About Language by Scott Thornbury

Subtitle: Tasks for Teachers of English

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book/ Background Information

                Several years ago I was talking to other expatriate English teachers at a bar in Japan.  One woman was complaining about how little expatriate English teachers in Japan actually knew about English—we were all native speakers, but beyond that, few of us had ever studied in detail the grammar of our own language.  We knew what sounded right, and what didn’t sound right, but we were able to give little guidance to our students in terms of the concrete rules of the language. 

Fortunately, most of us worked in jobs that didn’t require us to know much grammar.

                “But you can’t get away with that in Europe,” this woman told me.  “There, the students actually have questions about the grammar.  For example, they might ask you why a certain verb is in the present perfect continuous instead of the present perfect simple.  And so you really have to really know your stuff.  You can’t just get by on your ‘Native-Speaker Power’.”

                Ever since that conversation, it has been my ambition to “really know my stuff”, and become more knowledgeable about the language I teach, so that I can better deal with student questions. 

                The difficulty, however, is figuring out how to do it.  I mean, I suppose I could grab a grammar book off the shelves, and start reading through it.  But would that do me any good?  Wouldn’t my eyes just glaze over as soon as I got halfway down the first page? 

                Grammar is inherently a boring subject in any language, but it’s especially hard to force yourself to concentrate on grammar rules in your native language, because intuitively you know the rules already.  The only thing you don’t know is how to explicitly articulate those rules to an English learner.  So reading an explicit explanation of something you already know implicitly is almost guaranteed to make your eyes glaze over.

                The genius of Scott Thornbury’s book About Language is that the whole book is designed as a workbook.  You work through the exercises in the front, and then you go to check your answers in the back.  This forces you to pay attention, and makes it impossible for your eyes to glaze over.  (As I’ll discuss in the main body of this review, I have some ambivalence about how effective this actually book is in practice, but at the very least, the core concept is a very good idea.)

                So, that’s the long explanation as to why a book like this would land on my reading list.  The shorter explanation, and the reason why I picked this book up sooner rather than later, is because this book was on the recommended reading list for the Delta (W) course that I’m currently doing, so I’m also classifying this book in my Delta reading list.

This Book’s Reputation (Anecdotally)

                I’ve gotten mixed reports on this book from other people.  A couple people have recommended it quite highly to me, saying that it was perfectly designed as a “workbook for teachers”.  But a couple other people have given me less positive reviews, telling me they learned very little new from this book. 

                I mention this because I’ve got a fair amount of ambivalence about the value of this book myself, but I think I’m leaning towards the latter opinion.

Some Comments about Grammatical Knowledge in the English Speaking World

                I’m not a grammar expert by any means, but I did at least study some grammar in school.  I know how to diagram a sentence (or at least I used to know back in my school days, and can vaguely remember some of it.)  I know what a noun is, what a verb is, and what the difference is between an object and a compliment.  I know what a pronoun is.  And although in practice I’m just as likely as the next person to mix them up, in theory I know what the difference is between “who’s” and “whose”.  And I know what the difference is between a plural “s” and a possessive “s”, and when to use an apostrophe.  In other words, I know the basics.

                However, in my years as an English teacher in Asia, I’ve discovered that a shocking amount of people don’t even know the basics.  I don’t want to tell too many tales out of school, but you’d be surprised at the amount of people working as English teachers who don’t even know what the basics.  All of the examples I listed in the previous paragraph have been points of confusion among some of the fellow English teachers I’ve known. 

I was once told by a British friend that explicit grammar instruction was removed from the British and Australian school systems about 30 years ago.  The theory was that native speakers can perfectly speak a language anyway, so it was a waste of time to explicitly study grammar.  As a result, there is a whole generation of British and Australians who don’t know even the basics about grammatical terms.  (Someone correct me if I’m getting this wrong.)

This is the big obstacle for a book like About Language.  Who is the target reader for this book?  Do you go for the basics, and try to explain to the reader what a noun phrase is?  Or do you go into more detail, and try to explain deixis and references to context?

This book tries to do both. 

I found it frustrating.  Many of the exercises in this book were way too easy, some of them were way too hard, and very few of them hit that sweet spot where I thought I actually learned and understood something new.

