Last time, Geraldine Mark and Anne O’Keeffe explained what the English Grammar Profile is. Here, they look at how you can make good use of it.
Through our research, we were able to identify over 1,200 different items of grammar that learners really use, based on what they had written in their exams. So what? What does this actually mean?
What is the English Grammar Profile?
The first important point is that this list of grammatical items that make up the English Grammar Profile is just that, a list. It is not a syllabus that must be followed. This list does have some important uses, however, because it is telling us what learners know at different levels, and sometimes that is surprisingly more and at other times it is surprisingly less than we would have expected.
How can I use the English Grammar Profile (EGP)?
So, as a teacher, if you are teaching a grammar point, the EGP will offer a reference point that will allow you see where you may need to give more less or more focus. Let’s say you are about to teach that old favourite the Future Perfect Continuous, armed with great examples like By June, I will have been studying in this school for nine months. It’s a tough one to explain to learners, and maybe that’s because it’s not all that high up in our hierarchy of grammar needs.
So let’s say you go to the EGP. You click “Add Filters” and find FUTURE on the Super Category list and then select future perfect continuous on the Sub Category list, like this:
Hit Search and you’ll get these four result lines for the Future Perfect Continuous, which you are planning on teaching. Let’s explore the potential usefulness of these results for you in preparing your class:
We can see that it has come up mostly at B2 level, but there is also a C2 use. When we click onto the Details button for the first B2 level item, we see the following information about the affirmative form, which includes an example from a learner (in both the corrected and the original form – the corrected bits are not related to the future perfect continuous). Importantly, we find out in the comments section that the future perfect continuous is a “Very low frequency item.” And not only that, the note says that there are “No results for contracted forms” which means that we didn’t find enough examples – or perhaps none at all – in the 55 million words of learner data. In other words, students weren’t using the negative form:
While researching the future perfect continuous, we were really fascinated to find out that when we compared how frequently it was used in the Cambridge Learner Corpus with how often it is used in the 1.9 billion word Cambridge International Corpus, we found the frequencies to be low in both cases but overall lower in the native speaker corpus. Here’s a comparison per million words:
So, there you are, Sunday night, preparing your lesson on the Future Perfect Continuous.
What does all of this mean?
Should you just abandon the lesson now that you know that learners don’t use the negative form and that it’s not such a biggy after all in the real world? We don’t think so. The Future Perfect Continuous is still part of a set that we teach and we owe it to our learners not to leave gaps. It would be akin to not teaching the name of the second day of the week Tuesday just because we don’t use it as much as the other days. Word or grammar frequency isn’t the basis for such syllabus decisions. What this does tell you, as a teacher, is that this pattern you are going to teach isn’t one to spend much time on in terms of this Looking back from a point in the future use. Think about it: how often do you say things like:
By this time next week, I will have been working here for a year?
Okay, let’s jump to Wednesday night. You have that really advanced class tomorrow. It’s back to that dilemma again: what will I teach them that they may not already know? Well, here’s another use of the EGP. Tick the level C1 and C2 boxes (at the very top) to look up what learners can do at C1 and C2 level across any Super Category items. There will be some interesting surprises for that advanced class. Such as:
Using adverbs as a distancing device (where the writer or speaker wants to distance themselves from the message).
So for example, have a look at the use of supposedly, apparently and surprisingly in these learner examples:
Or how about the use of Not a + noun used for emphasis (and often followed by passive voice):
Or you could really impress them with the + PREMODIFIER + thing, fact etc.’ + is (that)‘, which is good way to focus on something:
The interesting thing is, there are endless possibilities and surprises!
Explore the English Grammar Profile.