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Caught up in Controversy Caught up in Controversy Enseñanzas Oficiales de Idiomas English Level C1 Lesson 4 The Routes of English: Caught up in controversy Click on the audio below and listen to these former students of English, who are now teachers, talking about how they learned the language. What has your experience learning English been like so far? How do you learn better? What style of language learner suits you best? Do you like learning grammar explicitly? This includes direct explanations from the teacher, and lots of practice from grammar books, or online websites. Do you like learning grammar implicitly? This implies learning grammar in context without realising you are actually learning a specific structure, and then figuring out the rule for that structure. What is your opinion on different English varieties and accents? Which one would you rather learn? Why? In this lesson we intend to broaden your concept of language learning, as well as to provide you with different approaches to teaching and learning English as a World Language. We will also include information about some of the very many standard varieties of English. Image by Pietluk and Kobo in Openclipart under Share. 1. Old School Grammar? There are different views on what is best for a student who is learning a language, whether this is his/her first language or any given second language. Read the following article and answer the questions below. Image by Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office in Flickr under CC The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar No more diagramming sentences: Students learn more from simply writing and reading. A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons—those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech—don't help and may even hinder students' efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old- fashioned way does not work. This finding—confirmed in 1984, 2007, and 2012 through reviews of over 250 studies—is consistent among students of all ages, from elementary school through college. For example, one well-regarded study followed three groups of students from 9th to 11th grade where one group had traditional rule-bound lessons, a second received an alternative approach to grammar instruction, and a third received no grammar lessons at all, just more literature and creative writing. The result: No significant differences among the three groups—except that both grammar groups emerged with a strong antipathy to English. There is a real cost to ignoring such findings. In my work with adults who dropped out of school before earning a college degree, I have found over and over again that they over-edit themselves from the moment they sit down to write. They report thoughts like "Is this right? Is that right?" and "Oh my god, if I write a contraction, I'm going to flunk." Focused on being correct, they never give themselves a chance to explore their ideas or ways of expressing those ideas. Significantly, this sometimes-debilitating focus on "the rules" can be found in students who attended elite private institutions as well as those from resource-strapped public schools. We need to teach students how to write grammatically by letting them write. These students are victims of the mistaken belief that grammar lessons must come before writing, rather than grammar being something that is best learned through writing. I saw the high cost of this phenomenon first-hand at the urban community college where I taught writing for eight years, an institution where more than 90 percent of students failed to complete a two-year degree within three years. (The national average is only marginally better at roughly 80 percent.) A primary culprit: the required developmental writing classes that focused on traditional grammar instruction. Again and again, I witnessed aspiration gave way to discouragement. In this seven-college system, some 80 percent of the students test into such classes where they can spend up to a year before being asked to write more than a paragraph. Nationally, over half of university and college students in developmental classes drop out before going any further. Essentially, they leave before having begun college. Happily, there are solutions. Just as we teach children how to ride bikes by putting them on a bicycle, we need to teach students how to write grammatically by letting them write. Once students get ideas they care about onto the page, they are ready for instruction—including grammar instruction—that will help communicate those ideas. We know that grammar instruction that works includes teaching students strategies for revising and editing, providing targeted lessons on problems that students immediately apply to their own writing, and having students play with sentences like Legos, combining basic sentences into more complex ones. Often, surprisingly little formal grammar instruction is needed. Researcher Marcia Hurlow has shown that many errors "disappear" from student writing when students focus on their ideas and stop "trying to 'sound correct.'" There are also less immediately apparent costs to having generations of learners who associate writing only with correctness. Invariably, when people learn that I teach writing, they offer their "grammar confessions." Sheepishly, they tell me that they "never really learned grammar," and sadly, it also often comes out that they avoid writing. I have interviewed an executive who locked herself in her office and called her son when she had to write reports, and I have had parents describe writing their child's paper because the kid was paralyzed with writing anxiety. I have even had people tell me that they passed up job opportunities because they required writing. Schools that have shifted from traditional "stand-alone" grammar to teaching grammar through writing offer concrete proof that such approaches work. They are moving more students more quickly into college-level courses than previously thought possible. One of these is a program at Arizona State in which students who test below college-level in their writing ability immediately begin writing college essays. More than 88 percent of these students pass freshman English—a pass rate that is higher than that for students who enter the university as college-level writers. At the Community College of Baltimore, a program in which developmental writing students get additional support while taking college-level writing classes has reduced the time these students spend in developmental courses while more than doubling the number who pass freshman composition. More than 60 colleges and universities are now experimenting with programs modeled on this approach. In 1984, George Hillocks, a renowned professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago, published an analysis of the research on teaching writing. He concluded that, "School boards, administrators, and teachers who impose the systematic study of traditional school grammar on their students over lengthy periods of time in the name of teaching writing do them a gross disservice that should not be tolerated by anyone concerned with the effective teaching of good writing." If 30 years later, you or your child is still being taught grammar independent of actually writing, it is well past time to demand writing instruction that is grounded in research rather than nostalgia. Source: Krashen, S. (n.d.). Stephen Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition (Assimilação Natural - o Construtivismo no Ensino de Línguas). Retrieved March 25, 2016, from http://sk.com.br/sk-krash.html Multi-choice After reading the text, choose A, B or C. 1. Studies confirm that__________. A. there is no significant difference between those classes who learn grammar and those who don't. A. there is no significant difference between those classes who learn grammar and those who don't. B. 9th and 11th graders tend to like grammar lessons. C. grammar lessons end up being disliked. 2. Students who pay too much attention to grammar rules__________. A. become unconfident. B. don't focus on the ideas they want to convey in their writing. C. will end up dropping out of school. 3. The author believes that__________. A. failure to complete the two-year degree was to be blamed on grammar lessons. B. writing should come before grammar. C. students were discouraged by the amount of grammar they learn before they produced a text. 4. According to the writer, the solution is __________. A. to get students writing before teaching them grammar. B. to teach grammar and how to write at the same time. C. to try to revise and edit as often as possible. 5. Specific data about certain schools indicate that__________. A. students do better in their freshman year. B. teaching grammar through writing seems to be the right approach. C. some community colleges still believe the stand alone grammar method works. 6. The authoris in favor of __________. A. the explicit teaching of grammar. B. the implicit teaching of grammar. C. having students discover grammatical rules through writing. Stephen Krashen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California. He is a linguist, educational researcher, and activist. Krashen has published more than 486 papers and books, contributing to the fields of second- language acquisition, bilingual education, and reading. Most recently, Krashen promotes the use of free voluntary reading during second-language acquisition, which he says "is the most powerful tool we have in language education, first and second." Adapted from: (n.d.). Retrieved
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