Grammar in Foreign Language Learning

1. Grammar in Foreign Language Learning March 2nd workshop Ernesto Macaro & Suzanne Graham

2. outline • What is grammar and what are our expectations? • What does the research evidence suggest? • Link to ways of teaching writing • Discussion and sharing of ideas

3. What is…. • Grammar?

4. Defining Grammar • Grammar as a way of describing and categorising language – grammar books written by experts • Grammar as a set of rules that a learner can try to explain to you – back of exercise book • Grammar as terminology – metalanguage • Grammar as a series of patterns in the learner’s head – evidence of change in their productions

5. Grammar questionnaire here

6. How do we expose learners to patterns in language (implicit learning)? • Through pattern-focused teacher talk and corrective feedback • Through transferring phrases to different situations • Through high exposure/interaction of verb-rich talk • Through opportunities to engage in open-ended activities - choice of language • Through pattern-focused listening • Through reading with a pattern focus • Through extensive reading

7. How do we teach patterns explicitly? • Practice a pattern communicatively then give some support via explicit teaching (+ exercises) • Provide lots of grammar-based exercises after exposure to aural and written text (in which those patterns are prevalent) • Teach explicitly only when they demonstrate consistent errors • Start lesson with and explanation of the grammar rule, then give exercises

8. Defining error • Slips • Mistakes • Errors

9. Interlanguage The theory of interlanguage goes something like this: learners who make mistakes when speaking or writing do not do so (necessarily) because they are lazy, inattentive, careless or have a low aptitude for the language. Their “interlanguage”, their current competence in the language, is quitesystematic. Mistakes are the result ofsystematic hypothesisingabout the L2. These hypotheses may be influenced bytransfer from their L1or byover-generalisingfrom what they already know (or have noticed) about the L2. Mary L1 L2

10. Example of interlanguage • *j’ai jouer au cricket • Where did this mistake come from?

11. Example of interlanguage • *j’ai jouer au cricket • a student justified by explaining that, as the phrase preceded ‘au cricket’, a ‘vowel clash’ should be avoided

12. U-shaped curves Cheval/chevaux Cheval & chevaux chevals Morphological Progression

13. An example of the U-shaped curve • The following slides report on work we did studying grammatical development among Year 12 learners of French

14. Macaro & Graham 2008. The development of the PC in FrenchLLJ • “it may refer to an action in the past whose effect continues into the present” (Hawkins and Towell 1996: 229) as in ‘elle a quitté la maison (ce matin)’ (she’s left the house – which may imply that she should be ‘here’ soon). • 1) ‘maman, Pierre est arrivé, tu peux lui ouvrir la porte?’; and 2) ‘Pierre est arrivé à sept heures, et il s’est lavé avant de sortir’ • ‘Pierre’s arrived’ and ‘Pierre arrived’

15. Surface forms differences: they washed in the river – Elles se sont lavées dans la rivière • The auxiliary has to agree with the subject both in terms of person and number • The auxiliary has to be correctly chosen in order to match the main verb. • If the main verb is reflexive it takes être and needs to mark reflexivity with the one of five reflexive pronouns. • There are three regular forms of past participle endings. • There are a large number of irregular verbs. For GCSE approximately 30 irregular verbs. In the case of irregular verbs, past participles almost certainly have to be learnt through associative mechanisms rather than rules. • The past participle (whether regular or irregular) is inflected for gender and for number when the main verb takes être, but not with avoir – lavées

16. Examples of PC progress • Ils visité un bar et Peter ordonné un boisson d’alcool.. • Il demander 4 billets • Ils ont arrivent • les adultes ont voient • Le guide a explique • il est disparu

17. Perfect Tense: development stages(Macaro and Graham 2008 LLJ) • 1. A basic stage. Here the auxiliary is never used. The perfect tense is marked by a mixture of a lone past participle, a present-tense like form, and the infinitive. • 2. A pre-auxiliary stage. The auxiliary is used in only one or two tokens. Where it is used, verbs construed by the learner to be verbs of ‘movement’ or reflexive verbs are more likely to be given an auxiliary (42 auxiliary present; 18 absent). Particularly, the verb ‘aller’ is more often used with an auxiliary than without one, and frequently used correctly. It is likely that it is a fixed phrase (association of some sort)

18. Perfect Tense • 3. An auxiliary development stage. The auxiliary is used more frequently, if still less than half the time. However, the proportion of infinitive and present tense forms is decreasing. • 4. A fixed auxiliary stage. The use of the auxiliary increases to the point where it is present most of the time, is the correct choice of auxiliary, but correct choice of auxiliary and agreement of past participles is variable. • 5. A PC acquired stage. The use of the auxiliary is always present except, perhaps, in complex phrases involving preceding direct objects (clitics) and the past participle is always correctly formed (unless it is an infrequent irregular) although it may not have appropriate number or gender agreement

19. Est-ce qu’il y a des toilettes près d’ici (generated) Est-ce qu’il y a un campingprès d’ici? (formulaic) Est-ce qu’ils sont des toilettes près d’ici? (beginning to unpack) formulaic - generated

20. What does the research say about teaching grammar explicitly • Depends on the nature of the rule/pattern: complex rules not easily learnt through explicit teaching • There are ‘orders of learning’ rules/patterns: difficult to learn them in the wrong order. Coursebooks random. • Try the inductive/implicit method first • Always ask “at what cost?”

