By L.G.ALEXANDER
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(communication and grammar)
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. First I’d like to thank my colleagues for their very generous introduction and particularly now I’d like to thank you all for coming on this occasion. It’s a great privilege for me to be here to be able to address you and to satisfy your curiosity. I know from many years of teaching experience when I was a young teacher especially when I had a textbook in my hand and I kept looking at the same name, I kept wondering, I wonder what this person is like, I wonder if I could ever meet him or her, I know that feeling very well. And that feeling, I hope will satisfy this afternoon. I know the name YA LI SHAN DA is very well-known to you, from textbooks and so on. And it may surprise you here that this is my third visit to Beijing. I have been here another two occasions, I came in 1981 when I spent a month traveling through the country and lecturing. I came again in 1988 because I was associated with Junior English for China with PEP , and I’m here again at the invitation of Foreign Language Press. That is why I’m able, through your generosity of inviting me to be able to address you. Now we have about an hour, I need about an hour to speak to you about this subject – communication and grammar. When I finish speaking, just after 3: 15 now, if you want to ask me any question, you may, it’s a very large audience, and it’s probably difficult for you to stand up and ask a question, but if you wish to write a question and there’s time I will be happy to answer it, but it will have to be a question on language. My theme this afternoon is communication and grammar, in another word, the rule of grammar in English language teaching today. “Does grammar still have a relevance?” I hear him making mouth in the background. Does language teaching, does grammar still have a relevance when we are teaching for communication? And I think it is a very important question. When we look at the way language was taught in the past, we based our language teaching on what we call the grammar translation method. All of you know about this method, consist of books which give you lots of rules with translation exercises from English and into English, and you have to get the language right, the grammar right, and you could spend many many years doing these exercises and never becoming fluent in a language. There are very good reasons why you never become fluent when using the grammar translation method. One of those reasons is that teachers were encouraged all the time to talk about the language, never to use it. And the the language was like a patient on the operating table with various doctors going over it, talking about it but never doing anything to cure it and make it get up and walk again. And what we are concerned with is to make language alive, to consider that language is not some dead object we study but a performance skill. We think of language not about how much we know about it but how well we can perform it – how well we can speak it, how well we can understand it, how well we can use it. And that is what we are concerned with in language teaching today. I have been in classes where I have heard a whole lesson in English conducted in the students’ own language. I remember one lesson I attended where I heard the teacher speak for something like 15 minutes and the teacher spoke entirely in the students’ language. I only heard three words of English during that lesson, and those words were Anglo-Saxon genitive. So obviously if we teach like that, we teach a living language as if it were a dead language, then that language would remain permanently dead. So one reason that students fail to learn through the grammar translation method was that they were always talking about language. It was always knowledge not performance. The second reason why students couldn’t learn from the grammar translation method was that they couldn’t transfer the knowledge they had from the grammar book to real life. So that knowledge was permanently frozen. When I began teaching English as a young man, I was given one book to teach English to teach from and it was called Living English Structure. It was a set of grammatical exercises with a rule at the top, a lot of sentences to fill in the blanks and then the students somehow by some miracle were expected to perform from this. And I quickly realized that you couldn’t learn a modern language in that way. You could use this information for certain purposes, but you couldn’t learn a language only in that way. You have to have human situations, you have to have texts, you have to have activities, you have to train the students in the four primary skills of understanding, speaking, reading and writing because a language is not just grammar. How are things changed today? (To be continued)
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Well today our emphasis is on communication. We want to get students to perform in understanding, speaking, reading and writing. So that we have realized one of the highest priorities when we are learning a language is listening comprehension. Everything begins with listening comprehension. You are exercising listening comprehension now. If you can’t understand what I’m saying, then you’re in deep trouble. And listening comprehension is the first step in language acquisition and what we have to train our students in before they speak. They go through a kind of silent period where they are taking in a lot of language before they can give out a lot of language. That is a very very slow business because learning a language is slow and cumulative. You can never learn a language in twenty-four hours as many advertisements promise you. I don’t know if you have this in China. But certainly in Europe newspapers are full of advertisements of how you can learn a language in two weeks of study, learn to be a concert pianist after 5 hours at the piano, learn to be a linguist after using this magic tape. Well if there were such simple solutions, you and I would surely know about them. We work all our lives to