Grammar rules... again?! Chunks strike back

This is a somewhat belated reaction to Catherine Walter's article which appeared in the Learning English section of Guardian last autumn. Click here to read it.

Language or maths?

Spaarnestad Photo via  Nationaal Archief

Dr Catherine Walter’s article Time to stop avoiding grammar rules defends explicit grammar teaching in EFL. Proudly subtitled The evidence is now in: the explicit teaching of grammar rules leads to better learning, the article makes numerous references to a "wide range of studies" that have shown evidence of effectiveness of explicit grammar teaching.


Although no sources are cited, the forthright and cogent tone of the article written by the co-author of How English Works, The Good Grammar Book and Oxford English Grammar Course (all with Michael Swan) would win over any ELT practitioner. As one would expect, to make her argument more convincing, Dr Walter talks with mild disdain about other approaches that have de-emphasised explicit grammar instruction and proposed instead:

"to expose learners to language that is just a bit more advanced than what they currently produce"(Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis / the Natural approach);

"to wait until a communicative situation demands a certain structure before introducing it" (Task-Based Learning with reactive focus on form)

"to let the grammar emerge naturally from the lived context of the classroom" (Dogme).

One such approach which has dealt a heavy blow to the dominance of a traditional grammar syllabus is the Lexical Approach proposed in the 1990s and based on teaching chunks of language. Without beating around the bush, Dr Walter claims it is WRONG because there are hundreds of thousands of chunks the learner has to commit to memory. She states "With much less time and effort, learners can acquire grammar" (acquire grammar or learn a few declarative rules?) "for putting together comprehensible phrases and sentences".

Does the author imply that, unlike grammar rules, chunks do not have generative value? Surely, chunks can be equally generative. Imagine, your student learns

  Could you pass me the salt, please?

which is a semi-fixed expression which allows variability and helps learners produce similar requests in other situations:

Could you pass me the water, please?

Could you pass me the ketchup, please? 

Could you pass me the menu, please? 

Could you pass me my phone, please? 

 Learning chunks actually facilitates the teaching of grammar and serves as a basis for mastery of the grammar system. Furthermore, grammar is best learnt when students have memorised a chunk which can then be used as a template for creating novel utterances. Let's consider, for example:

  If it doesn't work out, you can always fire me. 

Imagine how many "rules" a learner needs to remember here: no will after if, 3rd person doesn't and not don't… If they memorise it as a chunk, they can go on to produce:

If it doesn’t work out you can always move. 
If it doesn't work out you can always go back to working part-time. 
If it doesn’t happen… 
If it doesn't get better… 

Both Ellises subscribe to this view of grammar acquisition. Rod Ellis (Second language acquisition researcher) says that it is worth focusing on formulaic chunks initially before the teaching of rule-based grammar while Nick Ellis (cognitive linguist), coming from the emergentist perspective, maintains that by memorising and later analysing chunks learners bootstrap their way to grammar.

Native speakers do not realise how much they rely on stock phrases such as If I were you…, When it comes to… There's been a lot of opposition to… when communicating. By some estimates, between 50% and 80% of native speaker English – depending on the genre - consists of prefabricated routines and memorised chunks.

A number of studies have shown that learners across all levels use far fewer chunks than native speakers relying on word-by-word sentence building. The ability to produce appropriate multi-word phrases often lags behind even when students have mastered the third conditional. If anything, we should be advocating more – not less- chunk learning.

In the final paragraph of the article after elevating the role of grammar rules, Dr Walter, as if to pre-empt the imminent backlash by those on the anti-grammar side of the argument, acknowledges that teaching vocabulary is more important than grammar and there is room for both: a grammar syllabus and word lists… 

There you have it: twenty or so years of psycholinguistics, SLA research, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics are thrown out of the window, and grammar and vocabulary are decoupled yet again. Ironically, those teachers whose teaching is no longer dictated by the outdated and largely discredited slot-and-filler model of language learning probably shrugged off the article. But those who have never let go of the hold that pedagogic grammar has on their teaching will now be vindicated and continue - with renewed vigour - battering their students with grammar exercises.

References

Ellis, N. (1996). Sequencing in SLA: Phonological memory, chunking, and points of order. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18(1), 91-126. Available at: www-personal.umich.edu/~ncellis/NickEllis/Publications_files/Ellis1996Chunking.pdf

Ellis, R. (2005). Principles of instructed language learning. Asian EFL Journal, vol. 7. Available at: www.asian-efl-journal.com/September_2005_EBook_editions.pdf

Walter, C. (2012, September 18). Time to stop avoiding grammar. The Guardian Weekly. Available at: http://gu.com/p/3aa24