Teachers’ aspects about Language and Classroom Practice in Teaching Grammar
Dave - Conditional Sentences
Below is an example of a grammar teaching activity from Dave’s work. I will discuss it to illustrate the links between the development of his KAL and his instructional decisions in teaching grammar.
In a previous lesson a student had asked the teacher a question about conditional sentences. The teacher said he would answer her question in the next lesson. This is the lesson he subsequently conducted.
1. The teacher writes the following list of sentences on the board:
If you help us we will finish quicker.
Unless he gets his own way he gets very angry.
If I knew how to cook I would be more independent.
I’ll lend you the money provided that I get it back next week.
If I had known you were coming I would have prepared a special meal.
I’ll clear away as soon as you have finished.
Were you to win the lottery, how would you change your life?
Should there be an accident, this will be of use to you.
Even if I could drive, I wouldn’t buy a car.
Had he made more effort, his promotion would have been certain.
Were it not for his sheltered background, he wouldn’t be so narrow-minded.
It is because he comes from such a sheltered background that he’s so narrow-minded.
Had they taken the main road they could have done the trip quicker.
If he had been doing his job properly, he would have noticed his mistake.
2. The teacher now asks the students whether the sentences are all conditionals, and a class discussion ensues. The teacher works through the list, examining the way conditional meaning is expressed in each example. The teacher uses the following concept questions to facilitate students’ understandings of each example:
Is it a hypothetical situation?
Is it possible?
Is it happening now?
Is it happening tomorrow?
Did it happen already?
Each sentences is thus classified according to whether it is a first, second, or third conditional. At the end of the discussion, the sentences have been classified as follows:
1st conditional: (a), (b), (d), (f), (h), (l)
2nd conditional: (c), (g), (i), (k)
3rd conditional: (e), (j), (m), (n)
This lesson captures three key characteristics of Dave’s approach to grammar teaching:
• The use of planned rather than spontaneous activities.
• Identifying grammar content on the basis of students’ requests.
• Promoting inductive, metalinguistically explicit grammar analysis.
Dave was rarely observed to launch into unplanned, spontaneous discussions of grammar (but see Borg, 2001 for one occasion where he did). His typical approach when students asked him about grammar (and this was not something he encouraged them to do) was to make a note of the question and to reply that he would take it up in a subsequent lesson. He was willing to respond to their questions about grammar but felt insecure in his ability to do so without preparation. In his initial response to students’ queries, he endeavored to disguise any such feelings and tried to make students see his logic for postponing the discussion of grammar:
I’ve been asked quite a few things which I’ve told them quite plainly ‘Yes, but can we do it some other time so I’ll do it more systematically’. For example, last Monday I was asked to explain something about when to use the infinitive, and when to use the gerund, and I know that... But I told them, all right, I can explain it, but if you can wait until tomorrow I can look it up and I’ll explain it more systematically, because I might be giving you examples now and you might not be able to see a pattern.
He did actually examine this language point in a subsequent lesson. In fact, this extract, together with the conditionals lesson above, also illustrates how the focus of grammar work in Dave’s work was largely determined by specific requests students made. Dave was not bound by any examinations students would be taking or syllabuses he had to follow. There was a course book which students were given, and Dave did use this regularly, but it consisted of long reading texts with associated comprehension questions and no grammar work. The assumption, as stated in the preface to the book, was that students at advanced level did not require such work. In the light of what we have seen about Dave’s KAL, the rationale in this course book perhaps provided a further means for him to justify the minimal role which grammar teaching played in his lessons.
Dave’s preference for inductive grammar work was partly influenced by ideas suggested in the Diploma course referred to earlier. Discovery learning was a notion the course promoted and which Dave embraced. He also felt that, even when students were not able to reach clear conclusions about the grammar under study, engaging them in the kind of processes illustrated in the lesson above was valuable:
The students try to work out the rule for themselves rather than having it given by the teacher with examples to follow. I think if the learner can somehow see some logic in the pattern/how the form is being used, and deduce for himself how the rule works, he is more likely to assimilate it.
The very explicit nature of his grammar work, though, was in contrast to the more implicit approach he said the Diploma has promoted. I therefore also asked him how he felt the kind of explicit KAL generated by such an approach to grammar was helpful for the students:
Being adults, they can take it back with them and study it, and I think when you come to a certain age your brain starts compartmentalizing everything, even if it’s grammar, it’s logic and this is the way you go about it. And it’s a system in your brain. So I suppose it helps them because they can remember it that way. I certainly remember it that way.
His comments here reveal beliefs about the way adult learners organize knowledge: he feels they use a logical, mental filing system in which explicit information about grammar can be conveniently stored. He feels his own knowledge of grammar is mentally organized in this way.
Earlier I mentioned that Dave did not demonstrate a well-developed repertoire of techniques for handling grammar teaching. He exhibited a wide range of strategies for dealing with other areas such as reading and vocabulary, but with reference to grammar this was not the case. In designing a grammar activity, his standard approach was to assemble in advance, from grammar reference books or teaching materials, examples of sentences containing the target structures and to ask students to analyses, classify, and derive rules from these sentences, as illustrated above. We have seen that his lack of confidence in his KAL had led him to minimize formal instruction in his lessons and to avoid spontaneous grammar work. The limitations of his instructional repertoire for grammar work could also be linked to his avoidance of grammar teaching over the years (i.e., by teaching grammar so infrequently his pedagogical skill in this aspect of his work had remained undeveloped). This suggests then that teachers’ KAL may influence not only the incidence of explicit grammar work in their lessons but, in the longer term, also the range of instructional techniques which they develop proficiency in throughout their career.
