Grammar is dead! Long live grammar!!

Part One : Grammar is Dead.

Hugh Dellar

Hugh Dellar teaches EFL at the University of Westminster, London, where he is also a teacher trainer. He is the co-author of the upper-intermediate general English coursebook Innovations, as well as the forthcoming intermediate-level follow-up, both published by Thomson learning. He previously taught in Indonesia and has given papers, workshops and teacher training courses all over the world.

The Obituary

Grammar has had a long and distinguished reign and its power has been so absolute that it still permeates every aspect of English language teaching. Over 150 years ago, the Grammar Translation Method took firm root and was to dominate English language teaching for over a hundred years. At its heart was a belief that studying a language involved approaching the language primarily through analysis of its grammar rules, with this knowledge then being applied to the translation of sentences and texts into and out of the target language. Language learning was viewed as little more than memorising rules and facts in order to understand and manipulate the morphology and syntax of the foreign language. The sentence was the basic unit of teaching and language practice, accuracy was emphasised and grammar was taught deductively - by the presentation and study of grammar rules. Vocabulary, where it did get a look in, was selected solely on the grounds that it cropped up in the structurally-driven reading texts used, and single words were taught through bilingual word lists, dictionary study and memorisation. Now, for a method over a hundred and fifty years old, and with little or no theoretical justification relating it to contemporary issues in linguistics, psychology or educational theory, it’s done remarkably well. It’s a method which is still imposed upon many language students around the world and its core ideas still inform the biggest-selling global coursebooks.

Fast forward to the 1960s and Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the nature of language. Chomsky spoke out against Audiolingualism on the grounds that language was not, as he saw it, a habit structure. Chomsky saw language not as imitated behaviour learnt through copying and repetition, but rather as something generated from underlying knowledge of abstract rules, and his mathematically-rooted view of language found favour with those attempting to establish Applied Linguistics as a scientifically-oriented university subject. Chomsky helped to add an academic sheen to the study of language, and - suddenly - grammarians were born out of a white heat of parsing sentences down into their constituent parts.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) initially threatened to overthrow grammar’s dominant position. The linguistics that informed CLT stressed a wider view of language: for the first time, functional language - requests, offers, complaints and so on - and notional categories - concepts such as time, sequence, location and quantity - were being talked about. Greater stress was placed on the communicative value of utterances, and meaning became more central. New activities filtered into our classrooms and methodology became as central a pillar of the new orthodoxy as grammar analysis had been of the old. Pair-work, role plays, balloon debates and so on were suddenly all the rage. Authentic texts flooded instructional materials. Yet out of all this upheaval emerged a new series of coursebooks, backed by the weight of the major British publishers, who had the clout to usher them into classrooms all over the world, which simply took this new methodology and welded it onto the traditional, atomistic, bit-by-bit grammatical syllabi that lay at their heart. Headway led the pack and every successive release from the major publishing houses was essentially devoted to reinventing the same grammar-heavy wheel.

Teachers of my generation (I trained up in 1993) were inducted into the mysteries of modal verbs, the passive and the past perfect continuous on our ludicrously brief one-month TEFL courses; the weighty grammar reference sections in coursebooks got us through our formative teaching experiences and helped us answer all those tricky questions about why you can’t say "I’ve been there yesterday" that came up when presenting the present perfect simple. The advanced DELTA courses we then did made us baffled and intrigued by the notion that there werent just first, second and third conditionals but all kinds of unnamed mixed ones too, and that there was such a thing as a get-passive AND a have-passive.

And so it goes on . . . grammar begets grammar begets grammar!! Teacher trainers teach what they were taught on their own initial training courses; teachers teach what coursebooks dictate and students demand to know what they are used to, in the belief that working all the way through Murphy’s English Grammar In Use - again! - will somehow help them break through the Intermediate plateau they find themselves stranded at!

By now, you are probably starting to wonder how on earth my title - Grammar Is Dead, Long Live Grammar - even remotely connects to what I’ve been talking about. What was heralded as an obituary has possibly ended up sounding more like a eulogy to a long-lived, benevolent ruler and at this stage that I should come clean and admit to a degree of wishful thinking. Grammar as we know blatantly is NOT dead. However, it really should be and there are a whole host of good reasons to explain why I believe we should all be doing our utmost to help it into is grave. It is to these reasons that I would now like to turn.

The problem with Grammar

Firstly, there is the problem of the canonical nature of grammar as it currently stands. We have all been conditioned into believing that we know what grammar is simply because we take it for granted that what we find in grammar books must be the be-all-and-end-all of the story. So it is that for most classroom practitioners grammar basically means verb tenses, modals, conditionals and passives, with a few exotic extras thrown in occasionally for good measure. This is all well and good, but in fact it only tells us half the story. Part of the problem with canons of knowledge is that they are exclusive : they keep out as much as they include, often for cultural, political and social reasons. Canons are also handed down from generation to generation and are largely a matter of traditional consensus. What this means is that the grammar of the written language has long been available to grammarians, for the obvious reason that the written language has been easily available in text form, and has already been much analysed. The far more recent insights into the very different nature of spoken grammar have yet to have much impact on grammar books or classroom coursebooks. Despite the fact that the vast majority of students studying General English are looking first and foremost to speak and listen to English, we are still insisting on furnishing them with the grammar of the written language. Its a bit like having students desperate to learn to play football whilst their teachers hammer them over the head with the rules of cricket, on the dubious premise that its also a ball game, its got eleven players per side and so on.

