MATERIALS FOR THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR

[This chapter appears in Tomlinson, B. (ed.) Developing Materials for Language Teaching: Continuum 2003]

It is self-evident that the development of grammatical competence has an important role in second or foreign language learning. However, despite the advent of the so-called Communicative Approach over recent years, and despite the daily evidence offered by learners that the difficulties they encounter in using another language to encode their own meanings are largely to do with lexis and (in the spoken mode) with phonology, the dominance of grammar in teaching materials remains high, to the point of obsession. Furthermore, examination of materials for grammar in coursebooks and supplementary materials reveals that concern with grammatical form continues to take precedence over meaning considerations. As long ago as 1990, Widdowson argued that restricting attention to grammatical form is insufficient: Learners need to realize the functions of the device [i.e. grammar] as a way of mediating between words and contexts, as a powerful resource for the purposeful achievement of meaning. A communicative approach, properly conceived, does not involve the rejection of grammar. On the contrary, it involves a recognition of its central mediating role in the use and learning of language. (Widdowson 1990: 97/8) If one looks at the majority of practice material offered to learners - single sentence practice, random lexicalisation, transformation exercises, wordy and inaccurate rules, etc. - it is hard not to conclude that the realisations and recognitions to which Widdowson refers, as to when and where the grammar practised might actually be employed, are mostly left to the learners themselves to come to. Examples of this would be the common practice of teaching and practising short forms such as Yes I am / No Im not as responses to open-ended questions - to be discussed in more detail later in this chapter - and that of asking learners to transform sentences in active voice into passive voice (or vice versa). Of the latter, an example is the approach taken by Acevedo and Gower (1996:23)i, where learners are told that the Passive is used when The agent is the new, important information. In English, new information often comes at or towards the end of the sentence (a laudable if somewhat limited attempt to refer to the Given-New Principle), information which is then ignored when learners are subsequently asked to identify the subjects and objects in eight sentences, and then to rewrite the sentences in the passive voice [including] the agent only where necessary. When it comes down to it, it is form that matters. Much of the present position of grammar today with EFL is due to the inherent conservatism of ministries of education and the major publishing houses, but also to the fact that the buyer of materials is not the learners, rather the people who make decisions concerning syllabus and/or book adoptions, where the attitude is essentially one of better the devil you know than the devil you dont - the grammar of many publications is comfortingly familiar and allows teacher-training in particular to prepare teachers for its implementation. The current situation with regard to grammar in the profession is subject, of course, to

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much criticism, and in particular there is criticism of the way in which the grammar of the language is taught through focusing on a sequence of individual and discrete grammatical items, to which Thornbury (2000) refers as the delivery of grammar Mcnuggets. Long and Robinson (1998) and others argue that there is too much focus on individual language forms (FonFs) and propose a focus on form (FonF) - in other words, an approach which asks learners to notice language forms as they occur in the data learners are exposed to, and to consider how the form(s) are used to establish particular meanings. This broad approach is also part of Task-Based Learning (TBL) - a book notable for an innovative approach to using texts for examination of language data and focusing on form is Willis (1996). The endeavour to break up the grammar of a language into discrete chunks for pedagogic purposes brings many difficulties with it, not least among which are decontextualized practice, examples given to and elicited from learners which are randomly lexicalised (as both Widdowson and Lewis have pointed out), and the endeavour to involve learners in production activities which are as controlled as possible to avoid learners attempting to use language which they havent learned yet. Nonetheless, the reality for most writers of grammar materials is exactly that. Classroom teachers producing their own materials for use with their own students perhaps have the greatest chance of innovating, and certainly have the best opportunity to take into account the learners themselves (in particular, the extent to which an aspect of English grammar does or does not pose problems for them given their L1); but once material is for publication (into whatever market), pressures to conform to current norms will frequently require the writer to work within the grammar Mcnugget framework. This chapter, then, while not condoning this reality, will try to establish some criteria for the creation of grammar materials and suggest some guidelines and thoughts for grammar materials which work within the traditional grammar areas. The writer of materials for the teaching and learning of grammar has a number of considerations to take into account. These include: a) the age and level of the learners who will be using the materials; b) the extent to which any adopted methodology meets the expectations of a) learners, b) teachers, c) the educational culture within which the learners and teachers work; c) the extent to which any contexts and co-texts which are employed in order to present the grammar area(s) will be of interest to learners; d) the nature of the grammatical areas to be dealt with, in terms of their form, their inherent meaning implications (if any), and how they are used in normally occurring spoken and / or written discourse; e) the extent to which any language offered to the learners for them to examine the grammar used represents realistic use of the language, and the extent to which activities for learners to produce language containing the target grammar will result in meaningful utterances, and ones which bear at

