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Does Grammar Matter?

Speaker: Scott Thornbury
Moderator: Stephanie Taylor (Richmond Publishing)
Date: Wednesday 27 October 1999

Scott Thornbury works at International House, Barcelona and has taught, trained teachers, and given conference presentations in many parts of the world. He is the author of two books about grammar teaching: About Language (CUP) and How to Teach Grammar (Longman). He also co-authored a task-based course for Spanish secondary schools (Over to Us!, Longman). At present he is writing materials for IH Net Languages (www.netlanguages.com)

Grammar went out of fashion. Now it's back in fashion. Or is it? And should it be? Researchers have discovered the importance of what is called "a focus on form". But does this mean a traditional grammar syllabus and traditonal grammar teaching? Scott argues that it doesn't, although there may still be a role for grammar teaching as a way of "priming" learners to notice features of the input. We invite you to join what promises to be a lively debate.

MODERATOR> Hello everyone and welcome to tonight's chat. We are very pleased to welcome Scott Thornbury from International Netlanguages who is going to lead tonight's chat. Hi Scott!

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Hi everyone.

MODERATOR> While people are arriving Scott, can you tell us how you became interested in the area of grammar?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> I think that as a teacher of English grammar gets interested in you. I started getting really interested when I started to query some of the things I kept reading in coursebooks like you know - the number of conditionals there are. Also, being a native speaker, I had to learn the grammar from scratch.

MODERATOR> And how would you define grammar? What is grammar?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Difficult. I suppose, very simply, it's the way the language is patterned - its regularities. Of course traditionally at least, grammar is the study of the regularities of the sentence i.e. it's at sentence level although more recently people have been getting interested in the patterns of texts but let's stick to the sentence. Grammar is really the rules that dictate what makes an acceptable sentence.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> That wasn't a very acceptable one!

MODERATOR> Did you learn these when you were learning a foreign language?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> OK - when I learned Sapnish for example, (which I have learned badly) I spent quite a bit of time on the rules until I discovered that I could get quite a lot of mileage out of vocabulary and lexical chunks. But now it's about time I addressed the rules again. What you need to get going with a language is functional vocab and lots of handy expressions or chunks. As someone is supposed to have said (it was Leibniz actually) "A language is acquired through practice it is merely perfected through grammar"

jeffs> How much of a role is there for lexical chunks/phrases? My own experience is that they take you a long way forward, both pragmatically and in later grammatical development.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Exactly, brilliant, totally agree. But there's a danger of relying too much on chunks - this gives you initial fluency but in the long haul it may stunt your linguistic growth so to speak can cause fossilization of the internal grammar. There have been a few studies which suggest as much i.e. lexicalisation without syntacalization - fatal!

MODERATOR> Let's go back to the question sent in from Barcelona. Does teaching grammar help accuracy?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> There's not a direct relation between grammar and accuracy although many people seem to think there is. So that there is a school of thought that says: if you don't foreground grammar, students will become inaccurate. But in fact the best preventative against inaccuracy is....wait for it......CORRECTION. I.e. you don't make someone accurate in the present perfect by teaching them the rules of the present perfect. You just pounce on them when they make a mistake. There's a lovely study by Catherine Doughy and somebody Varela on this that I was reading last night...! They simply corrected the past simple mistakes a group of teens made when they were reporting science experiments.. no grammar teaching as such... and these kids made significant improvements (compared to a control group) and this improvement persisted over time.

Jogger> But surely you have to know some rules in order to produce the pres perf in the first place..

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Well, did you learn the rules of the present perfect before you started using it (I'm assuming you're a native speaker!)

MODERATOR> I must be really thick! My daughter corrects my genders in Spanish all the time - but to no apparent avail. Is there any hope for me?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Genders are one of the last things to fall into place it seems - they resist learning because there are no easy RULES OF THUMB.

