We were lucky enough to catch up with Scott Thornbury at the IH conference in Barcelona and ask him some grammar questions. Scott is the author of Scott Thornbury’s 101 Grammar Questions, the latest Pocket edition in the Cambridge Handbook for Language Teachers series.
In your experience, what is the question about grammar that you have been asked the most by teachers?
The question about grammar that I’ve been asked most, and I imagine most teachers have been asked, is the perennial one about ‘what’s the difference between the past simple and the present perfect?’ and when we use the past simple and when we use present perfect. And I can completely understand why. It’s a really elusive concept – the difference between the idea of a disconnected past and a kind of ‘connected-to-the-present’ past, but at the same time we can talk about past experiences using the present perfect.
It doesn’t seem to be intuitively right, particularly for speakers of languages that have an equivalent of the present perfect like French, German or Spanish or have a form that looks more or less the same, but the use is subtly different. So it’s not just a question of not having the present perfect like speakers of Arabic who find it baffling, but it’s a question of knowing that it’s used in a slightly different way. So, that would be number one on my list.
What areas of grammar do your MA TESOL students find tricky?
I teach a Masters course training teachers of English, most of whom are native speakers. I deal specifically with what we call Language Analysis which obviously includes grammar. It’s interesting how even experienced teachers admit to having huge holes in their grammar knowledge. This may be because of the levels they’ve taught; if they’ve taught beginners or pehaps they’ve mainly taught higher-level students advanced writing, for example. There are whole areas of grammar that are difficult for beginners or elementary students that they’re not really aware of, and vice versa. It could also have something to do with the nationality or the language group they are teaching – certain areas are more difficult for some language speakers.
Syntax
But I think the areas that they find difficult, speaking generally, would relate to syntax rather than morphology, that’s to say, issues of word order, sentence construction and clause construction as opposed to the endings on or the inflections of verbs. When you think about English, it’s not a hugely inflected language like Spanish or Turkish for example, so theoretically it’s not as complicated to learn. But syntax is an issue and I think teachers really come up against it when they’re teaching writing. This is particularly the case when they’re trying to understand, correct and explain the kinds of errors that learners make in writing and they simply don’t have the terminology, let alone the understanding of syntax, to be able to deal with that. I know that in my own experience it is an area that was very late acquired.
Verb arguments
Pedagogical grammar doesn’t really deal with things like verb arguments. By verb arguments I mean the kind of construction that would follow a verb, so the fact that English verbs like ‘say’ and ‘tell’ have different constructions that follow them – you ‘say’ something but you ‘tell’ something to someone. We all know that certain verbs take infinitive forms, certain verbs take -ing forms and certain verbs take both. This is dealt with often in textbooks, but it’s not something that teachers feel confident about explaining or teaching to their students. It does seem to be rather arbitrary.
When you were researching and writing the book, did you learn anything surprising?
When I was writing the book I came up against ‘black holes’ in my own knowledge. I attempted to answer some of these questions and answer them concisely as well as take on board new findings in Corpus Linguistics, for example. I mentioned before that syntax is a tricky area for my students. This is still a tricky area for me and I still find it very difficult to come up with an immediate explanation of when you can delete or omit the relative pronoun with relative clauses, for example, ‘This is the book I gave her’ not necessarily ‘This is the book which I gave her.’ I’m trying to figure out an example where you have to use ‘which’ or ‘that’ and there’s the problem! It is not only coming up with examples, but also the rules as to when you can omit the relative pronoun or when it is customary to admit ‘that’ in that-clauses. Is there a rule for that? For example, if you compare ‘I think it’s going to rain’ with ‘I think that it’s going to rain’. It was really interesting finding out what Corpus Linguistics has to say about these kinds of syntactic issues. So I learned a lot in that particular section of the book.
Determiner system
The other area where my knowledge is not a hundred percent and certainly needs more work on (the same goes for my MA students) is the article system or the determiner system in English, which is really difficult to explain. It’s especially difficult for learners with languages that don’t have articles or different ways of marking definiteness and indefiniteness, for example, in the noun phrase. I find that fascinating.
Prepositions
I would add a third area: prepositions. Again, even very advanced learners of English encounter problems with prepositions because it seems to be completely arbitrary – and it’s not. There are very good reasons why we choose one preposition over another to talk about time and place and how we use prepositions kind of metaphorically in certain expressions. The combination of prepositions and articles, particularly in expressions like ‘at work’, ‘in bed’, ‘on Sunday’ where we don’t use an article. This is another really interesting area, which I used to think was completely and utterly arbitrary. But now I realise there’s a system there. There are rules that can be explained that they are accessible both to teachers and to learners.
Read Scott Thornbury on print versus digital materials blog.