Grammar: how to tame the unruly beast

Simon Buckland
A young child sat at a desk in a classroom writing

“Grammar, which knows how to control even kings”- ѴDZè

When you think of grammar, “rule” is probably the first word that pops into your mind. Certainly the traditional view of grammar is that it’s about the “rules of language”. Indeed, not so long ago, teaching a language meant just teaching grammatical rules, plus perhaps a few vocabulary lists. However, I’m going to suggest that there’s actually no such thing as a grammatical rule.

To show you what I mean, let’s take the comparative of adjectives: “bigger”, “smaller”, “more useful”, “more interesting”, etc. We might start with a simple rule: for adjectives with one syllable, add -er, and for adjectives with two or more syllables, use more + adjective.

But this doesn’t quite work: yes, we say “more useful”, but we also say “cleverer”, and “prettier”. OK then, suppose we modify the rule. Let’s also say that for two-syllable adjectives ending in -y or -er you add -er.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work either: we do say “cleverer”, but we also say “more sober” and “more proper”. And there are problems with some of the one-syllable adjectives too: we say “more real” and “more whole” rather than “realer” or “wholer”. If we modify the rule to fit these exceptions, it will be half a page long, and anyway, if we keep looking we’ll find yet more exceptions. This happens repeatedly in English grammar. Very often, rules seem so full of exceptions that they’re just not all that helpful.

And there’s another big problem with the “rule approach”: it doesn’t tell you what the structure is actually used for, even with something as obvious as the comparative of adjectives. You might assume that it’s used for comparing things: “My house is smaller than Mary’s”; “John is more attractive than Stephen”. But look at this: “The harder you work, the more money you make.” Or this: “London is getting more and more crowded.” Both sentences use comparative adjectives, but they’re not directly comparing two things.

What we’re actually looking at here is not a rule but several overlapping patterns, or paradigms to use the correct technical term:

  1. adjective + -er + than
  2. more + adjective + than
  3. parallel comparative adjectives: the + comparative adjective 1 … the + comparative adjective 2
  4. repeated comparative adjective: adjective + -er + and + adjective + -er/more and more + adjective

This picture is more accurate, but it looks abstract and technical. It’s a long way from what we actually teach these days and the way we teach it, which tends to be organized around learning objectives and measurable outcomes, such as: “By the end of this lesson (or module) my students should be able to compare their own possessions with someone else’s possessions”. So we’re not teaching our students to memorize a rule or even to manipulate a pattern; we’re teaching them to actually do something in the real world. And, of course, we’re teaching it at a level appropriate for the student’s level.

So, to come back to grammar, once we’ve established our overall lesson or module objective, here are some of the things we’re going to need to know.

  • What grammatical forms (patterns) can be used to express this objective?
  • Which ones are appropriate for the level of my students? Are there some that they should already know, or should I teach them in this lesson?
  • What do the forms look like in practice? What would be some good examples?

Existing grammar textbooks generally don’t provide all this information; in particular, they’re very vague about level. Often they don’t even put grammar structures into specific CEFR levels but into a range, e.g. A1/A2 or A2/B1, and none fully integrates grammar with overall learning objectives.

At app, we’ve set ourselves the goal of addressing these issues by developing a new type of grammar resource for English teachers and learners that:

  • Is based on the Global Scale of English with its precise gradation of developing learner proficiency
  • Is built on the Council of Europe language syllabuses, linking grammar to CEFR level and to language functions
  • Uses international teams of language experts to review the structures and assess their levels

We include grammar in the GSE Teacher Toolkit, and you can use it to:

  • Search for grammar structures either by GSE or CEFR level
  • Search for grammar structures by keyword or grammatical category/part of speech
  • Find out at which level a given grammar structure should be taught
  • Find out which grammar structures support a given learning objective
  • Find out which learning objectives are related to a given grammar structure
  • Get examples for any given grammar structure
  • Get free teaching materials for many of the grammar structures

Think of it as an open-access resource for anyone teaching English and designing a curriculum.

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    Build success beyond the classroom: Critical thinking and assessment

    By Christina Cavage
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    There are some common myths related to critical thinking and assessment. Many people believe that it’s impossible to assess critical thinking, especially in classes where language is limited. However, it can be done! Here, the key to success is crafting tasks and rubrics that allow you to separate language skills and cognitive skills. After all, a low language level doesn’t necessarily reflect your student’s ability to think critically.

    So, how can we measure how a student knows rather than just what they know?

