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.

More blogs from app

  • A woman reading outside with a book

    Three ways English students can learn to read at home

    By Kate Fitzpatrick
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    Read more at home if you want to learn English faster: three ways to get into the habit

    I can hear parents, ELT learners and teachers all over the world thinking to themselves: We know it helps if English students learn to read for pleasure at home, but how are we supposed to find the time? Who is buying these materials? What if a parent doesn’t speak English themselves?

    That’s the beauty of reading at home, also called extensive reading: it’s completely autonomous and parents can be as involved as much or little as they like. There’s more good news as it’s never been cheaper to assemble a selection of extensive readers for your children or students, meaning that cost is no longer so much of a barrier to reading at home.

    Is extensive reading really that critical to learning English?

    Stephen D. Krashen’s [1]offers a marvellous summary and critique of extensive reading studies around the world, concluding that:

    "When [second language learners] read for pleasure, they can continue to improve in their second language without classes, without teachers, without study and even without people to converse with.’"(Krashen 1993 p. 84)

    Philip Prowse’s excellent article, “What is the secret of extensive reading?”[2]agrees with Krashen’s conclusion.

    Prowse goes into more detail about efficacy studies at primary, secondary and adult levels. This body of evidence finds that reading for pleasure improves results in grammar, writing, speaking and fluency, as well as comprehension and vocabulary – both alongside and instead of traditional textbooks.

    So, we know it works. As with so many education-related things, the question is how to implement them. Christine Nuttall talks about the virtuous circle of reading – once a learner begins to enjoy reading, they are more likely to read more and benefit more from it, so they learn to read more, and so on.

    The reverse is also true. The questions then follow: how do we motivate our Instakids to read at home in English, if they won’t read in their first language? How do we carve out time between travel, work, school and homework? Here are three ways you can form the habit of reading at home:

    1. Learners need access to extensive reading material at home to use it

    Krashen establishes this common-sense fact based on five studies from 1983 to 2003.[2]It can be a reading app, an online library subscription or a pile of readers in the corner – whatever it is, it has to be the right level for the student and it has to be a topic they’re interested in, or they’ll never learn to read for pleasure.

    Negative reading habits can happen simply because there isn’t much available to the learner: Worthy and McCool studied 11 sixth-graders in 1998 who "hated to read", and found a direct correlation between those students and the lack of reading material at home.[3] Thankfully, we now have more options than we used to:

    For extensive reading online, the Extensive Reading Foundation offers good-quality, free materials, in audio and print, at its .These text resources and audiobooks tend to be quite basic and the stories are largely classics. You can choose by level and genre, and there is also a publisher directory.

    • You can purchase full app English Readers and other publishers’ Kindle editions on the Kindle store, iBookstore and Google Play, and read them on an e-reader, phone or tablet using the Kindle app. These are finely-graded, contemporary, relevant e-books with titles like , , , , , , and .
    • An e-book library subscription can be a cost-effective way to get access to a lot of e-books online through your browser. is a Japanese-run online library which offers hundreds of full-text graded readers, from reputable publishers, and charges about $19 per year.
    • For print readers, cost can be an issue. If you can't buy readers at your local bookshop from a publisher like app, you can buy first- or second-hand readers cheaply from Amazon or the Book Depository, or you can ask your school to let you know when they’re upgrading their readers library, as you may be able to take some of the older books home.

    2.Make the most of the commute or the school run

    The key here is routine – give it a try and see if it works for you. Reading doesn’t just happen on a page. Today’s English learners have multiple ways to read for pleasure on their various devices as well as in print, all of which are well-adapted for reading and listening on the train/on the bus/in the car/on foot.

    I listen to podcasts on my commute by train and, to this day, I know my times tables thanks to a tape my mother used to play in the car on the way to primary school.

    • Download a podcast or audiobook. Ideally, an English learner would both read and listen, but one or the other is better than nothing. Audible.com has plenty of English extensive readers in audiobook format, and a year’s membership is $10 per month, or you can buy individual audiobooks. There are classic extensive reading podcasts available on iTunes for $4.99 each.
    • Never underestimate your public library.is an online service that finds your local library for you, wherever you are in the world. You can also search by title and see which libraries carry that particular book. Just think: you could create an instant, extensive reading library at your home for free that changes every month.

    3. Consider the power of rewards

    You can reward your child or reward yourself for building a reading habit. Remember, we are talking about starting a virtuous circle: persuading a learner to begin a new habit of reading in English for pleasure. Reward mechanisms can be very effective.

    This idea should be explored on a case-by-case basis – it depends on what you or your child responds to best. In my opinion, starting a reading habit is well worth a glass of wine, a chocolate treat, or an extra half-hour playing video games.

    References

    [1]Krashen, Stephen D. (2004),p57

    [2] Prowse, Philip: “”

    [3] Worthy, J. and McKool, S. (1996): “” in Ibid, p61