Uncovering Grammar by Scott Thornbury

(Book Review)

This is a very short book--121 pages, of which only the first 80 pages are text (the last 40 pages are photocopiable materials and classroom activities.)
It's also a very readable little book.  (Scott Thornbury is always readable).

I am, therefore, embarrassed to admit how long it took me to finish writing this review.  I finished this book way back in December, and it's taken me about a year now to get this review together.

So what happened?
Well, as always, plain old procrastination played a big role.
But aside from that, despite the fact that I found this an easy book to read, it was a difficult book to review because Scott Thornbury touched on a lot of issues, and I had difficulty sorting out my thoughts.   The book touched on the nature of grammar itself, the meaning of grammar, the natural order hypothesis, the way the brain learns languages, cognitive linguistics, etc. 
Sometimes with some of these books I struggle to write a coherent review not because I don't have anything to say, but because I have so much to say that it's difficult to know where to begin.  (I had the same problem with The Lexical Approach and The Case for Christ.)  So, over the past year I kept mentioning this book on my blog, and promising to get around to the review, but never doing it (see--here, here, here, here, here, here , here  , here and here).

Part of the other problem was that I had started up a book club for professional development at my work, and over the past year all my energy has been focused on reading and reviewing those books, which meant that Uncovering Grammar languished in my "to do" list.  

But then, last month, when we needed to choose a new book for the book club, and nobody had any good ideas, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and suggested this book.  (This book is on the list of recommended books for the DELTA, so it counts as part of the DELTA reading list.)

And now here I am with the review.

As I mentioned above, when it comes to readability, it's a really quick and easy read.
However when discussing the subject matter, there are a lot of tangents one could go off on if one were so inclined.
But if one starts opening up all those cans of worms, the book review would never get finished.  So I'm going to deliberately hold myself back and NOT write all my thoughts about everything in this book.  Instead, I'll just try to summarize it in the briefest of terms.

The Review

This is the third book I have read by Scott Thornbury.  (See also Beyond the Sentence and About Language).

Scott Thornbury is perhaps the most well-known author in the TESOL profession.
Scott Thornbury has a reputation for communicating ideas very effectively.  He apparently borrows heavily from other linguists, but because he writes in such a clear and easy to understand way, many teachers prefer to read Scott Thornbury than to read the original academics.

I mention this as background, because in reading these pages, my primary thought was what a wonderful job Scott Thornbury was doing at communicating his message.  The man truly is a wonderful communicator.
A lesser writer would have simply stated their argument.  But Scott Thornbury does an excellent job of building his argument from the bottom up.  He gives lots of examples, and encourages  the reader to think about what is going on.  Then from these many examples, an argument gradually starts to emerge.

It's a masterpiece of communicating.  (While reading this book, I thought about Steven Pinker's thoughts on "The Curse of Knowledge"--video here--the problem that once people know a piece of information, they find it often impossible to assume the mindset of someone who doesn't have that piece of information, which is what makes communicating through writing so hard.   Scott Thornbury is a perfect example of someone who has managed to avoid this problem.  Thornbury carefully and patiently explains everything to the reader.)

The book is about how to teach grammar--or rather, a book about how grammar is learnt, and suggestions for appropriate classroom activities.

There were some things in this book I completely agreed with, and other things I had questions about.

Scott Thornbury is against the traditional transmission view of teaching grammar--i.e. the idea that a teacher teaches a certain grammar point, and then the students have learned it.
By extension, he also appears to be against the traditional P-P-P approach (present, practice, produce) or at least against the idea that the presentation and practice stage will lead smoothly into production.

Using both his own anecdotal classroom evidence and also linguistic research, Scott Thornbury argues that the human brain can not simply automatize a grammar point in one 90 minute lesson.
When the human brain is focusing on communicating the message, the brain is focused on the content, and not the grammar, and no matter how much the teacher has drilled the grammar, the grammar will inevitably get mangled during free production.  (And in my own classroom experience, I've certainly found this to be true.  I'm sure every teacher has.)

So what to do then?
An alternative would be Krashen's  approach of comprehensible input--give the learner plenty of input, and the learner will pick up the grammar from the input on their own schedule, following the natural order of acquisition.  Scott Thornbury never mentions Krashen by name (instead he just refers to this as the "instruction minus" position) but Thornbury rejects this approach as well.
Many learners, Thornbury argues, don't pick up the grammar even after years of living in a foreign country.  Learning grammar is so cognitively demanding that the human brain will often resist doing it unless it is forced to, and if learners can get by simply with vocabulary and gestures, many of them will never pick up grammar.

"A diet of nothing else but unrehearsed fluency activities, such as group discussions or communicative games, may make learners over-reliant on lexical processes at the expense of developing their grammatical competence," Scott Thornbury warns on page 20.

Indeed, I encountered many of these types of students during my time working at English Conversation Schools in Japan.  And in fact in the very next paragraph Scott Thornbury quotes a description of a Japanese learner who sounded very much like many of my old students.

Sachiko-san was as unabashed and unruly in her embrace of English as most of her compatriots were reticent and shy.  ... She was happy to plunge ahead without a second thought for grammar, scattering meanings and ambiguities as she went.  Plurals were made singular, articles were dropped, verbs were rarely inflected, and word order was exploded--often, in fact, she seemed to be making Japanese sentences with a few English words thrown in.

(From page 20.  Ellipses in Thornbury's original quote.  When I looked at the footnotes, I discovered Thornbury was quoting this description from a travelogue (A) and not from the linguistic literature, but it's a good description nonetheless.)

So, Thornbury argues for a combination of what he calls the "instruction plus" and the "instruction minus" positions.
Thornbury argues that grammar is acquired in the following steps:
1. The learner is exposed to massive amount of input.
2. The learner’s attention is drawn to a particular grammatical feature (possibly through formal instruction)
3.The learner starts to notice this feature in the input
4. The learner begins to experiment with using this feature
5. The learner gets feedback on the accuracy of their use (possibly through formal instruction)
 6. The correct form is acquired.

This process is pretty much the exact same process I had previously outlined in my two workshops on input: Comprehensible Input in Young Learner Classes and Upgrading Your Input--both of which I had written before I read this book.  However I get no credit for being prescient because I was heavily influenced by another book, SLA Research and Language Teaching by Rod Ellis, which Scott Thornbury also relies on.  (In fact, much of Uncovering Grammar is simply retreading Rod Ellis, but Scott Thornbury's version is much more reader friendly.)

Scott Thornbury also believes that because learning the grammar is so cognitively demanding, if left to their own devices many learners will end up like Sachiko-san.  As long as they can get their meaning across, the learner, or at least their linguistic system, is perfectly happy not mastering the grammar.

In order to overcome this, Thornbury argues, learners have to be put into situations in which the grammatical meaning is essential for conveying the message.
The example Thornbury gives in his book is the present perfect.  If teachers simply drill the form of the present perfect, learners will never integrate it into their language.  However, if the teacher designs meaning based communicative activities which force the learner to distinguish between the present perfect and the past simple, then learners will begin to pay attention to the use of the present perfect.

My Reservations
I found myself largely in agreement with this book.  Which is no surprise, because, as I mentioned above, before I had even read this book I had given two workshops on input which largely expressed the same views as this book.

However, I have two areas of reservation:
1) The TEFL Show did an episode on Krashen [LINK HERE] in which one of the hosts cited research that comprehensible input does not appear to benefit learners unless it is more than 6 hours a week.
I'm been trying to find the source for this claim and I can't.  It doesn't seem to pop up on a Google search.  But it may well be in the applied linguistic journals, which I don't have access to because I don't work at a university.
For the moment, I'm going to assume the TEFL Show is accurate.
If that's true, that mean that Thornbury's model doesn't really work in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) environment.  In my case, I only see my students for 4 hours a week.  I encourage them to study English outside of class, but I know that many of them don't.
If comprehensible input is not effective with less than 6 hours a week, than maybe I should just give up on Thornbury's model, and just drill grammar points using the P-P-P approach instead.

2) Thornbury argues that learners will not pay attention to the grammar unless you force them to by  creating a situation where the grammar affects the meaning of the sentence.  But I'm not sure this would work for all grammar points.  After all, what about the 3rd person singular "s" ?  This contains absolutely no meaning at all.  How would you force students to pay attention to the 3rd person singular "s"?  And what about countable and uncountable nouns?  A learner could mess up the distinction between "much" and "many" and still get their meaning across perfectly, right?

Facebook Posts
As part of the book club, I've committed myself to making daily Facebook posts about whatever book we're reading.  (A couple people told me they wanted more discussion on Facebook as a way to increase their motivation to read the professional development books, and I've been doing my best to oblige).
Below are all the daily posts I made concerning this book.  As often happens to me, I didn't pace myself out well.  During the 30 days we had to read this book, I made posts for just about every page in the first half of the book, and then didn't get around to commenting on the second half of the book.

Post 1
A word or two of introduction about the new book: "Uncovering Grammar" by Scott Thornbury.
I've actually read this book once before, but I'll be going through and re-reading it and hopefully posting lots of thoughts on this Facebook page.
This book was chosen in part because it's on the reading list for Delta Module 1.
(See complete Reading list for DELTA Module 1 here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5QgMDk6npsRZFRiaTZqRWgwemc/view)
And a few people on this book club are planning on taking the Delta Module 1 this year, so we try to accommodate that.
However, having read the book, I can confirm it's also of general interest--i.e. it should be useful to any teacher, regardless of whether you're planning on doing the Delta or not.
In the past we've occasionally had to chose between the more theoretical books and the more practical books, but I'm happy to report that this book ticks all the boxes.
There's some interesting theory in here about how the human brain learns and processes grammar. We should get some interesting discussion/debate out of it.
But there are also tons of practical ideas in here for the classroom.
And, as always with Scott Thornbury, the book is very readable.
If you've read stuff by Scott Thornbury before, you know that he has a very light and conversational tone that is very easy to read.
Plus, the book is very short and sweet. So, if you've been wanting to get back into the book club, but feel like you don't have the time, this book will be perfect. It's 122 pages total, but the last 40 pages are all examples of photocopy-able classroom activities. There's really only 80 pages of text here.
Also, if this book sounds familiar to anyone who was at the Productive Skills Workshop last week, that's because I quoted this book in that workshop. The 4-3-2 technique comes from this book.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5QgMDk6npsRUHczNDk4OVo0U1E

Post 2
Some more preliminary notes:
Despite being on the Cambridge approved Delta Reading list (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5QgMDk6npsRZFRiaTZqRWgwemc/view) the view of grammar teaching presented in this book is quite different from the P-P-P method that is taught on the CELTA courses. Scott Thornbury doesn't bellieve it's realistic to take a grammar point the students have never seen before, present it to them, and then expect them to produce it by the end of a 90 minute lesson.
In Thornbury's view, grammatical complexity slowly emerges over long periods of time.
However, Thornbury is not a Krashenite either. Thornbury clearly believes that grammatical instruction helps the students to learn, but that the teacher's job is to slowly help the grammar to emerge, not to teach it directly.
(This isn't actually unique to Thornbury. As usually, he's borrowing from other linguists. In this book in particular, he's borrowing a lot from Rod Ellis).
However, on page 78, in the section entitled "A Compromise", Scott Thornbury does suggest some ways in which his views could be compromised with the more traditional CELTA method.
An interesting "guiding question" for this book (for those of you who like guiding questions) would be
1) How much of this book is compatible with what we learned in the CELTA? How much is contradictory?