    How to measure critical thinking

    Well, we first have to consider two types of assessment—formal and informal. Formal assessments tend to happen at the end of a task, lesson or skill-building activity and usually focus on the work the student has produced. Then, we have informal assessments. Those are the assessments that involve on-the-spot interactions. These types of assessments play a crucial role in measuring critical thinking.

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    Fostering critical thinking in the classroom

    By Christina Cavage

    Critical thinking is a term often thrown around the teacher’s lounge. You often hear, “Of course, teaching critical thinking is essential.” However, in that same space, we may also hear the question, “But how?”

    Teaching students to think critically involves helping them to develop a critical mindset. What exactly does that mean, and how can we do that?

    What does it mean to think critically?

    Critical thinking is a complex process that involves students reflecting, analyzing and evaluating ideas. Building a community of critical thinkers in our classrooms involves going beyond the cognitive domains and building the affective domains.

    The cognitive domain concerns subject knowledge and intellectual skills, whereas the affective domain involves emotional engagement with an idea or learning material.

    This deliberate teaching of critical thinking needs to be part of our teaching toolkit. We need to develop a mindset around it in and out of our classrooms.

    How can teachers develop a critical-thinking mindset?

    Consider all the questions we pose to students during our classes. Do we expect a yes or no answer, or have we established a classroom environment where students offer considered reasons for their responses?

    By following some guiding principles, we can get into the practice of naturally expecting deeper answers:

    1. Students need to engage in critical thinking tasks/activities at all levels.
    2. Teachers need to provide space/time in the classroom to build critical thinking learning opportunities.
    3. Practicing critical thinking must be incorporated throughout the course, increasing complexity as students improve their critical thinking ability.
    4. Students must be given opportunities to practice transferring critical thinking skills to other contexts.

    Activities to foster critical thinking in the classroom

    Activity/Strategy #1: Categorizing

    Provide a set of vocabulary terms or grammatical structures on the board (or pictures for true beginners). Ask your students to gather in pairs or small groups and have them categorize the list. Ask them to be creative and see how diverse the categories can be.

    Example:

    Desk, computer, pencil, stove, dishes, forks, novel, cookbook, sink, shelf

    • Made from trees: pencil, novel, cookbook, desk.
    • Made from metal: fork, stove, sink, etc.

    Activity/Strategy #2: What’s the problem?

    Provide students with a short reading or listening and have your students define a problem they read or hear.

    Tomas ran up the steps into Building A. The door was closed, but he opened it up. He was very late. He took his seat, feeling out of breath.

    • Determine why Tomas was late.
    • Underline verbs in the past tense.
    • Create a beginning or ending to the story.

    Activity/Strategy #3: Circles of possibility

    Present a problem or situation. Consider the problem presented in strategy #2 above: Ask the students to evaluate the situation from Tomas’ point of view, then, from the teacher’s point of view, and then from his classmate’s point of view.

    This activity generates many conversations, and even more critical thinking than you can imagine!

    Activity/Strategy #4: Draw connections

    Provide students with a list of topics or themes they have studied or are interested in. Place one in the center, and ask them to draw connections between each one.

    Afterward, they should explain their ideas. For example:

    “Energy and environment are affected by sports. Most sports do not harm the environment, but if you think about auto racing, it uses a lot of fuel. It can negatively impact the environment.”

    Activity/Strategy #5: What’s the rule?

    Play students an audio clip or provide them with a reading text. Draw students’ attention to a particular grammatical structure and ask them to deduce the rules.

    Activity/Strategy #5: Establishing context

    Show your class an image and put your students in small groups. Give each group a task. For example:

    The Jamestown settlement in the United States
    “A famous historic site is the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. People from England were the first people to live in Jamestown. When did they arrive? They arrived in 1607. They built homes and other buildings. They looked for gold, silver and other materials. They sent the materials back to England. It was a hard life. Jamestown wasn’t a good place to settle. The winters were cold, and the settlers didn’t know how to protect themselves. After some time, they traded with the Native Americans, including tools for food. This helped the hungry settlers. Did many people die? Yes, many of the first settlers died. Later, more settlers arrived in Jamestown. It wasn’t easy, but in the end the settlement grew.”

    Ask questions like this:

    • If this were in a movie, what would the movie be about?
    • If this were an advertisement, what would it be advertising?
    • If this were a book, what would the book be about?

    There are many other wonderful strategies that can help build a classroom of critical thinkers. Getting your students accustomed to these types of tasks can increase their linguistic and affective competencies and critical thinking. In addition to these on-the-spot activities, consider building in project-based learning.

    How can you incorporate project-based learning into your classroom?