Carmen Zavala> But don't you correct through the explicit explanation of grammar generalizations or do you just correct specific cases a s specific

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> First of all, Carmen, I'm not saying that rules don't help - but the best rules are rules of thumb - ones that the students can really grasp and use. It seems that if you can pop these rules in alongside the correction, without holding things up - these are the rules the students are likely to take on board.

MODERATOR> Another question sent in earlier from Málaga. What grammar should we teach?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Well, I'd like to say, teach to the student's grammar. I.e. use the student's grammar as the starting point and work from there as opposed to the coursebook grammar which doesn't really take the students' immediate level or needs into account but I realise this might sound a little unrealistic so, another answer might be, teach the USEFL grammar...

Jogger> You mean the L1 grammar

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> the high frequency grammar... like the past, the present, modals but not the ****** third conditional.

MODERATOR> Let's move on

Alicia> Do you think "grammar" should be taught to primary school students, and, if so, how would you suggest teaching it? Greetings from sunny Mexico!!!

MODERATOR> Thanks

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> It seems to be fairly well accepted now that kids under about the age of 13, 14 don't have the cognitive means to make a lot of sense of grammatical concepts and terminology so there doesn't seem to be much point in talking about auxiliary verbs and definite articles but there's no harm in playing language games that use a lot of auxiliary verbs and definite articles or singing songs with them in!

MODERATOR> Does this answer your question also, Harald?

Harald Dahle> yes

karl> Do you think that there is an over-emphasis on grammar and accuracy in beginners and elementary books. Doesn't this ignore what (at least we think) we know about how languages are learned?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> I totally agree. There seems to be more grammar than ever. Beginners books positively ooze grammar and it does contradict the research that suggests that the first stage of learning is primarily lexical as we said before.

MODERATOR> any comments?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Just another word about grammar and accuracy. As I said before, grammar rules don't cause accuracy, it seems grammar rules simply describe accuracy. Rules help make the system more complex which is obviously important. But any system can only take so much complexity before it cracks!

karl> On what basis are books including more grammar than ever?

Jogger> So at what point should we introduce explicit teaching of grammar . . if ever?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> OK Jogger, I think it depends on the learning style and the needs of the students and their learning context, and age of course. But as a rule of thumb, I would say a little bit of explicit grammar won't hurt anyone and it may keep some of the more grammar-fixated ones happy bit it should never be at the expense of opportunities to PRACTISE.

Jogger> Thanks, I totally agree :))

Carmen Zavala> What role, then, does grammar in your opinion, play in the learning/teaching of English?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Can I tell you quickly about Dick Schmidt in Brazil...? This is in answer to Carmen's question. Schmidt went to Brazil and enrolled in classes of Portuguese. He didn't make much headway (no pun intended). So he travelled around and just talked to Brazilians. And his Portuguese took off. Meanwhile he kept a diary of his learning experiences and one of the things that he noted was that, while talking to Brazilians he would NOTICE things that he remembered studying back in Rio and he figured that, although the teaching itself (which was very grammar based). did him no immediate good it acted as a kind of advance organizer for his later acquisition. it helped him NOTICE things in the input, and without that initial instruction he might not have noticed them. So to conclude (!) grammar teaching may help you become more observant - but it's no good on its own - you need lots of INPUT as well.

Harald Dahle> For adult learners who have no extraclass contact with the target language what do you suggest?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Intraclass contact. I.e. as much authentic LISTENING and TALK as possible (am I shouting?).

jeffs> It's not surprising Schmidt didn't make much progress in the lessons, given the pedagogic approach (!) of the place he attended!! However, he's gone on from then, hasn't he, to discriminate between 'noticing' and 'awareness'. Any comments?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Phew. Yes, there are degrees of noticing, and there are degrees of awareness, and this is a focus of a lot of research. Both seem to be essential... and now the buzz term is "consciousness raising" which is simply drawing attention to things (like old fashioned presentations), but without the expectation that they will be IMMEDIATELY internalised. I.e. a bit like drip feed or slow release -that's the current metaphor.

karl> it seems to me that publishers AND teachers are all a bit obsessed with grammar. For example we're all sitting here talking about grammar instead of talking about getting students to talk, motivation, task-based learning, creating opportunities to use language meaningfully etc, etc.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Thanks Karl. It IS odd how grammar gets people worked up. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that as English teachers we need a subject and the alternative to teaching grammar would be simply USING language which means getting students to talk and we all know how hard that is. Any suggestions? Karl?

karl> But as 'communicative' teachers we've got all the 'subjects' we could possibly want!