2) How much of this book is practical in our context?

XXXX Commented:

 I would dispute that PPP is a huge focus of all CELTA courses .The ILA CELTA course has no PPP lesson plans or guidance notes and most teachers on our course are only exposed to PPP through input sessions. I admit that it is common on CELTA though, mostly as it is easy to assess how well a teacher presented the language and it has clear staging (making it easy for candidates to manage their time effectively - a major area of difficulty for most).
I also think you can challenge what Thornbury says about PPP. Whilst I agree with him that it isn't realistic to learn an entire grammar point in 90 minutes, I think it is feasible that learners can produce examples of that language in a set context within that time frame. Furthermore, how often have you taught a group of learners in our context where no one in the group has ever been introduced to the grammar being covered? I would imagine this is fairly rare. Indeed, one of the criticisms of PPP as an approach is that the presentation and practice don't serve much purpose if the learners are already familiar with the language point (it doesn't offer any diagnostic aspect that approaches like Test-Teach-Test would give).
In response to your actual questions, like most Thornbury books, it contains the mix of easy to digest theory and practical classroom activities that has made him an ELT household name (if such a thing truly exists!). There are lots of ideas that can be applied directly to our teaching context of CLT, though a lot of the content is somewhat outdated and may not appeal directly to our learners, especially teens.

I Commented:

Thanks for the response XXXX.
I remember the PPP approach being the main methodology at my CELTA, but I didn't do mine here, so it's interesting to hear that it's different.
Going outside of Thornbuy slightly, and giving my own personal opinion, my main problem with PPP is that the PPP approach assumes that the students will always be ready to use the grammar in free production by the end of the lesson. But according to the Natural Order Hypothesis, the students will not be ready to learn certain grammar points until they have acquired others.
This is particularly a problem when the textbooks go against the natural order --which the English World textbooks do--3rd person singular "s" is taught in English World 2, way before it is ready to be acquired. Regular verbs are taught in English World 2, and irregular verbs are not taught until English World 3, despite the fact that the Natural Order is irregular verbs first.
I think that following this curriculum, it's impossible to expect the students to accurately use these grammar points in free production. Although they could still be taught receptively, and for controlled practice.

Post 3
p.1
Scott Thornbury mentions the dictionary definition of grammar. He claims the dictionary gives 2 definitions
1) rules by which words change their forms and are combined into sentences --e.g. "I find German grammar very difficult"
2) a book which teaches these rules: "This is the best Italian grammar I've seen."
I find the first one familiar, but the 2nd one a bit strange. I'm thinking the 2nd one is probably not used in American English. We Americans would say "grammar book" instead. Does that sound right to the other Americans?
...on another note, I think some dialects use "grammar" to talk about a primary school, right? But offhand, I'm not sure where those dialects would be.

Post 4
Sidenote:
Ever since I saw this Steven Pinker video on "the curse of knowledge", it makes me more appreciative of writers that can explain things really well.
https://youtu.be/OV5J6BfToSw
According to Steven Pinker, most people struggle to write clear prose, because once we know something, it's difficult to put ourselves in the position of someone who does not know the same thing. And we assume too much, and consequently confuse our listener.
Scott Thornbury has always struck me as the master of clearly explaining concepts. Despite the fact that he's been working in language teaching for years, and probably learned all this stuff long ago, he is able to break it down so clearly and explain everything so well to the novice reader.
I'm particularly impressed by his first chapter, and how well he explains when and why we use grammar.

Post 5
p.10
Scott Thornbury talks about the differences between "bite man dog' and "dog bite man" and "the dog was bitten by a man"
...speaking of which, if anyone is interested, I have similar sentences on a Google Slides-or images designed to elicit these sentences. (Images are stolen from a Google Images search).
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11U7dzwDuGR4LtqELzIbQ47ZkNuWcKB-DNogZ8bUYtBw/edit?usp=sharing
I use this when teaching the passive voice in order to illustrate:
I eat a hamburger
I am eaten by a hamburger
The dog bites me
The dog is bitten by me
...It reliably gets a laugh from the students every time.

Post 6
p.12
You've got to give Scott Thornbury credit for choosing interesting examples.
I tried to find more information about that circus incident, but searching through Google only brings up links to this book.

Post 7
Chapter 2:
Scott Thornbury uses the example of "Me Tarzan, You Jane". Which always makes me think of this Farside cartoon
https://thesestreets.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/farsidetarzan22.gif

Post 8
p.16
Given that Scott Thornbury's been one of the major critics of the lexical approach (see link below) it's interesting that on page 16 he's essentially saying the same thing as Michael Lewis: children memorize lexical phrases first, and then later break the lexical phrases down into the grammatical components. Michael Lewis, of course, goes a step further and also extends this to what second language learners should do.
http://nebula.wsimg.com/9129eed8a13130f4ee92cf2c3ce5b13e?AccessKeyId=186A535D1BA4FC995A73&disposition=0&alloworigin=1

Post 9--This one wasn't me, but was by a friend.  I'll call him XXXX
In Chapter 3, Thornbury talks about recasting and says "The research into the effects of these kinds of feedback devices is quite encouraging". Didn't we learn, though, in an earlier book that recasting is ineffective for learners before adulthood? Am I misremembering. Does Thornbury make a distinction between a general recast and a recast with appropriate emphasis as given in his example?

XXXX Commented:

Recasting is a great feedback strategy! Every feedback strategy is appropriate at different times and it depends on the classroom!

XXXX Commented:

Indeed, judging by the research I found on the internet, it has been shown to have proven benefits (though perhaps less than other feedback methods).
I do recall the main complaint being that many learners won't recognize the recast as being a correction. Instead they see it as an alternative form. And even if they do perceive it as a correction, if they don't then use it themselves, it isn't turned into uptake.
Anyway, seems my brain made a generalization based on a previous DELTA book. Wish I could remember the author though. 

I Commented:

How Languages are Learned by Lightbown and Spada. The authors said adults sometimes pick up on recasts, but children seldom do 

Post 10
p.15
Speaking of Nim the Chimp, did anyone ever see the documentary Project Nim? It's interesting if you can track down a copy. They detail all the chaos that went on behind this experiment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxQap9AAPOs

XXXX Commented:

If you're into language experiments with chaos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prmx0lYBTko

Post 11
p.17
When writing about the linguistic stages a child goes through, Thornbury comments: "At stage 2 he uses pronouns but he seems to be operating on a simple word-order rule: at the beginning of the sentence use 'I'; at any other place use 'me'. This is not a bad rule-of-thumb, since 'I' does start sentences as often as not." *End quote*
Fair enough, it isn't a bad rule of thumb. Which makes you wonder where sentences like, "Me and Jim are going" come from.
To go off on a slight tangent...a while back I was correcting student writing, and I across the sentence: "Me and my friends went to the mall" and was unsure of whether to mark it or not.
Technically it was a mistake, but it was a mistake that even native speakers would make. (I've said similar sentences myself). So I asked around for a second opinion, and was advised me not to mark it.
Of course, according to a descriptivist view of language, native speakers do not make mistakes by definition.
...and yet, it is an interesting use of language. Our language faculty would never allow us to say "Me went to the mall" so why does it allow us to say "Me and my friends went to the mall."
I suppose one answer is that the addition of "and my friends" confuses our language faculty, and causes it to lose track of whether "I/me" is functioning as an object or subject.
But when you consider everything else that our language faculty effortlessly keeps track of, this explanation doesn't really make sense.
For example, the language faculty effortlessly keeps track of subject-verb agreement, even when the subject is separated from the verb by a lengthy clause. (e.g "The boy who I told you about last summer has a new dog.")
And our language faculty effortlessly keeps track of whether the relative pronoun is acting as a subject or object in a relative clause. Every native speaker of English intuitively knows that a relative pronoun can be omitted if the relative clause is defining, and if the relative pronoun is functioning as the object of the clause. And so every native speaker intuitively knows that "This man I like is tall" is acceptable, but both "the man likes me is tall" and "Thomas I like is tall" are ungrammatical.
So with all the complex operations our language faculty can keep track of, why does the addition of 3 little words "and my friends" suddenly cause our language faculty to forget whether to use the subject pronoun or the object pronoun?

XXXX Commented:

Perhaps it has to do with the ease of pronouncing it? Pronouns seem to be the thing native speakers screw up the most, to the extent that hearing the correct pronounciaion of things (e.g. "This is he." on the phone. "He and I...") sounds unusual or overly formal.
Honestly, it's an interesting question. I'm surprised the books so far haven't commented much on the merits of correcting or nt correcting ungrammatical though accepted English.

Post 12
p.18
Thornbury writes: "At first the -ing ending is applied indiscriminately to all verbs. But over time, the learners in the study started to restrict the use of -ing to certain contexts, and mainly as a marker of pastness: 'Yesterday I no working' ".
So, as I mentioned before, this is my second time through this book. I first read it about half a year ago.
After I read this part, I've started to actually notice it. (I think I never noticed it before because nobody had drawn my attention to it.)
Particularly, I noticed this in the level testing booth. I started to notice that a lot of very low level students who come to our school (around Beginner C level) actually do seem to use the "-ing" to indicate pastness, exactly as Thornbury said.

Post 13
p.19
Scott Thornbury talks about the order of acquisition for pronouns.
First between self and not self, then between singular and plural, and finally between gender.
Thornbury writes:
"Interestingly, the gender distinction is the last acquired, suggesting that--psychologically, at least--gender is a more 'distant' concept than either person or number."
Interesting, also, that once again English World manages to mangle the order of acquisition. In English World 1, the "he/she" distinction is taught before the singular/plural distinction.

Post 14
To return to an earlier debate on P-P-P, the quote on page 20 seems to be a pretty good illustration of why we can't always expect learners to produce a certain grammar point at the end of a 90 minute lesson:
"Learners do not acquire pronouns as if they were arranged in a single ensemble or list, since some features are preconditions for others, and must precede them in acquisition. If we wish to visualize the process, it might be convenient to think of it as the growth of a tree; twigs can not grow before branches...Unfortunately, this state of affairs is not often taken into account by teachers or textbooks, and learners tend to be presented with whole sets of pronouns in a single lesson. The result is, very predictably, confusion and frustration."

