On Teaching Grammar
Patricia V. Lunn
(to appear in Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics)
Is ignorance of language bliss? And if so, are linguists only pursuing a
hobby, reaching conclusions that they had best keep to themselves?
Dwight Bolinger
I still remember the first day of my second-semester undergraduate psychology class, in which the teacher
started out by saying “You can forget about all that rats-in-mazes stuff from last semester.” As a naive
freshman I thought, Why don’t the professors agree on what we’re supposed to learn? Of course, at the
time I had no idea how hard it was for professors to define what students are supposed to learn, or to agree
on the implications of such definitions. Much later, I would discover that there is little agreement among
professors of Spanish about what their students should learn about grammar, though the teaching of
grammar is often discussed, sometimes heatedly. In this essay I will discuss some of the issues in this
debate from the point of view of descriptive linguistics.
Research in SLA has taught us that grammar lessons cannot change order of acquisition, nor can
they make it possible for learners to avoid errors as they proceed through the acquisition process
(VanPatten 1986). If grammar is to be taught, then, there must be some other justification for it. In this
essay, I will make two arguments for including grammar in the university Spanish curriculum, one
pragmatic and one intellectual. The first argument is that grammar identifies productive patterns that can
serve as organizing principles for learning. The second is that the structure of Spanish constitutes part of
the knowledge that a humanities-based education is designed to impart.
Because the debate about teaching grammar typically takes place in the context of language
learning, readers may expect a review of the voluminous literature in SLA on the role of grammar (as in
Macaro and Masterman 2006). This essay is, rather, an opinion piece about the contribution of linguistic
grammar to an accurate representation of Spanish, and of the role that this representation can play in
language learning and in general education.
.
Grammar as identification of productive patterns
For linguists “grammar” means the mental constructs that allow speakers to produce language. These
mental constructs cannot be observed directly but they can be observed indirectly, as patterns of usage.
Linguistic grammar is based on these patterns; it is therefore data-based and productive (a less loaded term
than “generative”). As a result, linguistic generalizations can be very different from pedagogical
generalizations.
Readers of this essay do not need to be reminded of the difference between prescriptive and
descriptive grammar, but it is worth emphasizing how dramatic the difference can be in practice. Here is a
simple example: a common pedagogical description of stem-changing verbs shows the forms containing a
diphthong inside a “shoe” (or boot) that can be traced around them:
quiero
queremos
quieres
queréis
quiere
quieren
The shoe generalization is flawed in several ways. For one thing, it is dependent on how the verb forms are
arrayed; if they were put in columns by person instead of by number, for example, the shoe would
disappear. Moreover, the millions of Latin American speakers who practice voseo have querés (or queréis)
in place of quieres; there is no way to shoehorn those forms into this shape. And perhaps the most serious
flaw in the unproductive generalization is that it hides a productive one: that the diphthong appears in
accented syllables and the simple vowel in unaccented ones. The accent-based generalization not only
describes all the data (the final syllable-accented vos forms are no longer exceptional), it serves to explain
nonverbal lexical pairs like siete/setenta and fuerte/fortaleza. The linguistic generalization is data-based
and extendible – and more helpful to learners.
An additional example shows how looking at data with a linguist’s eye can produce significant
simplifications in pedagogical rules. In many textbooks, and on many websites, the uses of ser are listed
separately:
time: Son las dos
date: Hoy es lunes
profession/occupation: Marta es abogada
political/religious affiliation: Ellos son demócratas
To a linguist, what these sentences have in common is that they are predicate nominative constructions, i.e.,
the verb is followed by a noun phrase. There is no need to learn what these nouns give names to; it is
sufficient to recognize that they are nouns, because estar cannot be used in this pattern. The linguistic
generalization is simpler and involves recognition of a pattern (in this case, a part of speech) that will be
useful in other contexts.
Ideally, pedagogical grammar should be grounded in linguistic grammar because linguistic
explanations – like the ones above – are based on what native speakers say, i.e. on the very patterns that
students need to acquire. Of course, the most adequate description in linguistic terms may not be the most
appropriate description in pedagogical terms; complexity and abstraction must be adapted to the needs and
level of students. Many of the major figures in Spanish linguistics in the United States have been
enthusiastic popularizers of linguistic grammar; Dwight Bolinger, to cite just one example, not only
published dozens of scholarly articles about Spanish, he was also part of the team that produced Modern
Spanish, the widely-used textbook sponsored by the Modern Language Association and published (in three
editions) from 1960 to 1973. It became common for linguists doing research on Spanish to publish articles
that included a section on how their findings could be adapted to classroom explanation; Terrell and
Hooper’s article on the subjunctive (1974) is a classic example of the fusion of the theoretical and the
applied.
