Piotr Marek Próba. Course 2601

The dos and don’ts of designing pedagogic grammar rules. Simplification and truth.

Introduction:

On the basis of grammar rules students of English should be given a chance to determine whether a given utterance is grammatically well-formed. Sadly, this ideal situation is much different from the real life circumstances, in which the majority of students of English are often not sure whether the utterances they read, hear or produce are grammatical. Worse still, a great number of EFL course books are to blame, as they provide inadequate or insufficient information concerning English grammar.

It seems much too easy to criticise the authors of those books for their clumsy and confusing grammar rules, which are to be presented in this paper. But why are those rules so easy to criticise? Why have they not been improved? How may one explain the problems they fail to deal with? These questions may provoke numerous answers, such as the great complexity of English grammar and lexical conditioning of numerous grammar phenomena. One may even claim that it is impossible to design satisfactory grammar rules for English learners. However even without contradicting those points, one may find numerous cases where adequate grammar rules may be presented, but the authors fail to do that.

But what are the criteria for designing good rules? Michael Swan believes that they are: “truth, demarcation, clarity, simplicity, conceptual parsimony and relevance” (Swan 1994, p. 45). Though they are not compatible and may overlap or conflict, they cannot be disregarded. On the basis of the learning and teaching experience of the author of this paper, it is possible to add one more criterion: the easiness to be memorized. If a rule is too difficult to be retained in memory, then it is not good for the majority of students, who will simply not remember it. Still, such rules may be extremely valuable, if their predictive properties exceed those of other, simpler rules.

In this paper, three criteria will be considered: truth, simplicity and the easiness to be memorized (which often corresponds to the limited length and number of rules, optimal generalizations and conceptual parsimony).

Simplification vs. Truth

The most significant fault of EFL books is presenting rules which are not true. This is exceptionally harmful to intermediate and more advanced students, who meet with original English texts and are extremely surprised seeing that the rules they learnt are not observed by native speakers! This may cause that they will not believe their books or even teachers presenting grammar rules.

However, in cases where simplicity and easiness of memorizing grammar rules is aimed at, linguistic truth happens to be disregarded! An eminent example is Callan Method students Book 4 (intermediate). It informs that the method is easy, interesting and pleasant. However, when a careful reader analyses the “easy, interesting and pleasant” rules, he will realise that many of them are not true!

Let us consider the following example of the explanation of the use of the Past Simple vs. the Present Perfect:

As we have already seen, we use the Past Simple when the action is finished and the time is finished whilst we use the Present Perfect when the action is finished but the time is not finished.

However, we must notice the following irregularity when we say “What time did you get up this morning?” even though when asking a question the morning has not yet finished; it may only be about 11 a.m.

The reason for this irregularity is perhaps that, when asking such a question, we are thinking of that part of the morning that is now finished (Callan).

As we will see, the first paragraph of the rule presents false information. Let us analyse the following of utterances in the Present Perfect:

1. I have lived here for five years (and I still live here),

2. I have learnt English for five years (and I am learning it now in the classroom),

3. My father has always worked hard (he still works).

In the first example the action (of living in the specified place) is not finished and the presented rule says the opposite! The same is true for the other examples. Another mistake in the rule is easily discovered when we consider a negative sentence: “I have never played football.” There the action of playing football is not finished, as it has not even began. On the basis of this observation one may conclude that the rule does not apply to negatives!

On the whole, the rule “we use the Present Perfect when the action is finished, but the time has not finished” is not true. Moreover, it seems impossible to be corrected. However, the author tried to do it by an additional explanation in the second and the third paragraph. It seems an extremely harmful idea. Not only, does it not solve the problems mentioned before, but may produce a false impression that the only exception or “irregularity” was that mentioned by Callan.

The next drawback of that book is that the grammar explanation is not followed by any examples and there is only one exercise relating to the rule, and the exercise consists only of one question! What is more teachers using the book are advised not to use any other materials. In this way, the student of the “Callan Method Student’s Book 4” acquires only the incorrect rule, as far as the use of the Past Simple vs. the Present Perfect is concerned !

A less striking example of making the student believe in false information maybe found in the following set of rules:

In question and negatives we use “many” with countable nouns.

In question and negatives we use “much” with uncountable nouns.

We use “a lot of” in affirmative sentences. (Elseworth, p.33)

This explanation is true only when we understand it literally, that is: we use “much”, “many” and “a lot of” in the described situations. However, those rules strongly imply that we use them only (!) in those situations, which of course is false, e.g. “Much has been written about the causes of unemployment” or “I liked it very much.”

That set of rules should be improved by adding that it refers to an informal style, and that “much” is used as an adverb in affirmatives.” If not, the students may be confused hearing their teacher saying even the common “Thank you very much.”

Between Maximum Generalizations And Unnecessary Differentiations.

Common sense knowledge suggests that it is better to achieve the goal by using the least of time and effort possible. Accordingly, grammar rules should be as short and simple as it is possible. In contrast, in many grammar books the length of grammar rules and unnecessary multiplication of their numbers is a considerable problem, though, in many cases it may be avoided.