    Project-based learning often begins with a challenge or problem. Students explore and find answers over an extended period of time. These projects focus on building 21st Century Skills: Communication, Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking.

    They also represent what students are likely to encounter when they leave our English language classes.

    An example project

    Consider this project: Our cafeteria is outdated. It does not allow for food variety, or for guests to sit in groups of their desired size and activity level. Survey students who use the cafeteria. Follow up the survey with interviews. Determine how your group can reimagine the cafeteria. Prepare a proposal. Present your proposal.

    You can imagine the amount of language students will use working on this project, while, at the same time, building a critical mindset.

    Teaching critical thinking is all about building activities and strategies that become part of your teaching toolkit, and your students’ regular approach to problem-solving.

  • A young boy in a room full of books thining with his hand to his head, there is a lightbulb graphic above him

    Success beyond class: Critical thinking skills and academic english

    By Christina Cavage

    English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes are designed to prepare students for higher education delivered in English. Students are expected to hold their own among a class full of fluent English speakers. So it’s essential that they have not only the language skills, but the academic and social skills that tertiary education demands today. And it’s up to teachers to ensure our students develop these skills – but that requires a balancing act.

    Many EAP courses lack the authenticity of the college classroom experience. Lectures are generally relatively short, only 5-10 minutes long. Reading is scaffolded, and the content is very structured, even overly structured. Then, our students move into their academic courses where they encounter two-hour lectures, 50+ pages of reading, and content that is far from scaffolded. So, how do we bridge these academic, linguistic and social gaps? Let’s look at some techniques to help students succeed in higher education.

    Bridging the linguistic gap

    Linguistics gaps may involve content-specific language, or the informal language students encounter when they work with other students, or the connotative and denotative meanings and contexts of a word. To bridge this gap, we need to build deep conceptual vocabulary knowledge. We don’t want students only to have label knowledge. Label knowledge allows students to pass a vocabulary text where matching or multiple choice is present. But that is not enough in an academic environment. Deep conceptual knowledge means truly knowing a word.

    So, what does it mean to know a word? Well, according to linguistics scholar Paul Nation, a student needs to know the following:

    • The spoken and written form
    • The parts of the word that have meaning
    • The word's forms and their meanings
    • The concepts and vocabulary associated with the word
    • The grammatical function, any collocations
    • The register and frequency of the word

    That is a whole lot!

    To build this extensive knowledge, we need to do so in an intentional manner. We need to build various activities that develop and foster critical thinking skills and engage students.

    Here is an example:

    “Hello! I am so glad to see so many of you at our special lecture today. Today, I am going to describe how a mixed community is planned and built. First, let’s look at what a mixed purpose community is, and then we will discuss the planning and building. As many of you know, a mixed purpose community is a neighborhood that includes residential spaces, business spaces, services and green spaces. How about the planning? First, when planning mixed purpose communities, architects, city planners and builders work together to plan where everything will be located. Because they want the community to be a fully walkable one, they need to think about how far homes are from schools, services and other businesses. Then, they carefully look at what kinds of businesses and services are needed. Next, they must design sidewalks so people can easily get to anywhere in the community, and not worry about car traffic. Today, planners are even looking at including bicycle paths, as more and more people are riding bicycles to work. Lastly, they need to consider the different types of residential space they will need. They build homes and apartments to attract all a wide variety of residents. These communities are becoming more and more popular, but planning them still takes time and a team of people.”

    The terms mixed and community are bolded. You can engage students with a simple noticing activity of how these words are used, the forms they take, the words around them, their collocations and the concepts associated with these words. An exercise like this will help students develop a deep understanding of these words. And that deep understanding will enable students to make connections and draw conclusions around these terms.

    Bridging the academic gap

    EAP students move from very scaffolded EAP courses to courses where they must listen and take notes for 50 minutes or read 50+ pages before class. Additionally, their professors often do not build background knowledge, or scaffold learning, as they expect students to enter their classrooms with this understanding. And this can create an academic gap.

    When it comes to bridging this gap, content can be the vehicle for instruction. Exposing students to the language of academic disciplines early on can build background knowledge, and be highly motivating for students who crave more than rote language instruction.

    Bringing the social gap

    When students enter their university courses they will be expected to work with peers, engage in group activities, negotiate, take turns and assert their own ideas into a dialogue. These social skills require language which needs to be developed and practiced in their EAP courses.
    You can do this by building instructional tasks and learning around developing and practicing critical thinking skills. Consider introducing project-based learning to your class. In project-based learning, students must work with their peers, learning how to prioritize, negotiate and assign responsibility. Bringing in these types of tasks and activities helps develop soft and critical thinking skills.