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least some resemblance to utterances which the learners would be likely to want to produce in their own, non-classroom discourse; f) any difficulties that learners can be expected to encounter when learning these areas of grammar, especially with regard to any similarities or differences in form, function, and form / function relationship, between the target language and their mother tongue. The first three listed here are of course of great importance for anyone working with or designing materials for classroom use. This article restricts itself to considering the last three, since the extent to which grammar materials accurately reflect the language and the learners linguistic needs, and to which they encourage and allow learners to produce language which is of relevance to them, are factors whose absence may result in material which is interesting but of low pedagogic value. With regard to criteria d and e, one might immediately consider the continuing tendency of materials to avoid normal ellipsis in practice activities which are intended (presumably) to teach language that can be used conversationally, e.g. in Ur and Rib (2000:4) learners are presented with exchanges such as: Whats your name? / My names Debora, How old are you? / Im fourteen, Whens your birthday? / My birthdays in September (etc.). What is clear in such writing is that writers (and / or editors) retain the view that the exemplification of grammatical form(s) is more important than the presentation of naturally occurring language. A further example is an area included in virtually all grammar materials and which is referred to as short answers: Yes I am / No he isnt / No they havent etc. This is normally treated as a stand-alone area - Yes/No questions can simply be answered in this way, and learners are given practice exercises which involve simply question and response. Invariably, no reference is made, or indication given to learners, as to when such responses may or may not be appropriate - the function or pragmatic effect of utterances such as Yes I do is ignored. Whitney (1998:136) includes the following practice of past simple: learners are asked to ask and answer with a partner, are given the prompt play - football - yesterday and the example Did you play football yesterday? Yes, I did / No I didnt, and then asked to produce further exchanges with prompts such as study - a lot - at the weekend and watch - TV - yesterday. Getting learners to produce only these short answers is presumably based on the belief that they do not have the linguistic armoury to say more; however, their use as encouraged in such exercises could often, in conversational settings, result in learners coming across as brusque, if not downright rude. Such utterances tend not to be used as responses to questions at all, but rather to correct or disagree with another speakers statement or claim, and would normally be followed up with a correction or further comment. Therefore these misnamed short answers need to be taught and practised a) in contexts such as disagreeing or correcting, and b) with appropriate follow-up to the short answer, giving exchanges such as: A: Youre late! B: No Im not. Its only eightthirty or A: Neil Youngs American. B: No he isnt, hes Canadian (etc.) The materials writer wishing to