Post 15
On page 20 Scott Thornbury quotes from a description of a Japanese woman who has fossilized at the lexical level:
"Sachiko-san was as unabashed and unruly in her embrace of English as most of her compatriots were reticent and shy. ... She was happy to plunge ahead without a second thought for grammar, scattering meanings and ambiguities as she went. Plurals were made singular, articles were dropped, verbs were rarely inflected, and word order was exploded--often, in fact, she seemed to be making Japanese sentences with a few English words thrown in."
When I first read this, I thought, "That is a spot-on description of many of my old students in Japan."
However, if you follow Thornbury's footnotes, it turns out this description comes not from the linguistic literature, but from a novel that Thornbury is quoting from
https://www.amazon.com/Lady-Monk-Four-Seasons-Kyoto/dp/0679738347
Which... I don't know, how do we feel about this? Is this acceptable for Thornbury to use a novelist's description in support of his point, or not?
But for what it's worth, as someone who taught English for 8 years in Japan, I thought this was an entirely accurate description of many of my old students.
The Japanese public school system is notorious for producing students who know the grammar of English, but can't speak a word of it. However, there exists an industry of "English Conversation" schools in Japan, in which Japanese people go to only study speaking. (At my school, we were explicitly forbidden from trying to teach the students grammar. The students were only there to study grammar.)
Students who went to these "English conversation" schools for years and years ended up sounding exactly like Sachiko, described above.
It was because of this experience that I've never been a Krashen purist--i.e. I've never believed that students could learn grammar only from the input. They need some grammar instruction.
However, my experience has also lead me to believe that you can't build grammar from the bottom up. Students don't learn grammar just by being taught the rules. Rather, they need to have acquired a passive familiarity with the grammar (from the input) before grammar instruction can be useful for them.
This is, I believe, more or less the position Scott Thornbury is also arguing for in "Uncovering Grammar"

Post 16
p.26
I'm unfamiliar with this software, but it reminds me of a website that my co-workers often used in Cambodia (but that I haven't seen in use much here)
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/

Post 17
p.25-26
Scott Thornbury writes:
"Another technique that facilitates grammaring is task repetition. Simply getting the learners to repeat the task, with different partners, or in the next lesson, is a way of producing more grammatically complex language. Having done the activity once--as a kind of rehearsal--learners now have more spare attention to devote to the form of their output. Repetition serves to lower the pressure, increasing the likelihood of grammaring. ... One way of building repetition into this task is to have them tell as many people in the class as possible, with a view to finding out whose weekend was the most similar/most different to theirs. Another is through the 4-3-2 technique . This involves learners performing the same task but within successively decreasing time limits. For example, Student A talks about a topic or tells a story in four minutes, while his or her partner listens and keeps an eye on the clock. Student B then does then same. Then student A retells his or her piece, but this time in three minutes, and so on. The repetition of the task encourages greater linguistic complexity, while the decreasing time limit is aimed at promoting greater fluency."
*ENDQUOTE*
Since I first read this book, I've incorporated the 4-3-2 technique into my classes. I use in the "Telling Your Stories" activity (I would do one of these every class with pre-intermediate students to give them more speaking practice).
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5QgMDk6npsRNEg0eFdHc2N3a00
I did make some adjustments.
First of all, instead of giving each person 4 minutes (followed by 3, and 2), I gave this time for both partners to tell their story.
I did this for a couple reasons.
First of all, to save time. Since I was trying to sneak one of these in every lesson as a supplement to the regular coursebook material, I didn't want it to eat up too much classtime. (And by the time both partners speak for 4 minutes, then both speak for 3 minutes, then both speak for 2 minutes, that's like 18 minutes total).
Secondly, in my experience, it's hard for students to speak for 4 minutes.
Even IELTS students (in my experience) need to be pushed in order to be able to speak for the whole 2 minutes in IELTS Speaking Part 2.
Actually, I don't know what Scott Thornbury was thinking starting out with 4 minutes.
I mean, I get the general idea of the 4-3-2 activity. The first time the student speaks, they waste a lot of time searching for the right words. The 2nd and 3rd time, they can do the same activity in less time. So I understand 4-3-2 in theory, but how many ESL students can talk for 4 minutes? Shouldn't it be more like 2 min-1 min-30 secs?
Anyway, that complaint aside, I've found the basic idea of having the students repeat their story 3 times does seem to lead to better fluency and more accuracy.
I also sneak in some delayed error correction after each round. Which I think also helps with accuracy. Although I'm not sure how Scott Thornbury would feel about it.
I snuck the 4-3-2 technique into the workshop I gave last month on productive skills.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JMIfwaVwBZu27WEYfiX93DmG7XhlzKBaTvkaN8GZcWs/edit?usp=sharing

Post 18
p.28
Scott Thornbury writes:
"One further way of building into a task a degree of distance (and remember, distance is good for grammaring) is to formalize it. Writing, by its very nature, does this to some extent. Another way is to exploit the effect of social distance that occurs when students are asked to perform, eg by making a formal report of an activity to the class. After conducting a survey, for example, students in groups prepare a report which one of them delivers to the class--preferably standing up on in front of the class"
*ENDQUOTE*
One activity I have that works good for this is "Get to Know Your Group". I usually use this on the first day of a new class.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5QgMDk6npsRU055aENXdkIzaVE/view

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1084n6Im0vlxnM-hDlRi59TZkPnZ5mItkCCcvc5ZMDI4/edit?usp=sharing
Students talk about the questions in their groups first and then afterwards present to the class on what they had in common, and what they were different on.

Post 19
The man himself on PPP. Thoughts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EddmOr-b57g

Post 20
So, how many people are using duolingo to study Vietnamese?
I've gotten into some interesting discussions about the benefits and demerits of duolingo. What seems to bug a lot of people is the absolutely absurd sentences that duolingo makes you translate (one example of many "you are that goat").
I thought about this while reading pages 28-29. Scott Thornbury argues that text that go against our mental schemata of how the world is supposed to work are useful for learning grammar, because it forces us to pay more attention to the grammar. What do you guys think?
PS--if you are using duolingo, and want to compete for weekly points, put me on your list of contacts: https://www.duolingo.com/JoelSwagman

XXXX Commented:

From a classroom perspective, I like Thornbury's "grammaring up" tasks involving strange schemata. However, I think this should be just one aspect of grammar learning, along with explicit form-based instruction and consciousness-raising activities and such. Duolingo, however, has taken this nonsensical schemata idea almost as its core. Thornbury, in the same chapter, emphasizes the importance of reducing the processing load of learners, and I find that to be much easier if the learners themselves have memorized meaningful chunks rather than having to contend with yet another pointless expression like "the fish bites the mug" or some garbage.
Duolingo may be good at motivating people to use its app, but I question whether it is good at motivating people to actually use the language. It isn't easy when one has to wrestle these absurd sentences into something conversational.

I Commented:

I think reducing the processing load is only a consideration in freer practice. In controlled practice, it's not so much of a concern. So for the purposes of the duolingo grammar exercises themselves, I don't think processing load is a problem.
It does not, however, give you useful lexical phrases to use out in the real world. Which it sounds like is what you want.
It's a pity Michael Lewis never designed his own version of duolingo.

XXXX Commented:

Fair, I guess I'm focused on that freer practice aspect.
It's a pity indeed. The only "chunks" that language learning apps seem concerned with are the small chunks of time that one can spend using them at a time.

Post 21
p.30
Scott Thornbury suggests "The grammaring up potential of strange schemata suggests a number of classroom tasks"
His second suggestion is "students take a selection of unrelated pictures and weave them into a story."
Although it doesn't use pictures, I think this collaborative story writing activity is similar enough to also count. Provided that you get students to use combine all the prompts into one story:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oUkgrLHxmwDflvsjFpwZ6_iHIg0JU3UKGQOaOxog3WE/edit?usp=sharing
(This activity comes from the workshop on productive skills,
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JMIfwaVwBZu27WEYfiX93DmG7XhlzKBaTvkaN8GZcWs/edit?usp=sharing

Post 22
Tangentially related to the topic of "Uncovering Grammar"...a workshop on Activities for any Grammar Point,
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/0B5QgMDk6npsRU3VuTXBHalEtYUk

Post 23
p.31
Scott Thornbury writes:
"...you can't devote equal attention to meaning and form. It's a condition not unlike that of the US president of whom it was said that he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time."
This got me curious. Which one was it? So I googled it and...
As Minority Leader in the House, Ford appeared in a popular series of televised press conferences with Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, in which they proposed Republican alternatives to Johnson's policies. Many in the press jokingly called this "The Ev and Jerry Show."[43] Johnson said at the time, "Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time."[44] The press, used to sanitizing Johnson's salty language, reported this as "Gerald Ford can't walk and chew gum at the same time."[45]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#House_Minority_Leader_.281965.E2.80.931973.29

Post 24
p.31-32
Scott Thornbury writes:
"...there is reason to believe that if the system locks at the 'I go...' stage, it may have a knock-on effect, such that a whole range of emergent grammatical structures are effectively 'turned off' too. The learner who gets stuck on saying 'I go" instead of 'I'm going' is as likely to get stuck on saying 'I no like' instead of 'I don't like', and 'I am student' rather than 'I am a student'...."
An interesting idea... that fossilization in one grammatical area somehow spreads out to all the other grammatical areas. Anecdotally, it certainly seems to be true, doesn't it? But it's a pity that Scott Thornbury doesn't explain this more. I would have been interested to hear more about the theory behind why this is.
My best guess is that he's referring to the order of acquisition (something that has come up before in a couple of the books we've read--Ellis, and Lightbown & Spada). The idea that the human brain cannot learn certain structures before others are acquired--or at least cannot use them in free production.
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/krashenfivever1-2fv-130603082420-phpapp01/95/krashens-five-main-hypotheses-16-638.jpg?cb=1398794756
Or does anyone else have another guess?

Post 25
p.34
Thornbury writes:
"Therefore, misunderstanding (or pretending to misunderstand) may be a useful teaching strategy. It is a way of showing how form and meaning are powerfully (as opposed to trivially) interrelated."
One of the main problems I have with the whole book (a problem that is illustrated on page 34, but that is true of the book as a whole) is that all of Thornbury's ideas only seem to deal with situations in which grammar and meaning are connected. I don't think there's any place in Thornbury's method for situations in which the grammar carries no meaning. Or am I missing something?
The most obvious example of meaningless grammar in English is the 3rd person singular "s". It conveys no additional information to the listener. How would 3rd person singular "s" be covered under Thornbury's approach?

Post 26
p.35
Scott Thornbury uses a quotation of a father attempting to correct the grammar of his child (and the child resisting correction) to illustrate how difficult it is to get learners to focus on meaning and form at the same time.
If memory serves, Steven Pinker used this exact same quotation in "The Language Instinct".
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/1491514981
Pinker's point was that children do not pick up on grammar corrections form their parents. Therefore, they cannot be shown in any sense to be taught grammar. Therefore, grammar must be an innate part of our brain's pre-programming, that cannot be taught.
XXXX (who lent me The Language Myth) however, would disagree, no?