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Totally agree. It's perhaps more of a management problem - how do you get 30 teenagers to talk about their favourite pizza?

MODERATOR> Come on Karl!

jeffs> Not only getting students to talk, but also finding ways of 'ensuring' that they talk about more complex things and in more complex ways, so that their system is forced to become more (grammatically) complex.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Thanks jeff, couldn't have put it better.

Jogger> Ham and mushroom...sorry!

MODERATOR> There's always someone!

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> It goes back to what I said about working from the STUDENTS? grammar.

karl> By subjects I mean any topic that we think will motivate students to use language meaningfully.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> I know what you mean. But don't underestimate the problems of organisation. That's why teachers fall back on grammar. Did I tell you about the teacher who, when asked by a student if he could go up to the next level, she said: NO your present perfect stinks!

Erika Lizarraga> How can you get students more "grammatically complex" by using complex topics to discuss about?

MODERATOR> that was Jeff, I think

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Maybe Jeff should answer that one - but I would say that you make them use more complex language by first letting them write about the subject first as a form of rehearsal and then maybe topping up - pushing them to rephrase and fine tune their language so that when it comes to the speaking they are extending their present competence -as they say.

karl> Task planning/preparation and task repetition are really important for helping students to use language that is near the 'cutting edge' of their language level.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> No pun intended I hope. Yes, the way you set up a task can have an important effect on the quality as well as the quantity of language produced.

jeffs> The complexity isn't a function of the topic, I don't think. Can't really answer my own point, but Willis's ideas about reporting stages etc. are interesting plus what Scott's just said.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Yes, I love that Willis thing about reporting back to the class AFTER the fluency activity is over. My Spanish is always so much better when I have to make a formal report, at a meeting for example because it's formal I have to focus on the form.

MODERATOR> Going back a bit to a comment you made earlier Scott..... a comment from Lauren

Lauren Robbins> Don't you find that a little unnatural? In real life you don't usually have the opportunity to write about what you want to say beforehand.

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> No,. I agree. But classrooms are unnatural places. if we could learn second languages naturally we'd just hang out in a bar. But I agree that there comes a time even in the classroom, when students need to be thrown back on their own devices for the purposes of developing FLUENCY. But fluency without complexity and you are liable to end up speaking pidgin.

jeffs> Hope your typing's better too!!! (Sorry!)

MODERATOR> Another joker!

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> This is fluent but not accurate typing!

MODERATOR> We're coming up to the end of the hour so here's one last question sent in earlier..... Is it true that English doesn't have much grammar?

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Every language has pattern complexity - but sometimes it's of a different type. English, mercifully, isn't a very inflected language - like Spanish but it makes up for it by having tight syntactical constraints. just think of constructions like "He told me/he showed me..." but not "he explained me..". I'd say English does have a lot of grammar - but we don't have to tell the students all about it all the time!

Jogger> English has very few grammar rules...just lots and lots of EXCEPTIONS!

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> You're pretty exceptional yourself!

MODERATOR> Well everyone. Thanks a lot for participating in this moderated section of the chat. We would be delighted if you want to carry on chatting directly but first, let's thank Scott very much for a very enjoyable hour and erudite too!

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Thanks. I'm whacked. But it was fun!

Jogger> Thanks Scott!

Lauren Robbins> Thanks, Bye, bye from Mexico

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Bye Stephanie. Thanks for moderating.

MODERATOR> Pleasure!

nicky> thanks Scott, that was very informative, and enjoyable!

SPEAKER_Scott Thornbury> Thanks Nicky! And to everyone. Even Karl. Joking. I might just slope off and have that virtual beer.