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get learners to produce short answers would need to develop possible conversational exchanges which begin with statements that learners can either disagree with (because they know them to be untrue), or else to which they can give a contrary opinion. Exercises might be developed along the following lines: A: Mel Gibsons a really good actor. Hes British, you know. B: _____________________. Hes Australian. (Learners would be expected to produce No he isnt in the gap). Practice exercises which develop a theme such as this will, of course, be more complex for the materials writer to produce and for the learner to engage with - however, not to do so easily results in grammar practice which is not language practice. There are many traditional areas of grammar which appear in virtually any grammar syllabus or list of contents and which do not need to be dealt with as separate areas, and certainly not dealt with discretely. One example, to be looked at in some detail here, is reported speech. Willis (1990), among others, has argued that it is unnecessary to treat this as an area of language with its own separate existence and set of rules. (One might also argue that for conversational language use, it is a relatively unimportant feature of language to teach, since Direct speech reporting (where the speaker gives an apparently verbatim report of what someone said) is an important and recurrent feature of conversation (Biber at al, 1999:1118)). If we look at what a speaker needs to do in order to produce an utterance in reported speech, we will find things such as: a) the ability to select a verb which reflects how the reporter views the original speech act (e.g. say, tell, explain, suggest, admit, ask, etc.); b) knowledge of the implications of the verb selection for the following structure (e.g. he asked me if or he asked me to ); c) the ability to refer to periods of time at a deictic distance (e.g. the day before / the following day / three weeks later as opposed to yesterday / tomorrow / in three weeks time etc.), and also to make other deictic references at a remove (e.g. the house as opposed to this house etc.); d) when the verb selected for reporting is followed by a that verb phrase, the ability to select an appropriate tense form for the verb in the that clause. The first three of these need not - and, arguably, should not - be left until the area of reported speech crops up in the syllabus. Learners need to know what the verbs used to refer to different speech acts mean and how to employ themii. The verbs have differing grammatical implications: some (inform / tell / persuade etc.) require an indirect personal object; others (suggest / admit / say) take either a noun object or a that clause (etc. etc.). But these features are of the verbs themselves, not of reported speech, and need to be taught as the verbs occur during a course. Equally, the time phrases, demonstrative pronouns

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etc. have no exclusive linkage with reported speech, and can be taught and practised with narratives and so forth. Many of the so-called features of reported speech can, then, be seen as quite separate and taught as such. Thus an approach can be developed which provides learners with a great deal of the linguistic armoury they need in order to report speech, without teaching them reported speech as such at all. The fourth point, however - that of selecting the appropriate verb tense form - is perhaps more complex. The verb select is used here consciously - speakers select the tense rather than transform from one to another, and although such selection is not at a very conscious level, native-speakers of English will be aware of the effects of differing choices in e.g. He said hes coming or He said he was coming. In a way very similar to the selection of time phrases (e.g. a reporter of a speech act which referred to tomorrow may employ either the phrase the following day or similar, or else maintain the word tomorrow, depending on the circumstances of the time of reporting), the selection of a verb tense form will reflect either the speakers knowledge of the prevailing time references, or else his/her interpretation of the situation. To illustrate: if someone approaches me as I am writing this and says Johns arriving tomorrow, and I report this later today, I may report it as X said Johns arriving tomorrow. Naturally, if I report this tomorrow, I will no longer refer to tomorrow, but to today. However, no matter when the reporting takes place, up to the point of Johns arrival or my receipt of other information, I may select to use the form was arriving if I so wish. To do so would indicate either a) but I now know that this is no longer the case, or b) it may or may not be the case - I am not willing to vouch for the truthfulness of what I am reporting. It may be necessary for learners of English to become aware (if they are not already) that these options are open to them. At this point, what has been said about reported speech is liable to incur the wrath of grammarians such as Swan (2001:182), who inveighs against what he terms the I have seen the light approach to areas of grammar, and which he describes as follows: We normally teach such-and-such a grammatical topic (the present perfect, articles, prepositions, or whatever) by giving a large number of superficial rules of thumb. These dont really get to the heart of the matter, and they give the impression that the relevant grammatical area is bitty and arbitrary. In fact, however, there are deeper underlying patterns which guide native speakers instinctive choices. If we can tease out these patterns and convey them to our students, everything will fall into place, and the relevant structures will cease to be problematic. The preceding argument about reported speech certainly claims that traditional approaches do not get to the heart of the matter, and treat it as bitty and arbitrary. However, this does not necessarily mean, as Swan implies, that no problems will remain. Teaching is required, as suggested above. What is debatable is what the teaching should work on. Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, for example, if allowed to follow