Post 27
p.35-40: Noticing and Consciousness Raising
I was really captivated by this section.
I had heard of terms like "noticing" and "consciousness raising" before in other books by other authors, but I was never really fully sold on it before.
But, as always, Scott Thornbury does such an excellent job of explaining things, that after reading his explanation, I was sold on it.
As a result, this caused me to alter my movie worksheets significantly.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5QgMDk6npsRUndrYlVBZVY5TWs
Before reading this book, I had just presented the movies to my students as pure input. After reading this book, I realized that in order for the input to become intake, my students might need some help in noticing the grammatical forms they were being exposed to.
So, I started adding a "grammar" section to the end of each PowerPoint to show my students some of the grammar in the movie they had already watched.
Because the first time I read this book, I was right in the middle of "The Emperor's New Groove", I started adding grammar sections right in the middle of that movie--from part 16 onwards.
I then continued doing this with Robin Hood and Princess Mononoke, so all of the slideshows for those movies have a grammar section at the end.
The grammar section is meant to encourage noticing of the grammar in the parts of the movie that students have already watched.

Post 28
p.35 Scott Thornbury writes: "Have you ever had the experience, for example, of being taught a new word in a second language, and subsequently noticing it everywhere? It must have been there before, but you simply didn't notice it."
Has anyone ever had this experience?
I certainly had this when I was living in Japan. (Unfortunately I still haven't learned Vietnamese well enough to get to any sort of stage where I'm aware of the input around me--but I definitely had this in Japan).
Getting away from linguistics, I've also had this with just knowledge generally. Like I'll learn about a new author, or a new book, and suddenly I'll start seeing references to this author everywhere. I'll start noticing this author is being referenced in essays, or quoted in speeches. Of course it must have been always there, but I just never noticed it before.
Anyone have any examples of this? I feel like I have tons of examples of this phenomenon, but the one that sticks out the most is the Flashman books. I never heard of them before a British friend introduced me to this series, but then after I started reading them, I started catching references to Flashman in lots of other essays.

XXXX Commented:

No personal examples, but I have indeed encountered the frequency illusion often. Mostly with new words from books.
I wonder to what extent this noticing effect assists learning. I'd imagine having the brain drawn to recently learned material would only help strengthen that memory.

Slideshow Presentation 
This is the slideshow I used to aid the discussion at the bookclub meeting: slides, pub



Video Review
Video review here and embedded below:



Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky exclusively Interviewed by Pervez Hoodbhoy (October, 2017)

Second Language Acquisition by Rod Ellis

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book
This is another book that I read for the professional development book club I've got going at work.

The general criteria for picking books is that we try to stay on the DELTA reading list (LINK HERE) to keep the book club motivating everyone who's considering doing the DELTA at some point in the future.

We've also decided to try to alternate between practical books and theoretical books,
Many teachers like practical books for the obvious reason that they can use the activities in the class.
But practical books don't lend themselves to discussion as much as the theory based books.  So we agreed to alternate.

We were due for another theory based book, so this is what we decided.

I personally had some experience with Rod Ellis before.  Back in 2013 I read his book SLA Research and Language Teaching.  I found it tough going to be honest, but I also got a lot of information out of it.  So I was not opposed to another Rod Ellis book.

The Review
This is yet another book that acts as a general introduction to Second Language Acquisition.
I'm getting to the point now where I've read a number of general introductions to SLA (see here, here, here and here) and I'm getting diminishing returns out of each one.
For example, when I reviewed Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega , I made a long list of all the interesting things I learned from that book.
At this point, however, I've already learned most of this before, and mostly just reviewing the information.  As such, this review isn't going to comment on all the new and interesting things I've learned.

I can make some general comments on the readability, however.

First of all, this book was a lot smaller than I was expecting.
I knew that Rod Ellis had written some massive books on SLA, and so I was thinking this would be big and juicy with details.
But it turns out, this isn't one of Rod Ellis's bigger books.  This is a slim little volume--only 147 pages, of which only 90 pages are the main text.
(I think the book I must have been thinking of was Rod Ellis's The Study of Second Language Acquisition, which apparently runs over 800 pages.  But it turns out that's a different book.)

This book was also a lot more readable than I was expecting.
I suspect that this is because this book was written as part of the Oxford Introductions to Language Study series, so Rod Ellis is writing to a general audience, and not an academic audience, and he does a good job of adjusting his tone accordingly.
...that is, for the most part.  By the time he gets to Chapter 7 (Linguistic Aspects of Interlanguage), Rod Ellis starts slipping back into academic-speak and, in my opinion, he starts throwing around a lot of terms that aren't adequately explained for the novice reader.

One more complaint:
There are a few instances of what appear to be sloppy proof-reading in this book.  On page 38, Rod Ellis talks about the Japanese difficulties with the /z/ sound, when I'm fairly sure he meant to say the Japanese difficulties with the /r/ sound (more on my reasons for thinking that below).
Section 2 of the book contains a number of reading excerpts followed by discussion questions, but a few times the discussion questions refer to things not contained in the excerpts.  (Example, page 96).

And that's really all I've got to say about this one.

Notes:
* This book was published in 1997, so presumably it must be out of date by now.  Although I lack the expertise to critique it, so I don't know in what ways it is out of date.

* The second part of the book consists of a series of short excerpts from the literature, with discussion questions, organized by the chapter they relate to.   This is apparently the format of the series (Oxford Introductions to Language Study series) that this book is a part of.
It's an interesting idea.
I wish I had read these readings alongside of the chapter they related to. Instead what I did is just read the book straight through, and by the time I got to the reading sections, sometimes I struggled to remember what their context was.

Book Club Comments
As I mentioned before, some people in the book club felt that they lacked the motivation to read these books by themselves, and felt that more discussion on Facebook helped to motivate them to read the book.   So, as with the last time, I kept up a running commentary on Facebook as I read this book.
I'll duplicate all those Facebook posts below.
In some cases, we did get into some interesting discussions in the comments, so I'll duplicate those as well.  But I'll replace everyone's names with XXXX for privacy reasons.

Day 1
Book club update:
The next book is Second Language Acquisition by Rod Ellis

Next Meeting: May 9 (Tuesday)
We're going to be picking up the pace on this one slightly to accommodate people's schedules. So the next meeting will be in 3 weeks instead of the usual month. Apologies to all the slower readers in the group. As always, if the reading pace is difficult for you, feel free to only read part of the book. (We'll try to summarize the book at the meetings so that people who didn't get a chance to read the whole thing can still get something out of it.)
About this book:
Unlike the previous couple books, I've not read this one yet, so I can't review it in advance.
I have, however, read one other book by Rod Ellis, so I'm somewhat familiar with his style.
He's a proper academic, and writes in a somewhat dense academic style. I'll be honest, I found his previous book a bit of a hard go, but if you put in the work to unpack his sentences, he's usually got some fascinating insights into language learning theory.
I'm fully expecting that this book is going to be more on the theoretical side, and less on the practical side. But for people who want to increase their general knowledge of linguistics and second language learning theory, it should be interesting.
(And, as with all the books we've been doing, it's straight off the DELTA reading list, so it should be practical for anyone planning to do the DELTA at any point)
http://thedistancedelta.com/howitworks/books.aspx

Day 2
I'm a few pages into the book now, and I'm going to have to take back some of what I said yesterday. This book is actually pretty easy to read. I suspect that that's because (as series editor H.G Widdowson stated explicitly in the introduction) this book is meant as an introduction to non-academics. So Rod Ellis is probably adjusting his writing style to meet his target audience.
Flipping through the book, it looks like this is also incredibly short. (The main text only runs to 90 pages). So this will work well with our accelerated time table.
It looks like this book will re-cover a lot of the same ground we already covered in a previous book "How Languages are Learned" by Lightbown and Spada. But personally I'm not bothered by that. Covering the same information from a slightly different perspective should help to cement it in the memory more.

Day 3
p.6-8
I swear, that Wes pops up in just about every book on second language acquisition I've read.
(A friend once commented to me that she feels sorry for Wes--the story of how he failed to learn English grammar has been read by just about every linguistics student in the world by now. Of course they changed his real name, so no one knows who he is. But he knows its him, wherever he is.)
To be fair, I guess it is a good case study for demonstrating that input alone does not always make correct speakers. Which is a blow to Krashen's theories.
But, as I think Rod Ellis does a good job of pointing out on page 8, that's the glass half empty way to look at it. The positive way to look at it is that Wes became communicatively competent just from input and interaction.

XXX commented

It's interesting how his inability to learn English grammar is kind of seen as a failure, when his ability to communicate in English after a mere 3 years was such that he could even negotiate business deals. I'm often stunned when I meet people speaking perfectly understandable English and they tell me they have been learning for 2-3 years. The internet frequently claims that a basic level of fluency in any language can be had in only 3 months. Perhaps it is the difficulty of Vietnamese, or the lack of time spent learning it, but being that proficient in Vietnamese in even 5 years seems an impossibility. I wonder what success in speaking VN would even look/sound like.
Edit: Having read more, I guess the issue with learning Vietnamese might tie into what the book refers to as "social identity" and "cultural capital".

I replied:

My experience:
I was conversational in Japanese after only about 6 months in the country.
By contrast, I spent 4 years in Cambodia and never learned any Cambodian. I've been in Vietnam for 2 years now, and really can't speak any Vietnamese.
Some of this is because Japanese is an easier language--at least as far as pronunciation goes.
But the situation made a huge difference. I was living in a small town in Japan, where there was only one other foreigner and I worked in the public schools where there was no one to talk English with.
In Japan there was a big difference between foreigners who taught in the public schools, and foreigners who taught at private language schools. People who worked in the public schools (like I did) usually became fluent in Japanese. Whereas people who spent their whole day working with other foreigners at private English conversation schools usually never mastered Japanese.

XXXX commented:

 Yeah, to be completely honest, I couldn't get past intermediate Spanish until I moved to SAm. I became fluent after living there for two years and just interacting with Spanish speakers. It's a romance language so it's a bit different, and Like Joel said, it's different depending on context. For example, we live in an area of the country where we are not forced to learn more VN than we need to. I was forced to communicate in Spanish, as no one could speak English around me. As for this example in the book being a blow to other theories, I disagree. This particular theory should by no means be a basis for SLA, as Joel said, no one will master a language on input alone. Krashen has since backed down from putting so much emphasis on it, but it's still a legitimate theory as there is definitely language learned through input. As we all already know from experience. 

