(British Journal of Language Teaching, 24

(British Journal of Language Teaching, 24.3 157-162, 1986)

What do language students know about grammar?

Thomas Bloor, Modern Languages Department, University of Aston

1Introduction

This article reports on some results of an investigation into aspects of the language awareness of university students and offers some preliminary comments on the background to the investigation, notably the question of the status of grammar teaching in modern languages classrooms. The results discussed here are part of more wide-ranging work in this area being carried out under the auspices of the Committee for Linguistics in Education, a joint committee of the British Association for Applied Linguistics and the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, and this investigation was sponsored by the Modern Languages Department of Aston, where most of the research was carried out.

2Grammar and modern languages

In a recent article in BJLT[1], Henshaw criticises the widespread use of traditional, Latin-based grammar in modern language teaching and calls for the use of more efficient modern descriptions. She implies that the overt teaching of grammar is the norm, the dispute being about which:. grammar to teach rather than whether to teach it at all. Yet there is reason to suppose that explicit treatment of grammar of any kind is by no means universal in British schools, and that this once central pillar of learning has been shifted to a more peripheral position and severely knocked about in the process.

Audio-lingual methodology did not succeed in ousting grammar-translation from modern language teaching in this country, but in the past decade or so the traditional emphasis on grammar rules has lost ground as a profusion of applied linguistics publications has promoted communicative language teaching[2]. Krashen's influential Monitor Theory, recently extolled in BJLT[3]has suggested that the ability to use a language unselfconsciously is acquired independently of any explicit learning, and that an excessive use of the Monitor (conscious attention to linguistic form) on the part of the student inhibits performance. The Council of Europe has given its blessing to functional-notional syllabuses[4]. Major research projects in communicative teaching have been undertaken, such as the East Midlands Graded Assessment Feasibility Study or the Stirling-based project which led to the Tour de France materials. And, last and least, publishers have replaced the 'buzz word' structural with the 'buzz-word' communicative.

There is usually a discrepancy between academic debate and what goes on in the classroom, which is perhaps fortunate. It would therefore be rash to assume that the new approaches have swept away grammar teaching entirely. Nor would most advocates of communicative teaching wish it to do so, though many, like Henshaw, might draw the line at traditional grammar. However, whilst there is no necessary opposition between communicative goals and overt attention to linguistic form, it is widely believed that there has been a significant shift away from the latter in modern language teaching, which, coupled with the more sweeping rejection of grammar by English teachers and the decline in classics, suggests that modern school-leavers are less informed in this area than their forebears.

Whether this is important, and whether it is a bad thing, are complex questions, but my own simple answer to both is "Yes", not so much because of the practical consideration of language learning, but because people ought to know about language in general and be able to talk and write about it. Perhaps most pupils were never so good at this sort of thing, and there is no intention in this article of bewailing falling standards. Communication should be the priority in most modern language learning, and it is evident that you can learn a lot of grammar without being able to communicate, but pupils should know something about language, too. In the words of the NCLE[5]:

"It is also time to point out that the effort of getting rid of the old style of grammar teaching required the exclusion of most investigations of pattern in language, and that a lot was therefore lost."

The Language Awareness movement rather than the "back-to-basics" reaction seems to offer a way forward. As McGowan observes, Language Awareness ". . . should not be seen as the private preserve of modern languages,"[6] but many pupils may have no other source. Of course, Language Awareness covers a much larger field than formal grammar, as McGowan indicates (see also NCLE 1985, CLIE 1984[7]), but formal grammar is an important aspect, and with all its faults, which are grievous, traditional grammar is better than no grammar at all. University lecturers in modern languages still tend to assume a certain familiarity with traditional metalanguage and concepts on the part of students. How far are they justified in this?

3The SPAM Questionnaire

With these considerations in mind, a questionnaire was administered to 63 students entering Modern Languages or Linguistics degree courses in two universities (Aston and London) and to 175 second year students from other departments[8]. The latter had all chosen the Foreign Language option of the Complementary Studies programme but varied considerably in language background. Hereafter, I shall refer to the first group as the linguists and to the second group as the non-linguists. The aim was to give students the opportunity to display their familiarity with grammatical terms and concepts and related linguistic issues. At the risk of giving the discussion a negative slant, I shall discuss the results largely in terms of errors and omissions, and it should be borne in mind that this was not a rigorous examination or test, but a rather informal questionnaire, not all of which is discussed here. (The acronym SPAM stands for Students' Prior Awareness of Metalinguistics, a touch of academic frivolity from the Monty Python generation.)