This belief in the pedagogical value of linguistic description was challenged, however, by doubts
about whether second language acquisition can be a conscious process (Krashen 1981). If it cannot be, then
it follows that the conscious activity of learning about grammar cannot lead to acquisition. A growing
consensus that the goal of language classes should be communication was accompanied by growing
misgivings about the usefulness of teaching grammar. In this climate there was little incentive to make
improvements in the content of grammar lessons and, as a result, the exercises in the next generation of
textbooks were much more innovative than the grammar explanations.
There is a significant time lag between research and practice, and the skepticism about the role of
grammar that characterized early SLA research is now the new orthodoxy. The consciousness of the
profession has been raised, and recently trained teachers know that control of grammatical structures does
not flow from teacher talk about grammar. The grammar-spouting opponent of communicative language
teaching has become a straw man. As communicative methodologies have become standard, the presence
of grammar, whether measured in textbook pages or in classroom minutes, has declined. This would be a
positive development if the grammar still taught were of high quality; but it is not. Improvements in
explanation of grammar have not kept pace with other improvements in the communicative classroom.
In any case, the grammar that students are exposed to no longer comes just from teachers and
textbook writers. Students have learned that grammar is just a click away, and many students – and teachers
– use the Internet as a primary source of grammar information (which means that there is a need for an
officially sanctioned grammar website sponsored by an organization such as the AATSP). On the Internet
you will find a variety of simplistic “solutions to grammar problems.” A favorite scheme is the acronym; a
quick search will turn up acronyms for ser/estar, por/para, preterit/imperfect, subjunctive/indicative, etc.
The uses of the subjunctive, for example, are summarized as WEIRDO (Wish, Emotion,
Impersonal expressions, Request, Doubt, Order) or WEDDING (Wish/will, Emotion, Doubt, Denial,
Impersonal expressions, Negation, General). These acronyms are all over the Internet, in several different
versions; sometimes the O stands for ojalá, or the G for God (as in “may God grant”). Because these
summaries are so obviously flawed, criticizing them is like shooting fish in a barrel: the categories are
semantic, syntactic, lexical or simply an artifact of the acronym format; usage that fits into no letter
category is ignored; related concepts are forced into separate categories; and on and on. Nevertheless,
explanations like these should taken seriously, if not uncritically, because they constitute the mainstay of
what many students know about the subjunctive – and differ mostly in degree of elaboration from the
contents of many current textbooks.
“Emotion” appears in many textbooks as a cue for the subjunctive. Though there would seem to be
no other explanation for an out-of-context sentence like Me alegro de que estés aquí, when context is taken
into consideration it becomes clear that the subjunctive-marked clause contains known/old/factive
information. This sentence can be uttered only if the hearer is, in fact, present; under these circumstances,
the presence of the hearer “goes without saying“ and does not require the assertion conferred by the
indicative. This explanation accounts for the use of the subjunctive after el (hecho de) que, as well as in
emotionless sentences such as Es normal que sea así. It also saves learners from wondering why the
emotional “trigger” doesn’t work for Te apuesto un millón de dólares a que es así. “Emotion,” in other
words, is not a grammatical category, and treating it like one only causes confusion.
Why does it matter if grammar explanations are less-than-ideal in linguistic terms? Pragmatically,
flawed generalizations have little explanatory power; and, they may even produce errors. For example,
students who are taught that doubt produces the use of the subjunctive may very well conclude that the
subjunctive should appear after the doubt-tinged word si. This is apparently the logic behind sentences like
*Si tenga tiempo. te llamaré, which no native speaker has ever uttered but which students regularly
produce. Intellectually, flawed generalizations give rise to the notion that languages – and especially
languages other than English – are whimsical, illogical and governed by arbitrary rules.
The next generation of grammar lessons
Recent research in SLA has converged on a role for grammar in the focus on form model (Ellis 2002),
which suggests that grammar, properly presented, can focus learner attention on patterns in the L2. (What
constitutes proper presentation is, of course, a topic of continuing research, which is surveyed in Spada
1997.) Focus on form does not signal a return to an emphasis on grammar explanation and drills, but rather
a research-based justification for using grammar to focus student attention on productive patterns.