Day 4
p.8-10
On pages 8-10, Rod Ellis talks about his research involving data collection of two children and their evolving ability to form requests.
This same research popped up in the other Rod Ellis book I've read:
SLA Research and Language Teaching by Rod Ellis

Actually I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable with Rod Ellis's analysis then, and I still feel the same way now.
For example, on page 10 of "Second Language Acquisition" (the book we're reading now), Rod Ellis writes:
"However, it was equally clear that this ability was limited in a number of respects. Their requests tended to be very direct (i.e. they mostly took the form of commands with an imperative verb) throughout, whereas native speakers would tend to use more indirect requests (for example, they make requests by asking questions or giving hints)."
Well, sure native speaker adults do this. But native speaker children? I feel that children are always very direct with their requests, regardless of their first language.
In order for this study to have any value, we would have to analyze what native speakers OF THE SAME AGE are saying, and only then could we make comparisons.
In "SLA Research and Language Teaching" (the book linked to above), Rod Ellis acknowledges this kind of in a brief sentence at the end of his analysis of the study. "This conclusion needs to be treated with caution, however…The study has …provided no baseline data from native-speaker children in a similar classroom context.” ( from p.195 of SLA Research and Language Teaching by Rod Ellis). But even there, I thought he had kind of buried the most important qualification at the end, when he should have been emphasizing it throughout.
In this book we're currently reading, he doesn't even make the qualification.

XXXX Commented:

It's a good point, though J and R were 10 and 11 respectively, which might be old enough for a native English speaker to be using such forms. I'm not sure if this was there age at the beginning or end of the study, but if it was the beginning they'd be even older at the conclusion of his research. Alas, it is an area I know nothing of. It'd be interesting to know more about first-language learning of English.

Day 5
p.19
Rod Ellis talks about transfer errors on page 19.
It got me thinking about what transfer errors Vietnamese speakers make.
I guess the most obvious ones are pronunciation. But what about grammar?
The only one I've noticed is using "have" instead of "there is" to indicate the existence of something. For example "It has a tree outside" instead of "There is a tree outside". (I'm assuming this is a transfer error from Vietnamese, just because it seems to be so ubiquitous among Vietnamese students. But if I'm being perfectly honest, my Vietnamese isn't good enough to say with 100% certainty).
What transfer errors have you guys picked up on among our students?

Day 6
p.20
On page 20, Rod Ellis writes: "In such circumstances, some L2 learners, particularly if they are children, undergo a silent period. That is, they make no attempt to say anything to begin with. Of course they may be learning a lot about the language just through listening or reading it. The silent period may serve as a preparation for subsequent production."
Rod Ellis doesn't mention how long the silent period typically is. But Krashen does. In Krashen's book: The Natural Approach, he claims on pages 35-36 that for immigrant children, the silent period lasts for several months before they attempt to speak the language.
Krashen infers from this that learners in the classroom should also be given a silent period.
(Actually I think we discussed all this before on the previous book, How Languages are Learned)

Day 7
p.21-22
The order of acquisition is something else that we also encountered in "How Languages are Learned"
But in this case, I thought it was interesting that Rod Ellis briefly mentioned the on page 22 the reasons why some researchers are skeptical of a universal "natural order"

Day 8
p.25
On the order of acquisition, Rod Ellis writes:
"The work on developmental patterns is important for another reason. It suggests that some linguistic features (particularly grammatical ones) are inherently easier to learn than others. For example, the fact that learners master plural -s before third person -s suggests that plural -s is in some sense easier to learn."
End quote.
But does it though? I've heard it suggested that the reason that learners acquire the 3rd person -s so late is not because it is difficult, but because it is unnecessary for communication. The 3rd person -s contributes absolutely nothing to meaning. Because human attention is limited, during free production attention is usually needed elsewhere, to attend to the features of language that actually carry meaning. Only once all these other features of language have been automatized is there spare attention for meaningless grammatical features like the 3rd person singular s. (At least according to one theory.)
But what is your experience in the classroom? Do learners find the concept of the 3rd person -s difficult? Or do they find the concept easy to understand in theory, but just have trouble remembering to use it in free production?

Day 9
p. 26
Something related which I picked up from this article here:
Riddle, R. (1986). The meaning and discourse function of the past tense in English. TESOL Quarterly, 20 (2), 267-286.
Native English speakers have a preference for putting all of their verbs into the past tense when narrating a past event, even if it refers to something that is still true now. (For example: The mountain was so big).
This is something that learners often get confused about.
Riddle argues that the past tense is often taught in ESL as having a completive sense. That is, learners perceive (or are taught) that the past tense is used for situations that once were true, but are no longer true at the time of speech. This is in conflict with the native speaker preference for using the past tense to indicate something that was true in the past, and may or may not still be true in present.
This results in learners not using the past tense markers as consistently as a native speaker would.
I feel like I definitely have noticed this in my higher level classes (IELTS, etc). Has anyone else noticed it?

XXXX Commented:

Noticed this exact thing with my S4As recently. They were tasked with writing a 3 day journal about a wilderness adventure, and many students would mix past and present tense in such a way, but I wasn't able to express why it was incorrect in the time allotted for error correction. Seems this issue could deserve its own lesson.

Day 10
p.33-34
Rod Ellis talks about the difference between competence and performance.
If I'm not mistaken, the terms "competence" and "performance" come from Chomsky, and were originally used for studying L1 to express the difference between what a native-speaker actually knows and what they say.
For example, a native speakers frequently make grammar mistakes when they are speaking, but this is just a performance issue. In their head, they know what the correct grammar is, but they just make slips of the tongue when speaking in real time.
Remembering this, it made me think that this was yet another problem with analyzing learner mistakes. Native speakers also make lots of mistakes in production.

XXXX Commented

.. which brings us to the old question, "If a native speaker would say this, is it a mistake?" There's many reasons to believe that the answer is no. You see, technically, "there's many" definitely is a mistake, but the singular form of "be" didn't end up in that sentence purely by chance—it's just easier, especially in rapid speech, to produce "there's" than "there are". So, is it grammatical? No. Is it a mistake? Well, I suppose, that depends on what you believe about native speakers and mistakes. (Which might or might not be related to what you guys are discussing.)

XXXX Commented

Indeed, in a recent Business English class, I had students do a short phone call role play without any scripting, then had them write down the conversation they just had as best as they could remember. I caught quite a few mistakes in their spoken conversations while monitoring that never made it into their then transcribed speech.
Or like XXXX just said, sometimes we sacrifice grammar, perhaps to economize our speech, not because we don't know better, but due to the ease of saying something alternative.
Ellis mentions in the book that speaking can improve when students have had a chance to rehearse, transcribe, and correct their errors beforehand. Perhaps, then, it is our methodology regarding speaking tests and the like that needs to change. 

I replied:

My sister studied linguistics in university, and the faculty there explicitly taught her that anything a native speaker said was grammatically accurate by definition. This was intended to be in response to the old type of prescriptive grammar, where some grammarians sitting in an ivory tower somewhere got to decide what was grammatically correct for everyone else.
However...
I think "whatever a native speaker says is correct" is intended to refer to what native speakers mean to say. This is why Chomsky came up with the idea of competence versus performance. Native speakers all have a perfect mental representation of their grammar in their brains, but they make all sorts of slips of the tongue and spoonerisms because of the pressures of real time production. I know I do this all the time myself--mispronouncing words, saying the wrong words, etc. Like the famous George W. Bush quote: "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning." 

XXXX replied:

I think an important factor to consider in the last example would be whether he self-corrected immediately after saying that, or wanted to but thought it best to pretend that nothing had happened (possibly because he thought that that kind of self-correction would be inelegant in a speech). So, as I understand, Chomsky would say that W.'s performance wasn't stellar, but his competence was, perhaps, alright. 

( Of course, there are dialects of English where a sentence like that wouldn't be considered incorrect at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_English#Conjugation_of_the_verb_.22to_be.22 ) 

I replied:

 Yes, agreed, there are many different dialects. Competence relates to whatever a native speaker considers acceptable in their own dialect.
Competence is difficult to test objectively, because it relates to what a speaker knows and not what a speaker says. (Which is one of the criticisms that Chomsky's critics make). But yes, you are right, according to the competence/performance paradigm, the key issue would be not what Bush actually said, but what was going on in his head. If he realized it was a mistake--either at the time of speaking or later when someone brought it to his attention--then it's a performance issue. If he never realized it was a mistake, then it is a competence issue 

PS--The Nixon transcripts are great examples of this. See here: 

Day 11
p.38
Okay, so I think I've discovered an error in this book. Maybe.
On page 38, Rod Ellis says: "Japanese learners find it difficult to learn the sound /z/ as in "zoo" and "churches"...
Anyone else ever spend time in Japan? I spent 8 years there, and I'm pretty sure Japanese people don't have problems with the /z/ sound. In fact, the /z/ sound occurs in the Japanese language, so why would they have a problem with it in English?
So, I went to the back of the book to check Rod Ellis's references. Apparently this comes from:
L:. Dickerson "The learner's interlanguage as a system of variable rules" in TESOL Quarterly 9, 1975, pages 401-407.
I googled the original article. I can't find it online. But I found other articles which referenced it. Example:
http://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/01-Robert-Bayley.pdf
And it looks like the original article Dickerson wrote wasn't about the /z/ sound at all, but about the /r/ sound. (Which Japanese speakers definitely have a problem with). So I think Rod Ellis mixed things up when he said the study was about the /z/ sound.
Or did I mix things up? Let me know if I missed something.

XXXX Commented

Didn't spend enough time there to notice something like this, of course. Some quick googling tells me that 'z' only shows up in the beginning and middle of japanese words, and that if at the beginning it is always proceeded by a 'd' sound, but nothing indicates that they have difficulty learning this. Maybe the author made a mistake. Or maybe he watched too much "Godjira" and made an assumption, ha.

 I replied:

 XXXX, I'm not sure what your source is. It is true that the /z/ sound never shows up at the end of words. But then that's normal for Japanese. They have weird phonotactics over there--consonants can never end a word, except for nasal consonants (n, m).
I've never heard that if it is at the beginning, it must be proceeded by a "d" sound. In fact I can think of several Japanese words that start with a /z/ sound. And besides, according to Japanese phonotatics you couldn't have consonant clusters anyway without vowels in between. So I think your source is in error.

XXXX replied:

Japanese does have this consonant but once more, it is not specifically uttered in the same way. First and foremost, the sound /z/ in Japanese never occurs at the end of the word and thus it is always substituted for the consonant /s/. When it does occur either in the beginning or middle of the word, it is preceded by a consonant similar or identical to /d/, which means that the tip of the tongue makes contact with the teeth prior to releasing the restricted air of the English /z/." -englishspeaklikenative.com
perhaps an untrustworthy site

I Replied:

 Interesting. It's definitely not spelled that way in Japanese words.  And this was never taught to me in any of my Japanese textbooks or Japanese classes.   But now that I think about it, perhaps there is a slight alveolar tap prior to sliding into a /z/ sound in Japanese? 

Day 12

p.38
Putting aside whether or not Rod Ellis mixed up his example phoneme here, I feel like he's not wrong in on the main point. Although maybe this is common sense, and not so overwhelming?
To quote from page 38:
"One study found Japanese learners produced /z/ most accurately when reading isolated words and least accurately in free speech. They produced it at a level between these two when reading a dialogue."
I feel like in Vietnam, the equivalent to this might be the /s/ at the end of words.
In my classes, I've been finding that often students can produce /s/ accurately when reading sentences, but will often drop it in free production.
Does that match up with what everyone else has been finding in their classes?

