink! Let me take you around and introduce you to some of my friends.

"This is Bob. He is a marine animal trainer. He's American and trained the dolphins in the Guangzhou Zoo.

"Here is Richard. He's a lawyer and the vice-president of the Guangzhou Law Association. He was one of my students.

"And this is Rauol. He is the manager of the golf course, he's from Holland.

"This is Helen. She's the Southern China manager for Cambridge University Press. She is from Hubei.

"Here is Zhou Jing. She is the general manager of Microsoft Technology Center in Guangzhou. She was one of my students and improved her English very quickly so she could attend a big Microsoft meeting in Seattle.

All of these are real people I know as friends and/or students.

OK, now a question. Who is Bob?

Maybe you don't remember.

I agree that a brief introduction to a grammar form, just like a brief introduction to someone at a party, is not going to hurt unless you mix up all the people you met. But I don't think it really does much to help you really know the grammar or be able to use the grammar.

You don't really know Bob. You don't know that the secret of his job is "hunger". You don't know he is from California. You don't know that he also worked in Taiwan and in Japan. You don't know that when he was in Japan he studied the ancient Japanese martial art of sword fighting and passed several tests to achieve mastery. You don't know that he lives with his lovely Chinese girlfriend who is also an animal trainer.

What if I didn't introduce you to Bob? What if you lived with Bob? What if you observed him while he worked? What if you went out to dinner with him and his girlfriend? What if you joined him as he practiced his sword technique with his Japanese tutor? Without any introductions, you would know Bob very well.

Sure, introduce me to your friends. It's not going to kill me. (Unless one of them is a killer.) But to know them I don't really need to have an introduction. I need to spend time with them, even live with them, to know them.

Spamming my students with "BOB"

A teacher asked about spamming my students, "How much time do you estimate it takes to compose and send out a message?"

I use an Excel file and a Visual Basic program I wrote called "BOB". On one Excel sheet I keep the student names, Email addresses and some other information. On the other sheet I keep the "content" for the messages like message subject and message body.

Most of my BOB messages were taken from Emails I have sent to other groups of students in times past. Indeed, some students may be receiving a message I sent them years ago but probably forgot. So in this case composing a message is very fast. But since all of the messages are short, even if I write a new one it is also very fast.

HOW BOB WORKS

Keep in mind, each of these messages is stored in the Excel file and is reused. So once you write it, it gets used many times. The BOB program reads the student name, Email address and what message the student is on. For example:

John; john_zhou@yahoo.com; 27

Then the program will check on the content sheet and find message #27 which has a subject line for message #27 and body for #27.

BOB then creates the Email, first with the subject line and the body which begins with "Dear John," followed by my message. It ends with my signature name and my links like a regular message does.

Recently, I added a place for another line at the end of the message that I can customize. If it is a holiday time, I can send them holiday greetings. If I want to remind all of the students from one class about a homework assignment, I can do it there. If I found a new coffee shop to have my one-on-one class with a manager, I can mention it there.

It takes BOB about 3-4 seconds to make each message. After BOB is done making messages for all the students, it takes Outlook about 2 seconds to send each one out.

EXTENDING TEACHER PRESENCE THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Teachers have a wealth of knowledge on teaching that can benefit students. The beauty of this system is that it gets maximum use out of the teachers' resource of ideas, tips and pointers. The BOB system starts all students on message #1 and then works the student, message by message, through all of the teachers ideas and tips. Every student will receive every tip from the teacher. They will miss nothing. They will receive it in measured spoonfuls every couple days.

If any teachers would like a copy of the BOB spamming program please let me know and I'll send it to you. I'll let you have about 60 of my messages that I send out. It works only with Excel and Outlook. (It may not work with Outlook Express.)

Tablet computers in the classroom

A teacher referred to my experimentation with a tablet computer so I'd like to tell everyone about that. Five years ago I bought an ACER C110 Travelmate 11 inch notebook computer. You can twist the screen on this computer and lay it down on top of the keyboard and use it like a tablet computer. It was quite small and had an external DVD drive. I bought it here in Guangzhou and it cost 16,OOO Rmb. This was rather expensive but cheaper than the larger Toshiba computer that could do the same thing. When I bought this I was intrigued about the possiblities of using a tablet in the classroom and wanted to experiment.

I still have this computer and am writing you with it now. A corner of the computer broke off due to an accident. I was running across a busy Guangzhou street and the buckle on my computer bag, heavily laden with not only my computer but those immensily weighty Interchange Teacher Books, broke and my bag hit the street hard. The corner broke off my computer and now the WiFi no longer works. My computer looks terrible today and even my students beg me to get a new one but I've grown attached to it the way an old man gets attached to an old easy chair or a favorite pair of old slippers.

But I have to say that I am not satisfied with the computer as a tablet. It was not as easy to use as I hoped to move around the classroom and make notes on students. With the computer in one hand and the special pen in the other, I could not talk with students and then very quickly look up the student on my Excel sheet and make a notation.

What I wound up doing is making notations on slips of paper and at the end of class transferring these to my computer. One of the main things I note in this way is the IELTS speaking level of the students.

I sacrificed the DVD drive for this tablet computer. My next computer, which I'm shopping for now, will have a built in drive. I think this will be more useful for me than the tablet function.

I now have a Windows Mobile phone. This phone runs Excel and I've tried to keep my student list on this. I also can write on it like a tiny tablet computer but the whole process of finding the student's name amongst 40 other names and making the notation is more cumbersome than jotting it on a slip of paper and then entering all the info in a couple minutes after class.