A good example of generalization may be found in “Nowa gramatyka angielska w ćwiczeniach” (Gozdawa-Gołębiowski 1995, p. 300.) On one page, it explains the use of “I wish, if only, suppose, I’d rather, it’s high time” grouping them together. It was possible because those phrases behave in the same way. In contrast, one may look for the explanation of the same phenomena in “English grammar in use.”(Murphy) which is presented in six units (37, 38, 39, 40, 64, 65). Obviously, reading the long explanation in Murphy’s book would be simply a waste of time and effort.

Nevertheless, there are also confusing generalizations in books. An interesting example of such generalization is grouping all modal and auxiliary verbs with “dare” and “used to” naming them as “special verbs” in opposition to other verbs and explaining why they are different (Callan.) This lead to presenting false information in the rule. Surprisingly, when the author realised that, he wrote the following explanation instead of removing the false information:

“It is well to remember that in English there are very often exceptions to a rule, which means that it would be dangerous to think of the rules as always being obeyed” (Callan.)

Such an explanation may make students think that they should not believe that grammar rules are true, which obviously will not help them learn the system of English grammar, as they are told that they cannot be certain if, in a particular case, the rule is obeyed or not. This is obviously an unsatisfactory learning situation, after all, “rules should be true” (Swan). Is there any student who would like to learn untrue rules?

To justify the simplicity and the resulting incorrectness of Callan’s rules, one must remember that he wants to teach “English in the Quarter of the time.” Thus, he oversimplified the rules to save students’ time.

For the sake of this simplicity, the author also adopted a surprising strategy of presenting “the special verbs.” At first, he presented the rule which is quite complicated, but mostly adequate. Then, he placed a simplified rule at the end of the book, in section “Grammar Questions.” This rule seems mostly untrue.

A comparison of those two seems most interesting, however, for the purpose of this paper the better rule will be analysed:

…There are twelve verbs… which we call “Special Verbs”… :”be: can: dare: do: have: may: must: need: ought: shall: used to” and “will”…

The Special Verbs are different in nine ways from other verbs:

1. They form interrogatives by putting the verb before the subject…

2. They form their negatives just by adding “not”…

3. They are the only verbs that can be used in “Tail Questions”…

4. They are used as auxiliaries…

5. They are used for short answers. E.g. …Yes, I will.

6. They are used in “End Constructions”: that is they add something to the end of a sentence, and are joined to the sentence with the words “so, neither, or “nor”, e.g. “My brother has got a car, and so have I.”

7. They are used when we wish to be emphatic about something…

8. They are often followed by certain adverbs instead of being preceded by them…

9. They do not take “s” in the third person singular of the Present Tense. …exception: “do”, … sometimes “need”…”dare”.

As one may see, that sweeping generalization, in which “used to” and “dare” are treated as modals, actually implies that they behave like, for example “do”. This is obviously not true as forms of “used to” and “dare” very often behave like normal verbs, whereas “do” does not. For this reason, the rule is untrue to such a degree, that one may question each point of it for a number of reasons e.g.:

• point 1 implies that questions such as “Used he do it?” and “Dared he do it?” are common,

• point 2 does not agree with the normal use of “dare” and “used to “ as “Questions/ negatives are commonly formed with “do”,/ ”does”/”did.” (Alexander, p.234 - 236),

• point 3 implies that one normally uses constructions such as “He used to smoke, usedn’t he?” , “He didn’t dare, dared he?”,

• point 4 implies that “dare” and “used to” may be used as auxiliaries,

• point 5 implies that we commonly use answers like “Yes, I dared” , “Yes, I used” and “Yes, I need”,

• point 6 implies that the sentence “My brother used to have a car and so used I” is common,

• point 7 implies that “used to” is used in emphatic constructions

• point 8 is extremely vaguely formulated and difficult to understand, because: how is the student to know which adverbs are “certain” , (in the book there are just 3 examples of them) ?

• in point 9 the “Present Tense” should be replaced by the ”Present Simple Tense”.

As we see the rule is untrue in every point! This seems to be an extremely harmful to students, as they are not given a clue, in which cases the rule is true and they may use such constructions as “He used to smoke, usedn’t he?”. This would be entirely the fault of the rule designer.

Conclusions:

In constructing grammar rules there are, at least two extremes. One is oversimplification “for the sake of students”, who will not remember too numerous or too complicated rules. The other one is complicating the rules for the sake of truth and for limiting their number. Sadly, it seems extremely difficult to find the golden middle and design such a set of rules which would satisfy, at least the criteria of truth and simplicity. Nonetheless, it is important, to find and improve those rules, which should not be presented to the student, who may be badly influenced by them.

References: Alexander, L. G. 1998. Longman English grammar. New York.

Callan R.K.T., 2000. Callan Method. Student’s Book 4. Cambridge.

Elsworth S. & Rose J. 1996. Go 2. Students’ book. Longman.

Gozdawa-Gołębiowski R., , B. Jasińska, S. Kryński and A. Prejbisz. 1997. Nowa gramatyka angielska w ćwiczeniach, Warszawa.

Murphy, R. 1992. English grammar in use. A self-study reference and practical book for intermediate students. Cambridge.

Westney P. Rules and pedagogical grammar. In Terence Odin (ed.) Perspectives on pedagogical grammar. Cambridge.

Swan M. 1995. Practical English usage. Oxford.

Swan M. 1994. Design criteria for pedagogic language rules. In M. Bygate, A. Tonkyn and E. Williams (eds), Grammar and the language teacher.