A recent article by Negueruela and Lantolf makes explicit the link between focus on form and the
content of grammar lessons. The authors acknowledge that “As far as we can determine, the previous
research has not concerned itself with the quality of the grammatical rules presented to learners…”
(2006:79). Given the volume of studies on the effect of grammar on classroom learning, this constitutes an
extraordinary if explicable (see above) oversight. Negueruela and Lantolf report on the positive effects on
student performance, both as tested by them and as reported by the subjects, of a descriptively adequate
explanation of the preterit/imperfect distinction. The explanation used in their study comes from William
Bull, whose Spanish for Teachers set out to “discover resolutions to practical problems by reformulating
them from the point of view of general linguistic theory” (1965:iii).
Neguerela and Lantolf say that “Schooled instruction is about developing control over theoretical
concepts that are explicitly and coherently presented to learners as they are guided through a sequence of
activities designed to prompt the necessary internalization of the relevant concepts” (2006:80). “Schooled
instruction” is a term that is unthinkable in the dichotomous debate on acquisition versus learning, but its
use (and that of similar terms such as “instructed acquisition”) signals a new phase in the teaching of
grammar. Now that the teaching of linguistically accurate generalizations has official SLA recognition, it is
to be hoped that there will be a return to the Bolinger/Bull/Terrell model of developing accessible linguistic
descriptions.
The time lag between research and classroom practice becomes even longer when budgetary
pressures prevent public schools from purchasing new books. Textbooks based on the focus on form model
are only now being written, and once they are published they will have to be purchased by cash-strapped
school systems before they can make their way into classrooms. When they do, however, the focus on form
approach should produce a renewed focus on the quality of grammatical explanation.
An experience teaching grammar at the third year level
For several years, I was in charge of a third year grammar class that was taught in lecture-recitation mode.
Like many intermediate language classes – composition, conversation, pronunciation, etc. – this one was
intended to address flaws in the language skills of students. (It is worth mentioning at this point that there is
a dearth of research about the effectiveness of skills classes, though such classes are a standard curricular
response to concerns about student performance.) Because students in the major “didn’t know grammar,”
they made mistakes in speaking and writing. The mistakes were of many kinds – including lack of
recognition of Spanish patterns, failure to generalize partially-acquired patterns and inappropriate
application of English patterns – and the class was intended both to eliminate these mistakes and to serve as
a gatekeeper, i.e., a prerequisite to higher-level classes.
The knowledge of grammar that students brought to the class was invariably in the form of rules
of thumb, summaries or memory aids. These “bullet points” were not related to one another or to any overarching generalization about how Spanish works. In other words, the students had no systematic knowledge
about the structure of Spanish; many of them did not know the parts of speech and how to recognize them
in Spanish. They viewed grammar as a kind of medicine that could cure what was wrong with their Spanish
– a view which accorded well with the curricular assumption that the course would fix what ailed them,
grammar-wise.
After me, Eve Zyzik took over supervision of the course. Based on her experience, she described
in Zyzik 2008 how overt teaching of grammar can combine descriptive adequacy with communicative
practice. Her article is notable for offering practical advice supported by SLA research, and I commend it to
readers of this essay. Zyzik acknowledges that there are no studies comparing the outcome of a lecturerecitation class such as this one to that of grammar classes taught in other formats, and I will not address
this issue. I do, however, wish to expand on a few of the points she made.
One of the advantages that Zyzik identified for the lecture-recitation model is that if the lecture is
delivered by a linguist “… one can ensure that the grammar is presented in a way that is descriptively
adequate” (2008:465). However, this advantage quickly dissipates if grammar is taught in descriptively
inadequate ways in subsequent courses. And because no one class can eliminate student errors, grammar
will be taught over and over again – and students may well wonder why their Spanish professors can’t
agree on how things should be explained. If students are to capitalize on what they learn about grammar (or
about anything else) in a dedicated course, the rest of the curriculum must sustain that knowledge.
A recent article by Polio and Zyzik investigates how language is taught in upper-division literature
classes. The study shows that “the instructors had minimal language-related goals for their students, and
language issues were dealt with mostly incidentally” (209:550). This failure to address language
systematically is part and parcel of the belief that language classes are responsible for improving skills so
that students can engage with cultural issues, undistracted by language problems, in later classes. This
unrealistically modular view of language learning is damaging both to the language classes, which fail to
achieve the goal of error elimination, and to the culture classes, which fail to capitalize on contextualized
examples of language use. For every grammar point, there are examples of the exploitation of that point for
stylistic effect; Lunn 1985, for example, cites examples of literary exploitation of the aspectual preteritimperfect contrast. Professors likely to incorporate those insights into their literature classes are unlikely to
read an article in Hispanic Linguistics, however; new textbooks written by linguists, such as Lazos:
Gramática y vocabulario a través de la literature (Frantzen 2009), hold out more promise.