21. Writing • OFSTED inspection evidence suggests that pupils make rapid progress with language learning in the first half of Year 7 but that progress slows considerably from then on and particularly during Years 8 and 9 • “in writing pupils move too slowly from the copying of words or phrases to independent writing” (Ofsted)

22. Controversial Statement • Our obsession with written accuracy is stopping the learners from developing the rules and patterns of the foreign language

23. Study of year 7/8 writing (June Year 7) • Could write about anything they wanted • Topic chosen: personal information (except for one student who wrote about the sport she did. ) • Sample produced on average 5.7 words (range: 0 to 10 words)

24. Experience of writing in French • “we do exercises, but if um, I need to revise for a test like, I’ll put it on a bit of paper or something” • “(we)just copy things and do exercises out of….from books…” • “she just told us to write them down like “ à la campagne”, in the countryside and like right by the side of it in the English so we can just remember them or if we forget we just look back in the book……” • “we have ones where you have to make it up like our bedrooms, stuff like that, or we might have to copy out of our book to see how we do it”

25. difficulties with formulation process “I was thinking about some work we did about after school and stuff and I remembered it and then um, *je mangeay a snack* just came into my mind. Thinking about it I just wrote it” “I remember back to when we did it…it’s on my graffiti wall …(meaning a visual image he has?)” • “I keep thinking what I could put but I don’t know how to say these things. That’s my problem”

26. strategies used • most popular strategy was to try to recall a set phrase which roughly matched the idea that came into their heads • if the set phrase strategy failed, the only other available strategy was to avoid saying the idea altogether

27. March of Year 8 • students produced an average of 17.3 words, (range: 3 words to 38 words) a wider range of topics: • personal information; • hobbies/sport; the home; • likes and dislikes.

28. Summary of research in L2 writing (all contexts; all levels) • Vocabulary knowledge important in any type of writing task • Narrative tasks tend to be most challenging (require most knowledge of grammar) • Providing ‘models’ results in most accurate writing • Not providing models results in most interesting writing

29. Summary of research • Planning in L1 results in best content but most inaccuracies • Very unlikely that we can stop students from thinking in L1 when they are writing (but there are some things we can do to help) • Successful writers use a combination of “formulation” strategies and evaluate these for the likelihood of their effectiveness. • students (beginners & lower intermediate) who check as they write more likely to employ a range of strategies rather than only one or two

30. Summary of research • Dictionaries: only small % of words looked up result in correct use. • Important to a) use good dictionary b) use example sentences (dictionary training). • Students can be trained to improve their writing by using different strategies.

31. Suggested Writing Approaches • Let’s get away from copying • Let the students write more of what they want to write rather than what they know or have access to. • Sometimes do a writing task at the beginning of a topic rather than at the end. • encourage them to make mistakes • But offer them a series of strategies to minimise the mistakes • Feedback on their strategy use more than on their achievement

32. Spidergrams Phrases words Topic or topics phrases phrases phrases words

33. Quickly try to remember phrases on the topic: Les Vacances 5 simple sentences in English 1.__________________________ 2.__________________________ 3.__________________________ 4.__________________________ 5. __________________________ 1 (spidergram) First draft of a story “mes vacances, l’année dernière ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________

34. Generating via Translation (word for word) Recombining (set phrases) Formulation strategies Avoiding (content) Restructuring (unpicking set phrases) Evaluating decisions taken

35. Recombining set phrases Restructuring set phrases Generating sentences via translation

36. Strategies in the monitoring process • Auditory monitoring (does it sound right?) • Visual monitoring (does it look right?) • Back-translating (usually shows up extra or missing words) • Common sense monitoring (does it make sense?) • Content monitoring (have I put in the right information?) • Coherence monitoring (do the sentences follow each other) • Conventions monitoring (is this right for a business letter?) • Prompting a specific monitor (what are usual problems with this? E.g. present, future, conditional tenses = 1 verb) • Personalised monitoring (watch out for my usual mistakes) • Evaluating monitoring process

37. Feedback to writing sheets here

38. If time allows • Activity: two lesson plans to compare