Day 13

p.39
Rod Ellis talks about accommodation theory, and convergence and divergence.
The definitions he gives of convergence and divergence are a bit short and confusing, so I thought I'd supplement it with the definitions from The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics.
They define divergence as:
a type of accommodation. This involves emphasizing speech and non-verbal differences between the speaker and other interlocutors. For example, a person may exaggerate their rural accent because they are annoyed by the attitude of someone from the city.
And convergence as:
a type of accommodation. This is a strategy in which people adapt to each other's speech by adjusting such things as speech rate, pauses, length of utterance, and pronunciation For example, a teacher may use simpler words and sentence structures when he/she is talking to a class of young children.
I may be overgeneralizing, but in my mind I've applied this theory of convergence to explain why we English teachers often find ourselves subconsciously adjusting our speech to match that of our students. I think this is why we often find ourselves, often without even meaning to, mimicking some of the grammar mistakes of our students when we speak to them.

Day 14

p.43-44
I forget where I heard this, but I heard somewhere that responding to compliments is one of the trickiest aspects of sociolinguistics.
On the one hand, you don't want to be seen as vain by accepting the compliment.
But on the other hand, you don't want to be seen as disagreeable by arguing with the person who gave you the compliment.
These two things are in conflict, and different cultures will prioritize one or the other.
For example in Japanese, the priority is to appear humble, and so you have to strenuously disagree with any compliment that you get.
Whereas in English, the priority is to appear agreeable, and so you usually politely thank the speaker for any compliment you get.
...Or at least that's what I picked up from somewhere. Does that ring true to everyone else?
Rod Ellis, on pages 43-44, says that Americans usually downplay the compliment, which is true I think. We do try to downplay it, but we don't do it as strenuously as some other cultures.
Interesting that in his section, Rod Ellis (a Brit) specifically specifies American English when talking about compliments. The implication seems to be it's not universal for all native English speakers, and that possibly a Brit would react differently?

Day 15

As luck would have it, Chomsky's Poverty of the Stimulus theory (something Rod Ellis talks about on page 66-67) has been getting a lot of discussion online the past few days. Or at least it has in my corner of the Internet, on the various blogs I follow.
Our old friend Scott Thornbury writes a rather critical apppraisal of Chomsky's theory on his blog:
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2015/06/07/p-is-for-poverty-of-the-stimulus/
Yesterday, Geoff Jordan wrote a response in which he criticized Scott Thornbury's criticism of Chomsky:
https://criticalelt.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/treatise-on-thornburys-view-of-sla-with-apologies-to-wittgenstein/
(Geoff Jordan is an interesting guy. I found out about him via the TEFLology podcast, and I found out about the TEFLology podcast via the great XXXX. But Geoff Jordan's blog always makes for interesting reading. He writes a lot of angry posts directed at other people in TEFL. If you love TEFL drama, you should subscribe to this blog.)
And just today, Fredrik deBoer wrote about the Poverty of the Stimulus in relation to the Nicaraguan Sign Language:
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/05/04/study-of-the-week-nicaraguan-sign-language-and-the-speaking-animal/
Fredrik deBoer is another really interesting guy. His blog is split between political rants and linguistics, but I always find his writing interesting.
The example of Nicaraguan Sign Language that Fredrik deBoer uses was also used in by Steven Pinker in his book "The Language Instinct" . Steven Pinker also uses the example of Nicaraguan Sing Language as support for Chomsky's theories on the Poverty of the Stimulus.

Day 16

p.63--the matrix clause
So, how's everyone finding the readability of this book?
My own opinion has been changing as I read it. Initially I thought it would be dense and hard to unpack (based on my previous experience with Rod Ellis). Then I was pleasantly surprised to find that the early chapters read quite easily. But now as I'm working through the book, I'm finding that chapter 7 is actually quite dense and hard to unpack.
There are a number of things I thought that weren't explained well in chapter 7, but I'll start at the beginning, when Rod Ellis talks about a matrix clause.
What is a matrix clause? I had never heard of it before? Anyone else?
Anyway, I Googled it, and found a couple different websites, which gave me contradictory information.
https://www.thoughtco.com/matrix-clause-grammar-1691371
and
http://www.glottopedia.org/index.php/Matrix_clause
Neither of these definitions seemed to match the example Rod Ellis gave on page 63:
The police have caught the man who bombed the hotel.

Rod Ellis uses this as an example of a relative clause coming at the end of the matrix clause, so presumably the matrix clause isn't the relative clause "who bombed the hotel". So what is the matrix clause here?

Day 17

Chapter 9 Instruction and L2 Acquisition
So, it appears once again I spoke too soon. In a previous post, I said: "But in this case, I thought it was interesting that Rod Ellis briefly mentioned the on page 22 the reasons why some researchers are skeptical of a universal natural order"
But it looks like Rod Ellis was just raising those objections in order to respond to them later in the book, because in Chapter 9 he seems to come down pretty heavily on the natural order.
The message I got was that there is definitely a natural order, and you can't get around it, and if you try to teach these grammatical sequences out of the natural order, you're just wasting your time, because your students won't be able to learn them.
As I've mentioned before in previous book discussions, this is potentially a problem for us, because the English World series does not follow the natural order at all.
But, something I picked up from another Rod Ellis book, SLA Research and Language Teaching, is that the order of acquisition applies only to free production. So you can still teach the students to comprehend the grammar, even if they aren't ready to produce it yet.
And then, hopefully, this will help the students to notice the grammar structure in any future input they will receive. Which will help this input become uptake. Which will help them someday acquire that grammar point when they are developmentally ready.
So there is still hope.
But it is a problem for the P-P-P style lessons, which assume that you can isolate any grammar point you like and then get the students to use it in free production at the end of a 90 minute lesson.

Day 18
Section 2
I'm finding the readings interesting, although I wish I had read these with the chapters they go with, instead of afterwards. I'm having recontextualizing myself to remember what they're talking about.
On the plus side, these discussion questions at the end of each reading will be great for our discussion Wednesday

Day 19
p.94
I found the discussion of the difference between errors and mistakes interesting.
(Obviously this relates to the discussion in a previous post about the difference between competence and performance)
Obviously a teacher should respond differently to an error than to a mistake, but, as Ellis and Corder acknowledge on page 94, this is difficult to do.
Here is my experience though:
I've gotten into the habit of over-correcting my adult students, simply because Vietnamese students like to be over-corrected. This works well at the lower-levels, when they seem to appreciate this intensive feedback.
I've noticed at the higher levels (ie IELTS 3) when I try to do corrective feedback it's not always appreciated. Even when I try to do unobtrusive delayed correction, I often find the students rolling their eyes and saying something like "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I just made a mistake."

Google Slides
And below is a Google Slides Presentation I made for the Book club discussion: slides, pub



Video Review
Video review here and embedded below.




Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky Glenn Greenwald with Liberty and Justice For Some

SLA Research and Language Teaching by Rod Ellis

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          This book isn’t pleasure reading, but I’m trying to make a commitment to read 10 pages a day of something related to professional development.

            My selection is somewhat limited out here in Cambodia, but this book was in the teacher’s resource center at my school, so I picked it up.

           

            This book was published in 1997, which may well mean some parts of it are out of date by now.  (I’m not an expert, but I get the impression Second Language Acquisition is a rapidly changing field.  When I read Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega, I was struck by how much of the research she cited was from within the past 10 years.)  However, as the selection in Cambodia is limited, I didn’t have a lot of other choices for professional development reading, so I went ahead and read this book anyway.

           

The Review

          Someone more knowledgeable than me will probably be able to detail exactly how the research has advanced in the last 15 years, and which parts of this book are now out of date.  I didn’t notice anything myself.  The theories and descriptions of language learning in this book seemed to me to be in line with what I had learned in my Applied Linguistics degree and what was in Lourdes Ortega’s book.   (The latter is actually not so surprising considering that Ortega frequently cites Ellis in her book, indicating he’s probably one of the major players in the field.)

            It’s an academic book, but it’s surprisingly readable.  Rod Ellis is one of those rare academics who can actually write well (a point worth highlighting, because it’s certainly not true of everyone—see HERE.)

            It’s not the easiest book I’ve ever read—I definitely had to put in some work to engage this—but once I got into the book it was interesting.  I enjoyed following Ellis’s explanation of how the mind processes second languages.  (Linguistics was not originally my first love, but when you spend all day teaching languages you can’t help but develop an interest in how your teaching is being processed in the minds of your students.)

            I don’t think I would recommend this book to the uninitiated—my understanding of this book was greatly helped by having already read Lourdes Ortega’s Understanding Second Language Acquisition, and so I was already familiar with the theories Ellis discusses. 

            And yet….I don’t know, Ellis writes in such a clear straightforward way that it might just be possible to struggle through even without a lot of background knowledge.

            Most of the chapters originally started life as separate articles all published separately in scholarly journals.  I believe this is a common convention for academics (to take articles they’ve previously published and then re-work them slightly and publish them in book form) and although all of the chapters are broadly related to the title of the book, SLA Research and Language Teaching, the shift in focus between chapters can be a bit jarring.  One chapter will give a broad view of the field, focusing on everything modern research can tell us to date about SLA and language teaching, and then another chapter will drop the reader into a detailed review of some obscure small study.  (To be fair, the smaller studies are reviewed not so much for the value of their results, but for the sake of giving examples of teacher conducted research.)

            To me the most interesting chapters were the birds’ eye view chapters, in which Ellis reviews the findings of second language acquisition, and then makes suggestions as to how language teachers might make use of this.

            There’s a lot of information packed in these sections, but I’ll just focus on things that caught my interest.

            The first question Ellis address is whether language teachers should teach grammar at all. 

            There is a school of thought (most closely associated with Stephen Krashen) that learners will acquire the grammar of a language naturally if they are simply provided with comprehensible input, or opportunities to communicate.

            In fact Krashen argued that actively teaching grammar will actually hinder the acquisition of a language, because it will cause learners to consciously monitor their speech which will interfere with the natural acquisition of the language.

            Krashen’s ideas are appealing for anyone who’s ever been bored by a grammar lesson, but unfortunately the research does not appear to bear out all of his claims.  Learners can acquire some simple grammatical forms naturally, but there are many more grammatical forms which are more difficult to acquire.  Students who learn language from comprehensible input alone (such as French immersion students in Canada) often do not acquire the more difficult grammatical forms.

            Moreover the research indicates learners can benefit from direct grammar instruction.

            So then, if grammar should be taught, how best to teach it?

            One of the interesting findings of SLA research is that learners appear to always acquire the same grammatical structures in the same order.  (This is something I had previously encountered in my Applied Linguistics course, as well as in Lourdes Ortega’s book).  Below is an example of the order of acquisition taken from Ortega.