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their instincts in tense form selection, will rarely make errors other than of form. (As Swan himself suggests elsewhere (1994:53), quoting an old American proverb: If it aint broke, dont fix it.) Speakers of other languages, however, may need practice to help them with certain aspects of tense selection. But of what kind? Much grammar practice in the area of reported speech is of the kind which requires learners to take a given utterance in direct speech and transform it into reported speech, and to do so by shifting the verb tense. It is hard to imagine that this bears any resemblance to what happens in actual language production - and real-time, on-line language production is what learners want and need to be able to work with. Brazil (1996: 239) points out that: Sentence grammars, deriving as they do from an abstraction away from potential use, pose questions about the organization of language that seem to have little to do with those engaging the attention of people who are involved in communicating with others. and one might add that transformation grammar exercises (whether for reported speech, the passive or whatever other grammar area) require language learners to make decisions and produce language in a way which is quite divorced from the decisions and production that on-line communication will require. What alternatives are there to transformation exercises? Lewis (1993:154) points a possible way forward with a call for an emphasis on grammar as a receptive skill: Awareness raising is a term which has recently acquired currency in language teaching terminology. The unifying feature behind all these commentators is the assertion that it is the students ability to observe accurately, and perceive similarity and difference within target language data which is most likely to aid the acquisition of the grammatical system. Within this theoretical framework, grammar as a receptive skill has an important role to play. This is echoed in many ways by Ellis, who argues for what he terms interpretative grammar tasks which ... focus learners attention on a targeted structure in the input and [...] enable them to identify and comprehend the meaning(s) of this structure. This approach emphasizes input processing for comprehension rather than output processing for production ... (Ellis 1995:88). The notion of grammar as a receptive skill is not necessarily a new one - exercises have been produced and published over the years which require learners to work with aspects of grammar without actually producing utterances which employ the grammar under consideration. Arguments can and have, however, been made for a conscious adoption of receptive grammar on a theoretical basis, as for example by Batstone (1996:273) who argues: Learners may need time to make sense of new language before they are asked to make sense with it. [This is an argument] for receptive tasks to be clearly distinct from productive tasks, and for the former to precede the latter.

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Following this train of thought, and with the goal of helping learners see what choices are available (or not) with regard to tense selection in reported speech, one might design a receptive grammar activity which encourages learners to look at examples of utterances containing reported speech and to find criteria for categorising them. Such an exercise could take the following form: Read the following utterances. They all contain reported speech. Put them into two categories. Group 1: Group 2: Sentences 1, ............ Sentences 3, ............

1. I talked to James last week - he said he wasnt going to So Paulo after all. So we went for a beer on Saturday. 2. Alan called - he said he couldnt ring you last week because he had to go to Paris unexpectedly. Can you get in touch with him? 3. I talked to Paul yesterday - he said he isnt working for the bank any more. Did you know? 4. Sara called me this morning - she said she isnt coming to the meeting tomorrow, but shell e-mail you the information, OK? 5. When I talked to Sara yesterday, she said she was sending the information by e-mail. I dont know why it hasnt arrived yet. 6. Theres a Mr Johnson outside who wants to see you. He said its urgent. 7. I saw Joan this morning - she doesnt look well, she said she hasnt eaten for a week. 8. I phoned the electrician, but he said he couldnt come until the following week. So I fixed it myself. Seems to be working OK! Sentences 1, 2, 5 and 8 all illustrate a speakers use of past forms in reporting speech, whilst 3, 4, 6 and 7 illustrate the use of present tense forms (including, in the case of 7, present perfect). However, unless learners are particularly astute, and / or their first language operates in very similar ways, such an exercise will only alert them to the fact that some reported speech operates with past tense, and others with present. For them to begin to perceive why this is so, a further exercise will most likely be required again, on a receptive level, and possibly along the following lines: Look at the underlined parts of these conversations. Which things do the speakers think are still true? And which things do they think arent true (any more)? 1 A: I asked the new guy, Rolf, where hes from - he said hes German. B: German? Alan told me he was Swiss. 2 A: Johns just phoned - he said hes coming at 11.00. B: Thats strange - when I rang him yesterday he said he was coming at 10.00. 3 A: Joan said shes going to France for her holidays. B: Oh really? Shes always changing her mind. Two weeks ago she said she was going to Italy. 4 A: I cant believe youre ordering sushi! You told me you didnt like Japanese food! B: No I didnt I said I dont mind it now and again.