Traditional grammar was overtly treated in terms of parts of speech and grammatical functions (subject, etc.). Questions and percentage errors are given below:

From the sentence below give ONE example of each of the grammatical items requested and write it in the space provided. NB You may select the same word(s} more than once if appropriate.

Materials are delivered to the factory by a supplier, who usually has no technical knowledge, but who happens to have the right contacts.

errors to 1%
Linguists / Non-linguists
verb / 0 / 5
noun / 0 / 7
countablenoun / 38 / 43
passiveverb / 27 / 85
adjective / 2 / 27
adverb / 25 / 66
definite article / 21 / 48
indefinitearticle / 33 / 67
preposition / 9 / 60
relative pronoun / 17 / 68
auxiliaryverb / 44 / 54
past participle / 21 / 45
conjunction / 11 / 55
finite verb / 41 / 56
infinitive / 11 / 58

In the following sentences underline the item requested in brackets.

errors to 1%
Linguists / Non-linguists
1. Poor little Joe stood out in the snow. (subject) / 0 / 4
2. Joe had nowhere to shelter. (predicate) / 88 / 92
3. The policeman chased Joe down the street. (direct object) / 8 / 42
4. The woman gave him some money. (indirect object) / 30 / 46

According to the D.E.S. document English from 5 to 16, all 16-year-olds should be able to use the terms noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, article, preposition and conjunction correctly. These results indicate that at present most pupils fall far short of this target. Only verb and noun were correctly identified by all the linguists, and some of the non-linguists failed even on these two. It is not surprising that the term countable noun was unfamiliar to many since it does not usually figure in pedagogic grammars for speakers of West European languages (though it is important in some EFL contexts); it is probable that the errors on this item are misleadingly low since any noun selected at random stands a strong chance of success. It is more surprising that over a quarter of the linguists failed to identify usually as an adverb. Adverb is a notoriously messy category, the rag-bag of the traditional parts of speech (modifying verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, entire clauses), and it is conceivable that a verb modifier such as quickly might have produced fewer errors, but usually is a fairly central sort of adverb, and a better result might have been expected. The high error rate on passive verb is partly due to the fact that partial items (are or delivered) were scored as errors, but over half of the wrong answers failed to touch on are delivered, one of only four verbs in the sentence. Infinitive, not surprisingly perhaps, was generally well handled by linguists but. not by non- linguists, whereas auxiliary verb fared quite poorly with both groups. Well over half the non-linguists were unable to identify the conjunctionbut, which suggests minimal effective exposure to terminology of this type.

The grammatical functions (or in some terminology grammatical relations) questions also suggests fairly widespread ignorance, especially among the non-linguists. All the linguists could identify the subject of the given sentence; most chose the headword Joe, in accordance with the traditional type of analysis, rather than the entire noun phrase Poor little Joe, which would be the choice of most academic linguists. The traditional predicate category seems to have largely disappeared from the school environment, not surprisingly. Direct object was apparently well handled by the linguists, but the indirect object in the next sentence was missed by 11 of the 63 linguists, and of the wrong answers offered 9 were actuallythe direct object, some money or money, and one was actually the subject, The woman, which raises some questions about the reliability of their previous identification of direct object and subject.

The answers to somewhat more open questions are harder to quantify but in some ways more interesting. The instruction

Give an example of one way in which English differs grammatically from some other language.

elicited answers varying considerably in length, precision and truth. The most succinct was "Word order" (no languagespecified but safe enough.) Correct answers tended to focus on word order, gender, case inflections, agreement and disparity of tense systems, expressed with varyingtechnicality and precision. Some students isolated less general points such as be versus werden in passives, or the comparatively trivial, and sometimes ungrammatical:

"English nouns do not have capital letters and in German they do".

Many of the errors related to Englishrather than the other language, and often resulted from massive over-generalisation, converting some comparative differenceinto an absolute:

"English uses no genders".

"Verbs don't have to agree (ie endings) inEnglish with nouns. . .".

But rash claims were by no means restricted to English:

"In English the verb usually follows thesubject, whereas in German the verb is sent to the end of the clause".

A contrasting view on this point was the following:

"In English there is no rule for the position of verbs in a sentence but in German the verb is the second part of the sentence and all others go to the end".

Combining triviality, inaccuracy and an unusually broad definition of grammar, one student offered:

"We use apostrophes as a means of showing plurals, missed out letters and quantity. French, for instance, does not have this grammatical point".

