In my last post, I compared English lessons that fail to address learners’ targets and contexts to ‘bridges to nowhere’ – structures that may be well planned and strongly constructed, but at the same time fail to serve any real purpose. Now, I’d like to turn our attention to another bridge: London’s Millennium Footbridge, known locally as The Wobbly Bridge.
Construction on the bridge began in 1998, and the bridge was opened in June, 2000 as part of the year’s celebration of the new millennium. However, as soon as people began using the bridge, they reported feeling an unexpected and uncomfortable swaying motion, and many even reported feeling a bit sick. The bridge was closed immediately and investigations were carried out. Engineers discovered that a phenomenon known as synchronous lateral excitation was causing the movement. What this meant was that as people walked on the bridge, a subtle, natural swaying motion occurred. The motion was just enough to cause people to react slightly, and to walk in step with the motion. This in turned caused the motion to increase – a ‘positive feedback’ phenomenon.
Workers returned to the bridge from May 2001 to January 2002, and at a cost of five million pounds, fitted dampers to the bridge to stop the swaying. The wobble-free bridge was opened on 22 February 2002, but to this day, many Londoners still refer to it as the Wobbly Bridge. The problems with the bridge arose when the designers failed to take the laws of physics fully into account.
Learners may have a similar sense of discomfort or dissonance when our lessons and materials fail to properly and responsibly address grammar, which could be considered the ‘physics’ of language – the rules that govern how words go together for clear and useful communication.
I’m not prepared to discuss how grammar is best presented in this short blog post – explicit versus implicit, inductive versus deductive – but I would like to make three suggestions that may help teachers address grammar in a meaningful way for learners.
Let the function lead the grammar
Take any text or any chunk of language input, and of course it’s absolutely full of grammar. So how do we know what grammar to focus on in a given text? When I was teaching engineers at Sumitomo Electric Industries in Japan, even those with fairly low level English were required to give factory tours at times. This meant that I introduced the passive voice earlier in their courses than a general English course book might suggest. The context demanded it, so that was the grammar we worked on.
Explore the integration of grammar, lexis and context
In EAP, when we teach students to write academic texts, paraphrasing is an essential skill for the production of readable prose. This is an example of where grammar, lexis and context all work together. Noun and verb transformations are a basic paraphrasing tool that exemplify this idea:
Verbs and gerund
When the data was analysed, the pattern became clear.
Analysing the data made the pattern clear.
Nouns and verbs
Organization is of crucial importance for lab safety.
A lab should be organized to make it safe.
When learners begin to see grammar, lexis and context as closely integrated rather than as disparate elements of language, real progress in language development can occur.
Use grammar to enable communication
Learners develop their own working version of English grammar whether we teach them or not. It’s an inevitable part of language acquisition. Our role of teachers is to be aware as possible of the grammatical features that our learners need the most, and to really focus on the ones that can truly hinder or enable communication.
Most learners of English consistently produce the third person singular -s relatively late. This means that teachers hear a lot of He go to school every day rather than He goes to school every day. It’s fine to try to help learners be aware of the error, but it isn’t one that is likely to cause any real misunderstanding. But consider the following:
| You | don’t have to aren’t allowed to | enter the high-voltage switch room. |
In this case, if learners confuse the grammar of permission and obligation, the result could be fatal. This is grammar very much worth focusing on, as explicitly as necessary.
If you want to avoid lessons that are like London’s Wobbly Bridge, you don’t need to throw in loads of explicit grammar instruction, but you’ll do your learners a favour to keep an eye on the underlying ‘physics’ of your lessons.
[Image by: Arpingstone. Public domain. Image source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Millennium_Bridge750pix.jpg]
