Ask the Grammar Maven
Anne Ediger
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| Anne Ediger |
The Question:
Recently, the NYS TESOL listserv has had many postings on the issues of whether ESL teacher education should include coursework in grammar and whether ESL teachers should teach grammar explicitly.
Response:
I would like to address both of these recurring but thorny issues among ESL professionals. Given our short online Dialogue format, I will address each question in separate installments. Here we will look at whether and why ESL teachers might need to know about grammar themselves. Future columns will address whether grammar should be taught explicitly in ESL.
So—should ESL teachers have to know about grammar?
I would answer yes, absolutely, but this is not to say that teachers need to learn traditional grammar, which has often taken the form of a dry, outdated, frozen, abstract, and artificial view of language structure that has no relation to real communication. What we do need is a very applied understanding and awareness of how language functions in oral and written discourse, or how a knowledge of structural patterns can be useful in helping people express, write, and interpret intended meaning.
As an ESL teacher, I have truly benefited from knowing and understanding the patterns in language for many reasons, and a significant bit of the literature supports this. Wong Fillmore and Snow (2002: 10) list 5 roles that teachers of immigrants need to play—for all of these, we need a significant understanding of language patterns to serve as:
- Communicator—We need to be able to understand student talk so we can use it to determine what our students know, how they understand, and what teaching strategies would be useful for addressing their needs.
- Educator—We need to be able to distinguish which of our students’ language problems need addressing through instruction and which are developmental stages that our students will simply move through over time.
- Evaluator—We need to be able to make responsible judgments about our students—for diagnosing their needs, for determining whether they should be promoted to the next grade, for referring them for special services, etc.
- Educated human being—As users of English and members of society, we need to be critical users of language, aware of how our own language works and is used for various purposes.
- Agent of socialization—For many ESL students, we are often the first person they encounter in the culture of school and life outside of the home. As such, we often need language in order to interpret for and orient students to academic language and life of society at large.
Let’s further unpack some of the kinds of language knowledge needed to be Educators, our primary role as ESL teachers.
Academic English
Many of our students come to school speaking vernacular dialects different from Academic English, the language they are expected to learn and use in school (Adger, Snow, & Christian, 2002). Learning Academic English is one of the biggest challenges facing ESL students. But exactly how is AE different? Some of the differences are grammatical, some are lexical, and some at the level of discourse (see Biber et al., 2004 for descriptions of differences in usage across different modalities, registers and genres). If we do not know these distinctions and cannot recognize them, how can we teach them to our students?
Language Patterns for Literacy
Language patterns play an important role in learning and teaching the reading and writing process—we need to know the differences between oral and written language in order to teach our students the literacy skills that are vital to their future academic and social success. Learning to read includes understanding and extracting grammatical information, called syntactic parsing (Grabe & Stoller, 2002). Learning to write requires grammar knowledge in order to create accurate sentences and paragraphs. Clearly, we need to know the language patterns involved too if we are to teach them to our students.
Addressing Student Needs
We need to have strong intuitions or understandings about how language works in order to diagnose our students' errors, answer their questions, and know whether we need to give feedback to help our students improve. We need language knowledge to know what kinds of feedback to give students and how to design curricula and activities to meet their needs—to help them learn what is regular or irregular, how we express certain concepts, and how two different expressions differ in meaning.
Shared Language
Even if our approach to teaching ESL doesn’t include explicit instruction, we need an understanding of language structure in order to be able to answer students' questions about English—they do ask. We need to know the terms students use and how to address their questions, and we need a shared language and knowledge base for discussing learner performance with colleagues.
In order to have the kinds of knowledge teachers need for the purposes above, the “grammar knowledge,” as I said at the beginning, needs to involve more than just knowing the dry, outdated “rules” that have no connection to real student needs for communication. Our knowledge and skills need to include understanding about a variety of aspects of language: not only grammatical structures/patterns (morphology & syntax), but also patterns within the sound system (phonology) that we use for pronouncing and reading, how we actually use language in different contexts (sociolinguistics/ pragmatics), the role of vocabulary (lexicon) in language, and how we create and interpret larger “chunks” of language like oral dialogues and written texts (discourse). To date in the research literature, there is strong evidence supporting teacher and student knowledge of pedagogical grammar centered on communication of all sorts (Hinkel & Fotos, 2002).
Stay tuned for our next issue, where we will consider various issues related to teaching grammar.
Bibliography
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of spoken and written English. New York: Pearson Education.
Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. (2002). Teaching and researching reading. New York: Pearson Education.
Hinkel, E., & Fotos, S. (Eds.). (2002). New perspectives on grammar teaching in second language classrooms. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Wong Fillmore, L., & Snow, C. (2002). What teachers need to know about language. In C. Adger, C. Snow, & D. Christian (Eds.), What teachers need to know about language. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Send your questions and comments about grammar to Anne Ediger at: dialogue@nystesol.org.
Anne Ediger (Ph.D., Applied Linguistics, UCLA) is currently Chair of the Dept. of Curriculum & Teaching and Professor in the TESOL MA Program at Hunter College. She has taught ESL/EFL to students ranging in age from 5 to 75, and trained teachers in Japan, Korea,
Mexico, and the US for over 30 years.