-ing

plural –s

Be copula

                                                ↓

Be auxiliary

a/the

                                                ↓

Irregular past

                                                ↓

Regular past –ed

Third person –s

Possessive – ’s

            For example, learners will always master the -ing for of a verb before they can master the be auxiliary, and they will always master the be auxiliary before they master the irregular past, and they will always master the irregular past before they master the third person –s.  It doesn’t matter what first language background the learners are, it doesn’t matter if they are learning naturalistically or if they are in a classroom, and it doesn’t matter in what order the textbook tries to teach the grammar—for some reason, this is the order that all the learners must go through.

            Since the learner can not master the 3rd person –s until they have mastered all the previous forms, the temptation is therefore to say that the teacher should never attempt to teach the 3rd person –s until the learners are developmentally ready for it.  (In fact I myself have heard some language teachers suggest as much.)  But this, Ellis says, is impractical.  Among a number of other practical reasons he cites, for one thing learners develop at different rates, so if you have a class of 20 students, you’ll never get them all to the same stage of development at the same time.

            A sometimes overlooked point that Ellis emphasizes is that the order of acquisition applies only to implicit knowledge—the ability to use language in a free unstructured conversation.  However learners might have knowledge of much more grammar rules than they are able to use.

            The exact nature of the psycholinguistic constraints on language learning are still unknown, but the theory that makes the most sense to me is that the human mind is capable of storing in long term memory a lot of explicit knowledge about grammatical rules, but in real time conversation the mind can only focus its attention on a limited number of items at one time.  So in unplanned conversation it’s impossible for the learner to focus attention on all the grammatical rules at the same time.  When producing a sentence, the learner can only focus their attention on one or two grammatical aspects, and the rest will get neglected.

            Eventually, however, with enough practice, certain grammatical features will get practiced so much they will become automatic, and then the learner can say them without having to think about them.  And at this point they can shift their attention to focus on the next grammatical aspect in the order of acquisition.

            This is known as the interface position—the idea that explicit knowledge of grammar in the brain can, through practice, become implicit knowledge.

            Ellis rejects the strong interface position: “What appears to be happening in [theories of the strong interface position] is the equating of controlled processing with explicit knowledge and automatic processing with implicit knowledge” (p. 113)

            Ellis does, however, believe in the weak interface position—the idea that explicit grammatical knowledge by itself does not convert directly into implicit knowledge, but instead explicit knowledge of grammar may help the learner to notice these grammatical features in the input, and may also help the learner notice the gap between their own output and the language norms.  And this may help the learner intake and process these new forms.

            The point of all this, as far as Ellis is concerned, is that learners can still learn the grammar rules explicitly even if they aren’t ready to use them automatically in conversation.  If the learner has explicit knowledge of a grammar rule they are not developmentally ready to use yet, this will do them no harm.  And when they do reach the stage where they are developmentally ready to acquire the grammar rule, explicit knowledge will help them to acquire the grammatical form more quickly.

            Therefore Ellis suggests that learners can be taught awareness of grammatical rules even if they aren’t ready to use them. 

            Ellis suggests one way of doing this is to teach some grammar points for comprehension only—not expecting the learner to be able to use them in production, but making sure the learner knows how the grammar works so that they can understand it in the input.  For example Ellis suggests comprehension exercises where learners identify which picture goes with which sentence.

            Of course, Ellis acknowledges that for explicit knowledge to someday become implicit, learners will need plenty of time to practice free production, and this should also be an important component of any English course, but Ellis doesn’t go into much detail about this.

            Ellis’s theory on teaching grammar conflicts slightly with what I was taught in my CELTA (W) course.  According to the CELTA method, every grammar lesson should guide the learners from comprehension, to controlled production, to free production.  Ellis advocates only comprehension (and he also includes some forms of controlled production, like filling in the blank, as conscious raising activities) of new forms, and advises against having the goal of every lesson be free production of the new grammatical form.

            In fact, on page 90 Ellis says, “an assumption of much grammar teaching is that it is possible to lead learners from controlled practice to free practice and in so doing teach implicit knowledge (i.e. enable learners to make the necessary changes to their interlanguage so they can use the new structures when they are communicating). There is, however, very little clear evidence in support of the claim that practice makes perfect or that structures can be taught by taking learners through the text-manipulation/text-creation continuum.  In a review of studies that have investigated the effects of practice, Ellis (1988a) found little evidence to support the claim that more learners practise the better they become. In a study that sought to teach adjectival order in English nominal groups to Japanese college students by means of a series of activities strung out along the text-manipulation/ text-creation continuum, Tuz (1993) found that learners were unable to make the leap from controlled to communicative use of the structure.”  (p.90)

My Own Teaching Philosophy

          Ellis notes that a language teacher’s practices and philosophy are seldom the results of dogmatically applying research, but rather the result of the teacher’s experiences.  And this has been true for me as well—not only my experiences as a language teacher, but also my experiences as a language learner.  (This is perhaps something Ellis neglects to consider—how someone’s own experience learning a foreign language can affect their teaching.)

            I’ve always believed that grammar was an essential component of learning a foreign language, in part because of my experience in Japan.

            Most of us in the JET program arrived having little or no Japanese, and were immediately thrown into an immersion foreign language environment.  I had friends who seemed to miraculously pick up a consider amount of Japanese just by constantly immersing themselves into the language, but this didn’t work for me.  Attempts to pick Japanese up through exposure or through conversation just gave me a headache and made me feel tired.  I felt like my brain was drowning in an ocean of Japanese language that I didn’t understand.

            What helped me was consciously studying and memorizing grammar rules out of books, because this gave me a structure on which I could try to hang all the new words and phrases that I encountered and also made me less intimidated by the deluge of Japanese I was constantly exposed to.

            For this reason I always believed it was beneficial to teach my students grammar.

            However, despite believing that grammar instruction has some value, I spent 5 years working in the Japanese public school system, which is notorious for producing students who learn all the rules of English grammar, but still can’t speak a word of the language. 

            (As Ellis says in his book, “A good example of [learners who are only taught the explicit rules of grammar]is high school students in Japan.  After six years of studying English, much of which is taken up with the teaching of grammar, many of these students leave school with no procedural ability to communicate in English.” p. 75-endnote 10)

           

            The students in Japanese public schools are so shy and self-conscious about their English ability that they are very reluctant to speak the language, and so consequently never acquire procedural ability.

            One of my current colleagues once said that teachers are always reacting to their last disaster.  If you have a class which is low on listening, you become obsessed with teaching listening for months afterwards.  You continue this until you have a class that is low on reading, and then you become obsessed with teaching reading.

            This was true of me, and while working in the Japanese educational system I became obsessed with just trying to get students to speak and not to worry about grammatical accuracy when they spoke. 

            (I still maintain this hang-up to a large degree.  A senior teacher at my school recently suggested to me that I should be more aggressive about correcting students’ grammar during speaking activities, and I replied that my experience in Japan had made me very reluctant to correct students during free production activities.)

            However, my next job in Japan was at an English conversation school, where the only focus was on conversation and there was no grammar instruction given.

            Here I observed the opposite problem.  Many of the students who had been attending this conversation school for many years had achieved a high degree of fluency in the language, but had severe problems with grammatical accuracy.

            It is as a result of this experience that I am a firm believe that grammar can not be learned simply from exposure to the language, or even from communicative activities or negotiating for meaning. 

            Every language school has at least a few adherents of Krashen, and I have a couple co-workers who would like to do away entirely with the grammar component of our language courses, but my experience has made me a firm believer in teaching grammar.

            That being said, I like Krashen’s theories in so far as I can regard them as another tool in my toolbox.  I don’t like the restrictive aspect of Krashen—the idea that a language teacher shouldn’t teach grammar—but I do like to use his methods as a supplement to grammar teaching, and for this reason I like the idea of providing the learners with lots of comprehensible input. 

            Ellis mentions some of the reasons why Krashen’s ideas have become so popular with language teachers is because Krashen’s theories are very easy to understand, and they are very easy to adopt.  And I probably count myself in that category.  The idea of simply providing students with lots of comprehensible input is not only appealing in its theoretical aspects, but very easy to do practically.

            (Ellis also cites Krashen as an example of a theory which “may be seriously flawed and yet still give rise to useful proposals.  For example, Krashen’s Input Hypothesis has been subject to considerable criticism (e.g. Gragg 1984, White, 1987). However one of the pedagogic proposals derived from it—namely that teachers should provide learners with plenty of opportunities to read through an extensive reading program—has arguably had a beneficial effect on L2 programs for ESL learners in the USA.” (p.104))

            For this reason, I’ve become a convert to the extensive reading idea.  I still supplement it with traditional grammar teaching, but my hope is that by the time I get around to teaching a certain grammar point, the learners have already encountered this point many times before in the input because of extensive reading, and therefore the explicit grammar instruction will just be a clarification of the rules on a structure they are already somewhat familiar with.

           

            As for how to teach grammar: although I’ve been trained in the CELTA style, my own experience is very similar to Ellis’s research—when teaching a new grammar point it’s difficult to get the students to make the jump from controlled production to free production. 

            This is especially true when dealing with students whose motivations are low (for example, a class full of 13 year-olds who are not in the classroom by their own volition, but by their parents’ directive).  And I’ve found with teenage learners most of the free production or communication gap activities I set up for them quickly fall apart, and they just revert back into their native language.  So for practical reasons as much as anything I have been finding myself doing lesson plans that are very similar to Ellis’s theories—I try and raise the students’ awareness of grammar rules, but don’t force them to produce new grammar points they aren’t ready for.

            Therefore the proposals contained in Ellis’s book were not very different from what I was already doing, however, it was still nice to get some theoretical justification for what I was already doing.

Notes, Nitpicks, and other Addenda

*******Group Work*******

          As Ellis mentions, teaching grammar rules is only one part of a language curriculum. For these grammar rules to become procedularized, students will need an opportunity to practice them in conversation.

            In foreign language settings, this is not always easy to do.  If you have a class of 20 students, not all the students are going to get adequate time to talk with the teacher.

            The solution in most classrooms then is group work, where the students are given a communicative task, divided into groups, and then practice speaking with each other.

            This is standard procedure at almost all language schools, including my own.

            Ellis, however, cites some disturbing research about group work.

            On page 52, when talking about why French immersion students in Canada never develop beyond “a very defective and probably terminal classroom pidgin”, Ellis writes: “The reasons advanced for the failure of immersion in Hammerley’s eyes are the fact that immersion learners spend a large amount of time interacting with other interlanguage speakers, the impossibility of creating a ‘natural sociolinguistic language acquisition setting’ in the classroom, the tendency of learners to transfer structures from their L1, and the lack of motivation to advance to higher levels of proficiency once learners become functional.” (p. 52)

            And on page 51:

            A further problem of communicative classrooms is that much of the talk which learners hear come from other learners.  This interlanguage talk may encourage fossilization, a point which Prahbu (1987) has argued forcefully.  In short, although much can be done to make a classroom communicative, the resulting environment may not be conducive to successful grammar acquisition, because the input learners receive is impoverished, because they resort to their L1, and because opportunities for certain kinds of output are limited.