A second problem is the current gloss of democracy. All specimens of grammar are given equal prominence as if they were all of equal importance. This runs totally counter to what corpora-based research has told us about the way we actually use grammar. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language reveals that over 80% of all verb tense usage in both written and spoken texts is either in the present simple or past simple. But this dominance is in no way reflected in the percentage of space given over to these two tenses in coursebooks. Another statistic that is even more problematic for coursebook and materials writers is that fact that the percentage of verb tense usage in both spoken and written English that is in the present perfect continuous is less than 1%! Yet despite this, units dedicated to this relative obscurity appear in generation after generation of coursebooks. In short, what Longmans have done is put paid to the notion of a broad, diverse grammar-dominated syllabus by showing us that this simply does not reflect the reality of the way language is used.

A third flaw with the way grammar is currently handled is the fact that it’s still widely believed that more grammar makes students more competent users of the language. What this often means in practice is that intermediate-level students are forced back over the same tenses and conditionals they’ve already done to death. Contrary to popular wisdom, very little of what you might want to term Advanced English consists of what coursebooks often label Advanced grammar. Students are conned into believing that the production of such convoluted gems as ‘Were I richer, I would definitely purchase one’ and ‘Had I not arrived in time, the kitchen would have caught fire’ will make them sound more ‘advanced’. The reality is, however, that if learners are to learn how to communicate more complicated ideas, what they need is not more grammar structures like these, but rather different kinds of multi-word phrases. The true mark of an advanced learner is the ability to access under pressure a wide range of such phrases, particularly adverbials - in the not-too-distant future, In marked contrast to this, Going back to what you were saying earlier - and complex, densely-packed noun phrases - The introduction of tighter laws, The continuing decline of educational standards, the re-emergence of a perennial problem - and so on.

This brings me on to my next point, which is to do with the pure pragmatics of time and space. Coursebooks only have so many pages and English courses only have so many hours. The obvious upshot of these limitations is that materials writers and teachers are faced with a stark reality - time spent rehashing the same old grammar means less time being available for exactly the kind of multi-word phrases I’ve just been claiming are essential for fluency.

There’s the added problem that learners denied access to a wide range of collocations and fixed expressions - the most concise, condensed ways of expressing many ideas - need to do much more work, construct much longer expressions with more grammaticisation, thus running a much higher risk of making mistakes than the speaker who can use a precise lexical phrase with very little grammar. For instance, if you don’t know the expressions ‘It boosted team morale’, you have to construct something like the following: ‘It went to make the feeling and the spirit of the team go up’. Similarly, if you don’t know ‘a revised edition’, you may well end up with ‘a new book that is quite similar with an old book, but had been improved and more up-to-date’! This suggests a major change of mindset for teachers. We need to accept the fact that many grammatical errors are actually the result of lexical deficiencies and that what is thus needed is NOT more grammar correction and study, but rather more lexical input.

This really bring me to the crux of my argument against grammar. Long before the notion of a Lexical Approach had taken shape, writers such as Nattinger and DeCarrico and Willis were already pointing out that the traditional - and, I would suggest, still dominant- model of language, a model which involved a clear-cut division of language into grammar (usually tenses) ands vocabulary (usually words), was invalid and that, in fact, we all operate far more in accordance with the notion popularised by Michael Lewis that language does not consist of lexicalised grammar. Rather, it is made up of grammaticalised lexis. What these early writers were suggesting, and what Lewis later propounded more strongly, is that a vast proportion of the language used on a day-to-day basis (and especially spoken language, which is - statistically speaking - the most widely-used form of language, in terms of sheer percentage of time we spend on it) is pre-fabricated blocks or fixed and semi-fixed phrases. Because we speak in real time, with the time pressures that that involves, we need a mass of expressions to enable us to communicate. We could not function if we were putting language together word by word, using only our underlying knowledge of both grammar and vocabulary. We all have thousands and thousands of these phrases in our repertoire - I’d rather not, How should I know?, You’d better not, I’m operating on the assumption that . . . , , Rather you than me, It’s not worth the effort - and yet they still play only a marginal role in the vast majority of language courses.

If much of our language is less creative, more fixed than has generally been imagined, then it should also be added that grammar itself is far more constrained and limited by lexis than has long been believed. The real world imposes a fairly limited set of probable endings on many grammatically-derived sentence starters. It is, of course, possible to say many things, but considerably fewer things are realistically probable. We all know, for instance, that the present continuous is often used to relate future arrangements we have made. However, the very nature of such arrangements tends to mean that this tense is limited to a very small number of verbs in normal, everyday speech :

I’m meeting . . .

I’m going to . . .

I’m having dinner / a drink with . . .

and not a lot else!! In fact, what is of real interest here is not so much this relatively closed set, but the endings each would collocate with :

I’m meeting . . . a friend of mine for a drink later

I’m meeting . . . an old friend from college who I haven’t seen for ages

I’m meeting . . . some friends from work and we’re going out for dinner in town

and so on.

OK, so where has all this got us? Well, about halfway through, in fact. Grammar is dead!! It isn’t, of course, but in its present state, it really well should be!! We use less of it than we imagine; half of the grammar that we do teach, we hardly use at all; much of that which we do use is far more constrained by vocabulary than we may previously have imagined; and much of our actual spoken language is blocks, chunks of pre-fabricated language, grammaticalised lexis. So, I hear you asking, what on earth is the second part of this piece all about? Long Live Grammar? How? Why? And what kind? Well, in the second part of this article next issue, I shall move on to consider the implications of what I’ve been talking about, and try and answer some of these pressing questions.