None of this is probably Scott Thornbury’s fault.  It’s just one of the inherent problems with writing a book like this for a large audience.

My Subjective Experience Reading This Book

                So, I’ll be honest, I found this book a really frustrating experience.  And it’s not altogether the book’s fault.  Some of it was just my own anal-retentive tendencies, and the circumstances under which I read it.

                I may have enjoyed this book more if I had read it under more leisurely conditions, but it was part of a long reading list I got from the Distance Delta course, and trying to get through everything on that list caused me a bit of stress.

                The fact that this book is set-up like a workbook is in many respects a brilliant idea (as I mentioned above), and yet, if you’re under any sort of time pressure to get this book read, it can be very frustrating.  I tried my best to work through one unit a day of this book, but some of the exercises were very time consuming to work through.

                In addition, the fact that this book was a workbook made it hard to read in small snippets, which is normally where I get most of my reading done.  I normally work through books while I’m eating breakfast or dinner, or sometimes read a few pages standing at my desk if I have 10 minutes to kill before class.  But not so with this book.  Because I needed to sit down at a desk with pencil and paper to actually work through the exercises, I could only work through this book when I had dedicated time set aside for it.  And how often does anyone get to dedicate a certain amount of time out of their day to do a workbook?  Not that often in my case.  So it was hard to find the time to work through this book.

               

                Now, all that being said, it must be admitted a fair amount of this frustration is probably my own fault.  Because author Scott Thornbury says straight in the introduction that you’re not meant to work through this book cover to cover.  “It is not expected that all the material will be of equal relevance to different groups of users: teacher trainers are advised to use the material selectively, choosing the units, and those tasks within the units, whose content is both relevant to the courses they run and practical within the constraints in which they are operating” (Introduction, p. xvi).  It is further more suggested in the introduction that this book is designed for teacher trainers in mind.  That is, if you’re training people to be English teachers, you can use this book as a resource if you need an exercise for your class on a particular subject.  But no sane person would start at the beginning and work their way through every single exercise in this book.

                I, however, chose to start at the beginning and work my way through every single exercise in this book.  I don’t know why.  Just because of my personality I guess.  I wanted the sense of completion that came with systematically working my way through all of the recommended reading on the Delta course.  And I thought at the very least it would do me no harm.  And I guess I didn’t have much better things to do with my life anyway.

                But I certainly would not recommend that anyone else do the same thing with this book.

As I mentioned above, some of this book was way too easy for me.  (For example there was an exercise on page 102 when the reader was asked to read a passage and then identify what the pronouns were.) 

Others exercises, however, were on areas I did not know so much about.  But unfortunately, although a lot of the book was too easy for me, those sections of the book that were on difficult subjects often didn’t give me a lot to work with.  I would work through the exercise, check my answers in the back, make appropriate corrections, and then just move on to the next exercise, and usually quickly forget what I had just studied.  The book usually only had one exercise on each concept, which made it hard for anything to really sink in.  Maybe multiple exercises on a single concept would have been better.  I hate to say this, but I think I actually retained very little new knowledge from this book.  Although whether that’s my own fault, or that’s the fault of the book itself, is difficult to say—maybe I should have regarded it as my own responsibility to identify my weak areas and practice them more on my own initiative.

                The entire book is based on the inductive approach—the method currently very popular in TESOL classrooms.  That is, rather than explain to the reader the grammar rule, the reader does a number of grammar exercises in which they will hopefully discover the rule for themselves. 

                For the most part this works pretty well, but this approach is followed perhaps a little bit too dogmatically across every section.  There were some times when the purpose of some of the exercises were too confusing, and when it would perhaps have been better to just explain the rule first, and then do the practice exercises. 

Connections with Other Books I’ve Read

* This is actually the second book by Scott Thornbury I’ve read.  I previously read Beyond the Sentence, a book which I enjoyed much more than this one.

                The last 3 Units of this book, Cohesion, Texts, and Conversations (Units 26, 27, and 28) overlap heavily with material Scott Thorbury covered in Beyond the Sentence.