Another advantage that Zyzik identified is that the TAs who teach the recitation sessions “…
strengthen their own understanding of Spanish grammar” (2008:465). My experience was the same; the
TAs with whom I worked commented that they’d never before been exposed to a linguistic perspective on
grammar, and that they they’d learned a great deal from their participation in the course. These
observations lead to an important point: that TAs, like the undergraduates they so recently were, do not
necessarily have a firm grasp of Spanish grammar. Of course, most graduate students are TAs and so teach
the language, but they may not be given any training in grammatical description, and may be discouraged
from teaching grammar in their classes. What will they teach about grammar, then, when they become
professors?
Grammar as part of the humanities curriculum
Research on the teaching of grammar has been conducted in the context of the foreign language classroom,
and the debate on the teaching of grammar has been equally pragmatic, with proponents and opponents
staking out positions on the role of grammar in the learning process. In these discussions, it is taken for
granted that grammar has no intrinsic value, and that its inclusion in the curriculum is contingent on its
utility. There is another reason, though, for studying grammar: one of the defining characteristics of a
language is its grammar.
We have all heard the argument that no Spanish major should graduate without having read certain
works of literature. Such arguments represent an effort to define what students should know or, to put it
another way, what outcome a Spanish program is designed to produce. Except for the reference to specific
works, these statements are consistent with the ACTFL Standards for Foreign Language Learning, which
promote the interrelated goal areas of Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and
Communities. Standard 1.2 (“Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of
topics.”) and Standard 2.2 (“Students demonstrate and understanding of the relationship between the
products and perspectives of the culture studied.”) can be cited in support of reading literature.
It is rare, in my experience, that linguists feel able to take part in discussions of cultural goals, apart
from arguing that applied linguistics can help students to become proficient enough to pursue those goals.
But there is an argument to be made that is parallel to the argument made by our colleagues in cultural
studies: that no Spanish major should graduate without understanding fundamental aspects of Spanish
grammar. This too is consistent with the ACTFL standards, which promote the idea that students should
develop insight into the nature of language. Standard 4.1 is that “Students demonstrate understanding of the
nature of language through comparisons of the language studied and their own.”
We should argue that Spanish majors and minors should not be ignorant of the structure of
Spanish – or, perhaps more profitably, that the structure of Spanish is inseparable from Hispanic culture.
(The ACTFL Standards pair Standard 4.1, cited above, with Standard 4.2, which promotes student
understanding of the concept of culture.) Misapprehensions about grammar are, after all, misapprehensions
about the users of grammar. Students who have specialized in Spanish should not think that Spanish
speakers use impersonal se structures to avoid responsibility for their actions, or that their use of the
subjunctive is governed by “emotion”. Students should know, on the other hand, that that speakers who say
habían dos and tú fuistes are acting quite logically (though their logic may not license using those forms in
writing), and that social change causes linguistic change and voseante speakers are participating in a
reorganization of the forms of address that has occurred throughout the history of Spanish.
Who will teach these things to our students? To the provocative questions that open this essay –
“Is ignorance of language bliss? And if so, are linguists only pursuing a hobby, reaching conclusions that
they had best keep to themselves?” (Bolinger 1980:383) – we must respond with a resounding No. This
was Bolinger’s answer, of course. But linguists should not be the only ones to take on the task of teaching
language; fairness to linguists in what Trisha Dvorak (1986) called “the ivory ghetto” is an important issue.
And so is fairness to students, who are being shortchanged by the assumption that grammar should be
taught in language classes and ignored in culture classes.
Confining discussions about grammar to the realm of the utilitarian has negative consequences.
When the only role of grammar – and, more broadly, of linguistic description – in the foreign language
curriculum is that of facilitating language learning, any weaknesses on the part of students can be attributed
to the grammar classes (and, by extension, to the teachers of those classes). This frees the rest of the
curriculum (and the rest of the faculty) from the task of teaching language, which flies in the face of what
we know about the long and complicated task of learning a foreign language. It also fails to expose students
to what Whorf called “beautiful systems of logical analysis”.
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