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As a schoolboy, I was considered an oddity. I grew up in Broken Hill, a dusty mining city in the arid interior of Australia where I attended the local Catholic school. (Well, someone had to, as Bill Bryson once said.) As it was the early 1960s, grammar featured prominently on the curriculum. Hours of English instruction were given over to traditional, decontextualised parsing and analysis exercises. Most of my classmates found these lessons excruciating. I didn’t. I was fascinated by the complexities and intricacies of English syntax. I also loved Latin, which was drummed into us through grammar-translation and the chanting of verb declensions. The Marist Brothers insisted on Latin in the hope that at least one of us might one day be drawn into the priesthood as a vocation. (None ever did.) English syntax and Latin verb-endings were of no practical use to me, but neither was post-war industrialisation of the Ruhr valley or the periodic table – it was just part of the ritual of schooling). Language study had no use, but it had value. Little did I know then that one day it would also be useful.
Fast-forward several decades. How things have changed. I’m sitting in on a TESOL teacher educator roundtable on language awareness when it disintegrates into a gripe session.
“My methodology class is supposed to be about procedures and techniques for teaching language, but I end up spending most of the semester teaching them the basics of the languages.”
“My students are supposed to teach academic writing when they graduate and go into schools, but their own writing is confused, confusing, and semi-coherent at best.”
“I envy my colleagues in the Science program. A prerequisite is an undergraduate science major. We have no prerequisite at all.”
“We have a prerequisite, one undergraduate semester of a foreign language. As if a semester of beginning French or Japanese is all you need to teach English.”
“It’s the same old problem. The assumption is that if you can speak the language, you can teach it.”
“I pointed out to a student that one of her sentences lacked a finite verb. She looked at me blankly, and asked ‘What’s that?’”
The gripes mirrored my own experience with students in teacher-preparation programs over the last 30 years or so. How did it come to pass that cosmic ignorance of language fundamentals is no impediment to those who proposed to teach it?
Within my allotted word span, I’ll do my best to share my thoughts on the conundrum and what might be done about it. For reasons of space, I’ll restrict my attention to grammar, although what I have to say applies to other subsystems of language. (If you want the bigger picture, take a look at a book I wrote some years ago called What is this thing called language? (Nunan, 2013). I think it’s still in print.)
The fact is, that the systematic teaching of English language in general, and grammar in particular, went out of fashion. This happened at different times and for a range of reasons in Anglophone countries over a 20-year period from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. The teaching of grammar was seen as boring, irrelevant, and uncreative. And it was. However, rather than exploring ways of making it more engaging, it was dropped. It was out of kilter with the times, certainly in the 1970s, the decade devoted to personal liberation, flower power, an explosion in drug use, and subversion of the political, educational, and cultural paradigms that had dominated Western cultures.
In education, it could no longer be business as usual. Decades ahead of his time, that great visionary Jerome Bruner (1966) argued that, given the information explosion, globalization, and changing conceptions of the nature of learning, each generation had to define itself after the nature, aims and direction of education for future generations.
Proposals for innovation and change abounded. In first language education, the traditional, decontextualised approach to grammar and the use of phonics to teach reading was challenged by the whole language movement. Developed initially in the United States, it soon spread to other Anglophone countries including Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The approach was based on the premise that children acquire the ability to read and write in the same was as they learn to speak their first language. Expose children to rich, engaging texts, and they’ll ‘pick up literacy naturalistically’. While many aspects of the whole language approach, particularly it’s learner-centered focus, appealed to me, the premise did not. These days it’s largely dismissed, although other key aspects of their work remain.
In the early 1980s, in second language acquisition, Stephen Krashen (1981) proposed his comprehensible input hypothesis: that we acquire languages when we understand messages in the target language, that is, when we focus on communicative meaning rather than linguistic form. Krashen argued that two psycholinguistic processes functioned in SLA, conscious learning and subconscious acquisition. Memorizing and manipulating grammar rules was a conscious process. Controversially, Krashen argued that conscious learning did not ‘turn into’ subconscious acquisition. The pedagogy derived from the theory was called the ‘Natural Approach’. Classroom techniques mirrored ways in which children acquired their first language: extensive input, no explicit focus on grammar and so on. Krashen, an articulate and entertaining speaker, language teachers who were reassured by the message that knowing grammar and how to teach it effectively was unimportant as was their own shaky and piecemeal understanding of the intricacies of English grammar. If you want to experience a touch of the Krashen charisma, check him out on You Tube and you’ll see what I mean! In time, aspects of his theory, particularly his position on grammar, were dismissed. Others, such as the value of comprehensible input, became part of many teachers’ vocabulary.
Michael Halliday, a British/Australian linguist revived interest in grammar with his functional grammar, known as systemic-functional linguistics. Halliday argued that the dichotomy between form and function was a false one, that grammar exists in order to express communicative functions (Halliday, 1985). In the language classroom, functional grammar is realised through a set of procedures known as the genre approach. Genres are purposeful, socially constructed oral or written texts such as narratives, casual conversations, procedures, descriptions and so on. To succeed in school, students need to master a range of academic genres. An initial step is to identify three defining features of these genres. The first of these is purpose. The purpose will determine the internal (generic) structure of the text and its characteristic grammatical and lexical features. For example, the purpose of a procedural text is to instruct the reader (or listener) how to do something: how to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture (always a challenge for me), bake a cake or carry out a laboratory experiment. The generic structure will be a set of implements, ingredients, or materials. followed by a sequence of instructions. The key grammatical features will be imperatives: “beat the eggs and flour with a whisk” and perhaps the passive voice “after its removal from the oven, the cake is left to rest on a wire rack until it has cooled”. Once a particular genre has been modelled for students, and they are adept at identifying purpose, generic structure, and key grammatical and lexical features, it’s time for them to produce their own recipes or laboratory experiments.
To conclude, I return to the vignette with which I began this piece and to the problem it presents. There are too many newly minted graduate teachers entering the profession with an inadequate knowledge of language. At the risk of being provocative, I should add that there are also too many TESOL teacher educators who also lack an adequate grounding in the fundamentals.
It’s all very well to blame school and university policy makers for this state of affairs but as teacher educators what are we to do? In universities with which I have associations, administrators have taken the opportunity occasioned by the chaos of the last couple of years to reinvent themselves as corporate COOs. They are less inclined than ever to listen to those of us who actually teach. As they are dictated to by politicians, school districts may be more amenable although, in our experience when politicians make pronouncements on language, they are more than likely to trot out the back-to-basics mantra: a return to the dreary exercises I was subjected to as a schoolboy. That said, as I indicated at the beginning of this piece, thanks to those exercises, I developed a decent understanding of and appreciation for English grammar. But there are much better ways. In a forthcoming publication, I argue that what is needed in school curricula is a
… detailed, contextualized introduction to the fundamentals of language underpinned by a functional model of grammar, [that] can be taught through the scaffolded, inductive procedures proposed by Bruner all those years ago. The problem is that the type of language course I have in mind is no longer seen as core (Nunan, in press).
References
Bruner, J. (1966) Toward a theory of instruction. Harvard University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. Arnold.
Krashen (1982) Second language acquisition and second language learning. Pergamon.
Nunan, D. (2013) What is this thing called language? 2nd edition. Palgrave Macmillan.
Nunan, D. (in press) The changing landscape of English language teaching and learning. In E. Hinkel (ed.) Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Volume IV. Routledge.
David Nunan, TESOL President from 1999 - 2000, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hong Kong where he served as Chair Professor of Applied Linguistics and the Director of the English Centre for several years. He has published widely in the areas of curriculum and materials development, classroom-based research, and discourse analysis. |