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An exercise such as this, of course, engages learners in a cognitive activity which will not suit all learners. It is certainly not easy. It requires the teacher, as well, to be aware of such things as the use of past tense not only as a device for temporal distancing, but also for psychological distancing (Lewis 1986) and the use of present tenses for temporal and psychological proximity, in order to help learners perceive this. This may well be unmanageable for many teachers, who perhaps prefer the security of rules; however, rules such as put the verb in the direct speech one step back in time are inaccurate, and the welter of information with which learners are usually bombarded and expected to deal with are arguably more demanding and no less suitable than what the above exercise expects them to do. (Learning the distinctions between aspects of the grammatical system is fundamental to extended grammar learning and control - distinctions between active and passive voice, or the use of will or going to, are other examples of this.) Quoting Willis (1990:115), talking about noun phrases but making a comment which is applicable to many other grammar areas: ... most of these exercises are consciousness raising activities. The complexity and unpredictability of [this language] are such that we can offer no prescriptions. All we can do is outline the elements, and encourage learners to examine their experience of the language. It is, however, most important that we do this. But what about practice which requires learners to produce language? A major difficulty with eliciting reported speech from learners is that of establishing deictic references for the learners, a problem which most transformation exercises solve by ignoring. Rather than asking learners to produce utterances involving reported speech, however, one might well ask them first to make selections, as for example in the following exercise (Stranks 2001:28): Choose the most appropriate verb forms. 1. I invited Jim to the party tonight. He said he ________ (wants / wanted) to come. 2. Johns going to live in New York next year. Its odd, because last year he told me he _______ (is going / was going) to stay in London. 3. Dont worry, Mum. Dad said he ______ (ll / d) pick me up from school this afternoon. 4. I dont know why Jim didnt come to the party. Yesterday he said he _______ (wants / wanted) to come. (etc.) This exercise poses problems since several examples allow more than one possible choice. Many people involved in ELT - and that includes learners - have considerable difficulty accepting exercises which do not have clearly demarcated right and wrong answers. Unfortunately, however, language - and that includes grammar - is frequently not a matter of correct or incorrect, possible or not possible. The exercise above moves away from the right/wrong syndrome and thus will be unacceptable to many users (especially teachers); however, asking learners to consider which is more likely or appropriate allows

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them to perceive that choices are available, and that there are subtle meaning differences between the choices. Productive exercises, as mentioned before, are often highly controlled. But where choice is possible, such control is very difficult to achieve, and arguably counter-productive anyway. Alternatives in the area of reported speech would include asking learners to think of memorable things that were actually said to them at some point in the recent or distant past; asking them to report those speech acts; and doing whatever correction or modification proves necessary. (Doughty and Varela 1998 report on a piece of research which suggests that the correction of grammatical errors performed during communication can prove more effective in the acquisition of language forms than controlled practice, although their research did not use the kind of language practice task outlined here.) Grammar materials sometimes fail learners when they give highly contrived examples of the language point in question. To exemplify aspects of reported speech, Jones (1998:122) has a solitary man reading a book and saying to nobody: I dont like this book Im reading now. This is followed by a woman reporting to another: He told me he didnt like that book he was reading then. It is unclear why the phrases Im reading now, that book and then would be used by the speakers in these examples, and they do not ring true in the least. However, grammar materials can let learners down in other ways as well. When practice activities or exercises are given to learners to practise a particular aspect of grammar, it would appear to be desirable that the utterances produced in doing the exercise be ones that a) are feasible language, and b) bear some resemblance to language that the learners themselves might wish to utter. One does not need to look very far to find grammar practice activities in which the learners doing the exercise will produce language which is at best unlikely. A random selection from various published coursebooks follows: Scientists make a lot of clever inventions. (practising a lot of) Athletes must train very hard to be champions.(practising must as modal for obligation) Has John heard her latest record? (practising present perfect simple) James and Emma can speak French. (practising can as modal of ability) There are also very often instances of utterances which simply state the obvious, sentences of the An elephant is bigger than an ant variety. The last of the sentences listed above, in particular, illustrates the common tendency not only to lexicalise randomly, but also to encourage learners to use collocations which are in fact rare (can is much more frequent for possibility than for ability, and, inconvenient though this may be for materials writers, tends not to be used when talking about things like speaking a language, driving a car or riding horses). The first of the above actually includes a collocation (make inventions) which to this native speaker seems to be one which would simply not occur.

