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 Commented:
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.
Thanks for the response XXXX.Post 3
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.
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=prmx0lYBTkoPost 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.Post 21
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.
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)
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