* Scott Thornbury talks about Krashen’s theories in his introduction.  Thornbury argues that even though Krashen’s theories argue for a decreased emphasis on grammar exercises in the classroom, this should not be taken as an excuse for English teachers to remain ignorant about the grammar of the language they are teaching.  “If doctors choose not to baffle their patients with complex anatomical terminology, this does not exempt them from the requirement to know as much as they humanly can about anatomy.  Likewise, language teachers, regardless of the methodology they adopt, are still language teachers.  Whether or not they choose to make explicit to the learners the systems underlying the language they are teaching, they are still bound to be authorities in the language itself.”  (Introduction, p. xiii). 

                To which sentiments I agree completely.

* I previously read The English Verb by Michael Lewis, and there are a few places where Scott Thornbury references Michael Lewis’s book.

                In Unit 16, for example, Scott Thornbury writes:

                “Some writers on grammar argue….that the fundamental difference between the so-called present tense and the so called past tense is nothing to do with time at all: the ‘past tense’ is simply the ‘remote’ form.  According to this view, the so-called present simple is simply the unmarked form of the verb—the form of the verb used when no distancing is required” (p. 204).

                Although this doesn’t reference Michael Lewis by name, this is pretty much exactly the view Michael Lewis puts forward in his book.  Scott Thornbury goes on to imply disagreement with this view, however, by contrasting it with the more conventional view:

                “The more conventional view is that the ‘basic’ meaning of the present tense is the present time reference, and the ‘basic’ meaning of the past tense is the past time reference.  In other words, the cases where there is a mismatch between time and tense are simply exceptions to a general rule, or examples of a ‘secondary’ meaning of these tenses” (p. 204).

                Also in Unit 17 of About Language, Michael Lewis’s book The English Verb is quoted directly.  Thornbury quotes Michael Lewis’s view that “Forms containing (be) +-ing express the speaker’s view of the event as having limited duration” (Lewis quoted in Thornbury p. 79).  Thornbury goes on to disagree with this view, and instead asserts that: “Perhaps the single common concept—and, hence, primary meaning of the progressive—is that of something ‘in progress’.  Notions of ‘temporariness’, ‘incompleteness’ and ‘limited duration’ may be secondary meanings, or implications, of this primary meaning.  In other words, when we talk about things ‘in progress’ it is often the case that these things are temporary and/or incomplete, but it is not necessarily the case” (p. 207).

                I suppose these disagreements between Thornbury and Michael Lewis just go to support a point Scott Thornbury makes on page 139: “Even grammarians do not always agree as to the correct formation of a rule.”

Other Notes

* On a few of these exercises, the directions are a little bit confusing, and not stated as clearly as they might have been.  In particular, on my copy I marked Unit 9, Exercise 7c (p. 47) and Unit 14, Exercise 4 (p. 67) as containing confusing directions.

* In the copy available from my school library, the bottom half of page 120 is missing.  Since I’m fairly sure my school has an official copy of this book (bought from a legitimate bookstore) this appears to be just a printing error made by the book’s publishers.

                If anyone is reading this who has also used this book, did you find the same thing on your copy?

* On the positive side, I did find the exercise on lexical cohesion to be very useful (Unit 26, Exercise 9, p. 125).  In fact, I even photocopied it, and used it for one of my English for Academic Purposes classes, in order to show my students how each sentence should use key words to connect to the sentence before it, and to emphasis to them that they don’t need to be afraid of repeating key words.  (Sometimes my students have been taught that they shouldn’t repeat the same word too much in an English essay, and so they always try to include a lot of synonyms, which always makes their compositions hard to understand.  I’ve used Scott Thorbury’s exercise from Unit 26 as a way to try to counter-act this misconception.)

* At least one senior teacher at my school, when he was contractually obligated to conduct a professional development seminar, simply photocopied a unit out of this book, and had us teachers work through the exercises in the seminar.  He even commented to us, “This is a great little book if your boss tells you on short notice that you have to lead a professional development seminar, and you don’t have any ideas.” 

                And I suspect that this is the true value of this book.  It’s not really meant for teachers like me to work through it individually in my apartment—it’s meant for teacher trainers to use in seminars with other teachers.  (In fact, as I mentioned above, Scott Thornbury explicitly says so in his introduction.)

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