learn languages, so there can’t be simple solutions. Why is it impossible to learn a language in a short period? The answer is listening comprehension. You can learn a lot of phrases, you can learn to ask the way to be a station and order a cup of coffee and so on, but you have to listen to many hundreads of hours of English or any foreign language before you can understand it. And that is why it’s a long term study. Children of course are born with a language instinct, that’s how we acquired our mother tongues. But when we get beyond the age of five, six, seven, life becomes more difficult when language acquisition is concerned. When we speak of communication, we find that what we mean by communication is the ability to do things through language. If you look at all the textbooks, they were full of completely unnecessary bits of language and completely useless bits of language, things like “this is my head, this is my nose” and so on, or “Has she milked the cows yet? “ and so on.. .In other words, these are of the English we would never use in several life times. I want to quote an advertisement to you which is from AT&T the big American telephone company, and I want you to try to understand what communicators mean by communication. Telecommunication has the word communication in it, it’s about telecommunication. This advertisement reads like this: This machine communicates cver a hundred and fifty words per minute across oceans at less than one and half cents per word. It also listens, reacts, sympathires, charms, persuades, pleds, apologizes, sues, explores, informs and that’s whatever else it takes to solve the problem or close the sale. What’s this machine? Of course this machine is the telephone. And all those things we talked about here are what we do through language— Listen, react, sympathize, charm, persuade, apologize, sue, explore, inform, explain, and we can do on and on and on.. Doing things through language is communication And therefore what we are concentrated today is teaching communication skills. We develop the speaking skills through training students to be socially appropriate, to use language that is appropriate, so when you have a guest you don’t say “Drink this.” You say, because you’ve been a lot imperative when you offer them something, “Would you like something to drink?” and so on. If you learn the imperative, you learn “Stand up.” ‘Sit down.” You may think that is the only ways you can offer something to drink to someone. We have to learn socially appropriate way, ways of communicating with others.. We also have to develop the reading skill and there’re several different reading skills: skimming, scanning, reading for details and so on. And we also have to develop the writing skill which means controlling the syntax of a language that is the way sentences are joined together.
So communication is quite a complicated business. We can say that in the past with the grammar translation methoud, grammar was the master and communication was the servant. That is, we began by teaching grammar and if communication rezulted from that, that was a lucky coincidence. We say today that communication is the master and grammar is the servant. That is the way things have changed. (To be continued)
But has grammar disappeared? That is the question. And that is the question I’m going to answer in the rest of this lecture. We must now look at grammar as a support system for learning a foreign language. And I’m going to try and answer four questions: Why do we teach grammar? What do we teach? When do we teach grammar? And how do we teach it? So there are four questions we should be looking at. It’s very reasonable to begin with a question “Why?” because when we are speaking Chinese, when you are speaking Chinese, do you think of the grammar every time you have a conversation with your friends? And your answer must be “No.”, you say “I’m with my friends, we are sitting at a restaurant, we are walking in the garden, in the park, and we are having a conversation. I don’t think of the grammar of Chinese ever”. And am I thinking of the grammar of English now as I’m speaking to you? And I’m saying, ‘Ah I’m now using the present perfect tense, I’m now using the past tense.’ Of course not, of course not, in fact if for a minute I think that I must use the past tense, something happens to me, I freeze, I can’t speak. In another word, grammar will interfere with my communicative skills.
When you are riding a bicycle, you donm’t consider how it teaches you how you stay on the bicycle. The moment you think how does it heppen that I can balance on these two wheels, once you start thinking about that, what happens?You fall off. It’s like this story the old man, granddad with a very long beard, and one norning his granchildren said to him.”Granddad, when you go to bed at night, do you sleep with the beard under the sheet or over the sheet?” Granddad said, “I’ve never thought about that I’ll tell you tomorrow morning”. So the next morning. The grandchildren went in to see grandad and hi said, “Well you see, I’m very close with you”. They said, “Why, granddad?Where was the beard when you slept last night?” He said That was the problem, I spend the whole night thinking about it and I didn’t get any sleep.”
So grammar is a bit like that. If we think too much about it, we can’t say anything. It’s anti-productive. When you want to speak English, you sit in the corner and say,“I’ll begin with a present perfect, move into the past tense, sprinkle in a few adjectives, and I’ll really slay them when I introduce a past perfect as well. They’ll really be impressed.” If you try to do that, of course you won’t get to speak. So we can say that thinking about grammar is not a good thing and we cannot learn to communicate by thinking about grammar. But is it true that we never think about grammar when we communicate? And the answer to that question is ‘Well, not entirely true.’ Imagine you are applying for a job, and you want to impress the person you are writing to with your curriculum vitae—CV, with what the Americans call your Resume,
–To be continued–
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