           

            For someone who relies a lot on groupwork, like I do, this is a bit discouraging to read.

            But what’s the alternative?  Ellis never addresses this.

          There is, however, at one bright spot for group work.  On page 243, Ellis cites a study that says: “linguistic forms that learners of L2 French negotiated in small group-work were subsequently used independently by individual learners.  One of Donato’s main points is that whereas no individual learner initially possessed knowledge of the forms in question they were able to establish them collectively. Another is that learners can successfully acquire new knowledge through the scaffolding provided by other learners (i.e. they did not have to rely on expert others.)

************The First 35 pages******************************

            On the whole, I found this book quite interesting and readable.

            The first 35 pages, however, just about did my head in. 

            In the first 35 pages, Ellis examines the relationship between language teachers and SLA researchers.  It’s a very thorough review of the literature, in which he recounts just about every theory on what the relationship between teachers and researchers should be.  (There have, apparently, been several academic papers published in which various theories have been proposed to explain the relationship between SLA and language teaching.)

            10 or 15 pages of this would have been fine, but after 35 pages I thought all these various theories were just going round and round in circles around the same concepts, and that all of these theories were just in the air anyway.

            The fault, of course, is mine.  Ellis is not writing pleasure-reading, but an academic review of the literature, and it’s my fault for not being able to keep up.

            I only mention it in case other readers, like me, get discouraged.  If you can make it through the first 40 pages, the rest of the book gets into a lot more concrete research findings, and becomes a lot more interesting.  So it’s worth persevering through the first chapter.

**************Connections with Chomsky’s Political theories************************

            That being said, the first chapter does contain one or two interesting points.

            Here’s a quote from page 23 of the first chapter:

            Action research originates in the work of Kurt Lewin in the United States….Levin was concerned with decision-making centred around changes in practice in the work place. He was interested in what effect involving workers in the decision making process (the research) had on the factory production (the action). His approach is exemplified in his experiment on the Harwood factory in Virginia.  Lewin was able to show that when change was imposed on workers by management, production dropped substantially, that when representatives of the workers were involved in researching the change, production initially dropped but later recovered and that when all the workers participated in the decision-making, production rose markedly after only two days.  The study demonstrated the practical benefits of involving actors in decision-making. More importantly for Lewin, it demonstrated the need for and the advantages of democracy in the work place.

            I’ve often heard Chomsky say that what little research there is supports the contention that manufacturing would be more efficient if workers were in charge of production.  (For example this interview here: Every bit of evidence that exists (there isn't much) seems to show, for example, that workers' control increases efficiency.)

            I suspect this might just be the research Chomsky has been referring to.

           

            But what does any of this have to do with SLA research and language teaching?  Ellis says: “There is, of course, a dual application of Lewin’s model of action research to teaching.  One is that researchers interested in changing classroom practice need to work with teachers with a similar interest in researching change. The other is that teachers need to work with learners in negotiating the activities they will engage in. (end note page 37).

            The latter application is more relevant to my situation, and it’s a reminder to me to try and integrate my students into most of the decision making processes. (And for what it’s worth, my own anecdotal evidence confirms this.  Classroom enthusiasm seems to be much higher when I let the students vote on options instead of just imposing activities on them.)

************Direct versus Indirect Requests***************************

            Near the end of the book, Ellis describes a couple of smaller studies as an example of classroom research (one conducted by an outside observer, Ellis himself, the other by the teacher of the classroom.)  These are meant to serve as examples of how teachers can participate in research themselves either by gathering information or by testing out theories of SLA.

            And, judged solely on the criteria of examples of ways classroom or teacher research could be conducted, I think the examples serve their purpose.

            But if we look at the validity of the research itself, I have some nitpicks.

            The first example of research is a quantitative study following how two children in an ESL class learn to make requests.  Ellis notes that over time the children’s grammar becomes more sophisticated, but he also notes that in spite of their increasing grammatical sophistication both children prefer direct requests to indirect requests.  Ellis notes that this is in contrast to the native speaker norm, in which indirect requests are preferred.

            The whole time I’m reading this study, I’m thinking: “But that’s not because they’re English is unsophisticated—that’s because they’re children.  Children are always more direct than adults.”

            At the very end of the study, Ellis does acknowledge this: “This conclusion needs to be treated with caution, however…The study has …provided no baseline data from native-speaker children in a similar classroom context.” (p.195). However I still felt like he was burying this at the end of the study, when it really should have been a red flag throughout the entire discussion.

*****************Using the Past Tense to Describe a Picture*********************

            The other classroom research study dealt with 3 students who were given the task of describing a picture in order to practice the past tense. 

            Again, buried away in the notes is a little detail which should perhaps have gotten greater attention.

            Jim Lantolf reports that in his current research both native and non-native speakers found it difficult to sustain the use of the past tense when telling stories based on pictures, even when they were given a cue like “last weekend.”  (p.217 endnote 4)

            Actually, I’ve caught myself slipping up on this sometimes.  When I’m attempting to model the past tense to my students by using a picture, I often find myself slipping into the present tense despite myself.  Even though I tell the students that the picture took place in the past, after I get a few sentences into the story my mouth starts slipping into the present tense— there’s just something about describing a picture that deludes your brain into thinking the events are happening right now, because you are looking at the picture right now.

            This could mean that describing a picture is not the best way to elicit the past tense, and could screw up the results of the study right there. 

            Or maybe not.  Ellis claims that he’s had better luck using a similar task: “I found that the majority of learners when given such a cue attempted to adhere to a past-tense sequence when describing the main narrative events.”  (Although it would still be interesting to know with what degree of success these attempts were achieved.)

            The focus of the past tense exercise was on teacher correction.  Or to be more precise, teacher student negotiating for meaning, because the teacher never overtly corrected the students, she just pretended not to understand when the students failed to use the past tense.  The difference?  “It is extremely difficult to bring about a focus on a specific linguistic feature while at the same time maintaining true communicativeness.  Once learners realize that the task is intended to provide such a focus, they are likely to stop treating it as an opportunity to communicate and switch into a ‘learning’ mode. One way in which this can be prevented is if the focus is induced methodologically by means of requests for clarification directed at utterances containing errors in the feature that has been targeted.” (p. 216)

            Yes, but if the teacher pretends not to understand every time a learner uses the present tense instead of the past tense, isn’t that a little bit too obvious?  Wouldn’t the learners quickly realize that the exercise is meant to focus on the past tense, and still go into “learning” mode?

***********Confusing section 1***********************************

            And while I’m nitpicking, here is one more point I found confusing.

            On pages 88-89, Ellis talks about the options of teaching new grammatical structures.  There is, of course, the old fashioned way of just directly explaining to students how the grammar rule works, which is referred to as “explicit instruction.”

            Or, learners can just be exposed to examples of the new grammar, and learn the rule by themselves.

            There are two ways of doing this.  There is “input flooding” which Ellis defines as “learners are simply exposed to sentences or texts containing the target structure but nothing else is done to draw the learners’ attention to it.” (p. 88)

            And then there is “input enhancement” which Ellis defines as “efforts are made to increase the prominence of the target structure in the input.  This can be achieved by either doctoring the input itself (e.g. using bold print to highlight the structure) or by setting some task that requires learners to attend to the structure (e.g. asking questions that will lead the learners to pay careful attention the structure.)” (p.89)

            Then on page 89, Ellis cites the following study:

            “Williams (1995b) compared the effects of input enhancement and explicit grammar instruction on the acquisition of two structures (participal adjectives such as ‘boring/bored’ and present passive.) In the case of input enhancement, the learners (who were enrolled in an intermediate ESL university writing class) were exposed to written texts containing an artificially increased incidence of the target forms with the target structures italicized. In the case of explicit instruction, the learners received the same input but in addition they received metalingual explanations and corrective feedback on their own attempts to use the structures.  Both the input enhancement and the explicit instruction groups did better than the control group in tests of both structures. The explicit instruction group did significantly better than the input enhancement group in learning participial adjectives, but the differences was less evident for the present passive.  One tentative conclusion of this study was that input enhancement may be effective by itself for teaching complex structures like the passive but works better in conjunction with explicit instruction for easier structures like participial phrases, a conclusion that also reflected the results obtained by Robinson (1996.)”

           

            Now this really had me scratching my head.  To me, this seemed completely counter-intuitive, and I would have appreciated some more explanation.  Wouldn’t you think that it would be the easier structures that would be picked up by input enhancement alone, and that only the more difficult structures would need explicit instruction in addition to input enhancement?

            I half wonder if this isn’t just a printer’s error, especially since it’s not at all clear to me that participial phrases are easier to learn than passive structures, and furthermore the very next sentence seems to contradict this it.

            To continue the quotation. the very next sentence reads:

            “These studies, then, suggest that input flooding, used by itself, may work best with structures that are relatively easy…”

            So, I think this is a contradiction, right?  Although he does switch terminology from input enhancement to input flooding, so I’m not sure if he’s using the terms interchangeably now, or what.

***************Confusing Section 2******************************

            Similar to the compliant above, there was another part of the book on page 85 that seemed to me to be contradicting itself.  When talking about the effectiveness of implicit instruction versus implicit instruction, Ellis writes:

            “Hammerly (1975) found that it depended on the grammatical structure.  Explicit instruction worked best when the material to be learnt was relatively simple, but implicit instruction was more effective with complex rules.  Psychological studies (e.g. Reber 1976, N. Ellis 1993) have also found that explicit rule instruction is effective if the rule to be learnt is complex and if the grammar information is supported with examples.”

            Ellis connects these two sentences with “have also”, which implies continuity between them, but don’t these two sentences contradict each other?

            On the whole, I found Ellis’s book very readable and engaging.  But the two examples above really had me scratching my head.  I re-read both passages several times, and they still don’t make any sense to me.

********************Overgeneralizing and Interlanguage**************************

            As I mentioned above, on the whole this book matched up very well with Lourdes Ortega’s Understanding Second Language Acquisition.  There was, however, one point of difference I found:

            When talking about form-focused (grammar) instruction, Ellis says:

            “There is, however, some evidence to suggest that form-focused instruction can have a deleterious effect. Lightbrown (1983) found that Grade 5 learners (aged 10 to 11 years) of French in Canada over-learnt progressive –ing as a result of teaching. They overgeneralized it, using it in contexts which required the simple form of the verb, which they had used correctly before the instruction.” (p.58)

            Ortega also talks about the phenomenon of over-generalization, but Ortega says that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but just a stage in how the interlanguage of a learner restructures itself after acquiring a new form.  After first overgeneralizing, the learner can reshape their interlanguage and use the form more accurately in the future.

            (Although actually later in a different section of the book, on page 108, Ellis returns to the same study and said that later the overuse of the progressive –ing did in fact later decline.)

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