And German efficiency, it seems, extends well beyond its railway timetable:

"Whereas German has a set of rules to which it generally keeps, English has many grammatical complications".

There is an admirable touch of caution in the insertion of "generally" here; one wonders where it is that German occasionally goes off the rails.

All the answers cited here were given by linguists; the non-linguists were generallyless coherent and many did not answer this question at all (though a few were on a parwith the best of the linguists; interestingly, the two best 'non-linguists' were Vietnamese and French). One thing that emerged was that familiarity with linguistic terminology is no guarantee of accurate observations about language. This was most obvious in a question on sound-spelling relations, which was generallyhandled very badly, but which I will not go into here.

4So what?

It must be remembered that these answers were given by a very untypical group of young people, members of the small elite who clear the hurdles of the education system and acquire places in universities. The linguists all have good A levels in modern languages (the ML group had higher average grades than the national average for ML departments), and the results from the two universities were remarkably similar. The majority of non-linguists had studied a language at secondary school, many to O-level. It is therefore less surprising that most of the linguists did reasonably well over all than that it is so easy to find noticeable gaps inwhat appeared to be a very elementary test. One might argue that most of these weaknesses were in English grammar, and that questions on French or German would have been more appropriate, but it is unlikely that an English-speaking student who cannot identify an adverb or pick out an indirect object in an English sentence can do so in a French or German sentence, and even if s/he could, it would suggestsome failure to grasp the general principles involved; that is to say, it would suggest alack of language awareness. It may be negative to focus on the weaknesses, but it is these that, to some of us at least, suggest the need for some action. .

The students apparently feel this too. Only 11% of the linguists said that they feltconfident and knowledgeable in this area as against 46% who opted for worried about my lack of knowledge, and of the 40% who chose to give an answer in their own words, the majority expressed some sense of inadequacy. This insecurity contrasts with their evaluation of this type of knowledge. Overwhelmingly, it was regarded bylinguists as useful, 57% choosing useful and interesting, 24% useful but boring, and 5% interesting but boring. No one thought it both useless and boring. It seems a pity that successful students should feel so incompetent in something which theyclearly value.

On a brighter note for modern language teachers in secondary schools, 75% claimed to have acquired most of their knowledge of these matters in secondary school, 16% in primary school, and 9% in both, and 43% gave the credit to modern languages as opposed to 16% to English classes, the rest attributing it to combinations including modern languages.

Notes and references

[1] Henshaw, Amy (1985) "Latin Rules", BJLT 23,2 Autumn.

[2] For example: Harding, A., Page, B., and Rowell, R. C. (1980) Graded Objectives in Modern Languages, CILT; Littlewood W. T. (1981) Communicative Language Teaching; an Introduction, CambridgeUniversity Press; Brumfit, C. J., (ed.) (1983) Learning and teaching Languages for Communication: Applied Linguistic Perspectives,

CILT.

[3] Cross, David (1985) "The Monitor Theory and the Language Teacher", BJLT, 23,2 Autumn. See also, for Krashen's own restatement of his hypotheses, Krashen, S. D. (1982) Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition, Pergamon; or Dulay, H., Burt, M. K., and Krashen, S. D. (1982) Language Two, Oxford University Press.

[4] For example, CDCC Project group (1981) Modern Languages 1971-1981, Council of Europe, chapter 2; van Ek, J. (1977) The Threshold Level for Modern Language Learning in Schools, Longman.

[5] NCLE (1985) (National Council on Languages in Education: ed. Donmall, Gill) Language Awareness: NCLE Papers and Reports 6, CILT.

[6] McGowan, Paul (1985) "La plume de ma tante and all that revisited", BJLT, 23,2 Autumn.

[7] CLIE (1984) "Guidelines for Evaluating School Instruction about Language", CLIE Working Papers, Committee for Linguistics in Education (ed. Dick Hudson, UniversityCollege, London).

[8] Some of these 175 students are excluded from the comparisons given in this paper as their degree courses included a modern language other than their impending Complementary Studies course; they were therefore not non-linguists, even by my

restrictive definition. The number in the non- linguist sample discussed here is 137. The linguist sample comprises 19 students entering degree courses in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics of University College, London University, and 44 entering the Modern Languages Department of Aston University to study two of the following: French, German, Linguistics and Japanese, the majority taking the first two. I am grateful to Dick Hudson of UCL for his participation.