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It is, admittedly, not necessarily easy to write exercises where the language produced is consistently relevant to the learners (especially when so many learners around the world in fact have little or no desire to use English at all, certainly not in the short term), is within their linguistic capabilities, and is faithful to actual language use. However, the professional materials writer in particular is surely bound to attempt to do so, at the very least by maintaining normal features of collocation and lexical aspect. To this end, there is less and less need for the materials writer to rely on intuition (or what has simply been encountered in materials previously published). The existence and availability of language corpora, together with concordancing programmes, make it possible to check out what language users actually do, rather than what we think or hope they do. A reference work such as the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language (Biber et al.,1999), based on a corpus of over 40 million words, also provides illuminating statistical evidence as to how language is used (showing, for example, that will is, somewhat surprisingly, more frequently used than going to, and that the modals will, would, can and could are far more common than other members of that group). There are also commentaries on such things as register, style and collocation, making this kind of work a virtually indispensable tool for writers who wish their grammar materials to reflect actual language use. Grammar may be necessary - perhaps a necessary evil to some - but let it be seen and acted upon as part of language, not a separate feature to be learned for its own sake. The grammar materials writer needs to try to put into the hands of both teachers and learners materials which reflect grammars central mediating role in the use and learning of language. Bibliography Acevedo, A. and M. Gower (1996) High Flyer Intermediate Students Book (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman) Batstone, R. (1996) Key Concepts in ELT - Noticing, English Language Teaching Journal Vol. 50/3 Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Harlow: Pearson Education) Brazil, D. (1995) A Grammar of Speech (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Ellis, R. (1995) Interpretation Tasks for Grammar Teaching, TESOL Quarterly Vol. 29/1 Doughty, C. and E.Varela (1998) Communicative focus on form in C. Doughty and J. Williams (eds.) Focus on Form in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Jones, L. (1998) New Cambridge Advanced English: Students Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

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Lewis, M. (1986) The English Verb (Hove: Language teaching Publications) Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach (Hove: Language teaching Publications) Long, M.H. and P. Robinson (1998) Focus on Form: Theory, research and practice in C. Doughty and J. Williams (eds.) Focus on Form in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Stranks, J. (2001) The New You & Me: Grammar Practice 4 (Mnchen: Langenscheidt Longman) Swan, M. (1994) Design Criteria for Pedagogic Language Rules in M. Bygate, A. Tonkyn and E. Williams (eds.) Grammar and the Language Teacher (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall International) Swan, M. (2001) If this is the cure, lets have the disease, English Language Teaching Journal Vol. 55/2. Thornbury, S. (2000) Deconstructing grammar in A. Pulverness (ed.) IATEFL 2000 Dublin Conference Selections (Whitstable: IATEFL) Ur, P. and R. Rib (2000) Clearways: Students Book One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Whitney, N. (1998) Open Doors: Students Book 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press / La Nuova Italia) Willis, D. (1990) The Lexical Syllabus (London: HarperCollins) Willis, J. (1996) A Framework for Task-Based Learning (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman)
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References are made in this chapter to various published materials, in order to offer concrete exemplification of points being made. Similar exemplification could have been made choosing examples from other materials. Although certain activities / exercises are criticised, it is not my intention to suggest that the materials cited do not in toto have pedagogical value. These verbs are often referred to as reporting verbs and of course are often used to report speech acts. However, they are also used to refer to speech acts in the present and future, in which case they are not reporting anything, and so the label is misleading. There is also the issue of verbs such as say, tell and ask being used with continuous aspect on occasions (e.g. John was saying that the shows been cancelled) - grammar materials basically ignore this, along with the increasingly frequent use of go as a reporting verb in conversational settings.

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