Picking up where he left off last time, with Grammar: What should we teach, to whom, and when? (Part 1), Senior ELT Research Manager Niall Curry continues his exploration into this broad and interesting topic which leaves many teachers in search of answers.
So far, we have recognised that utility, relevance and frequency can be helpful when deciding what grammar to teach. However, we also know that they are not necessarily enough on their own to make the call.
Let’s take another example. This comes from uses of ‘used to’ in the Cambridge English Corpus. Traditionally, we would think to teach affirmative, negative and questions forms together. But is there much utility in that?
In the graph below we can see that the negative is much less frequent in the Cambridge English Corpus. So much so that it makes the negative form seem not all that useful, given that we don’t really use it.
But it would still be good to know if there is a particular situation in which it ought to be taught. This largely depends on relevance and whether there is any communicative context. How useful is it to your students?
At this point you might be wondering what is the answer, what is the perfect order in which to teach grammar? But, looking at all of these different perspectives, I think you can see that there is no easy one-size-fits-all answer.
Graham Burton’s grammar research
Researcher and PhD candidate Graham Burton, who has written blogs on grammar for us here at Cambridge University Press, has interesting insights on this subject. He sees that a consensus emerged in the second half of the 20th century on the order in which grammar ought to be taught and that teachers around the world gradually worked out which grammar their learners needed to study.
From his review of the research, concepts like simplicity and centrality; frequency; linguistic distance; communicative needs and learnability are core in the debate on grammar order. I have already dealt with some – like frequency and communicative needs – while others like simplicity, centrality and learnability are more controversial and would need much more space for discussion than available here. What exactly does it mean for a piece of grammar to be simple? Is any grammar inherently easy? These are big questions, and questions beyond the scope of this blog – but it is worth looking into this if you are curious.
Linguistic distance
Among the less controversial of these is linguistic distance, which has not been touched on here. This refers to the relationship between English and the learners’ L1. Features that are comparable between English and the learners’ L1 can be dealt with earlier than those where there is no overlap.
This is something that resonates with many of us and is something we can use to help make decisions. How we align that with utility, frequency, communicative needs and relevance is a challenge. Again, this brings another concept into the mix.
Summary
Overall, when thinking about the order in which to teach, we have lots of questions and few definite answers. This is an area of research that is not well advanced and is worthy of much more attention. It is a very big question, perhaps too big with an assumption that this would be the same for everyone. We can see that we have several resources available to use to help us make such decisions. It should not be forgotten that, while learning grammar is a cognitive process, it is also a social one. Social use and context is key for effective acquisition.
Finally, when we think about when to teach grammar items, we can be guided by our understanding of neurolinguistics and cognitive linguistics, in terms of developmental capacity. The use of corpus linguistics – for checking frequency of grammar items or focusing on relevance and communicative needs in different learning contexts – can help us order language in terms of utility.
With this in mind, what do you think about the order in which we teach grammar? How do you make it work for your contexts? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
This blog is part of a series of grammar posts by Niall Curry, the first being ‘Grammar: discovering what to teach and how to teach it’. To find out more about the world’s best-selling grammar book for learners of English, visit our website.