…teaching so-called indirect speech by requiring students to shift uncontextualised sentences from direct into indirect speech according to spurious ‘shifting-rules’ … is little more than a form of artificial pedagogical mathematics.

– The role of theory in pedagogical grammar: A Cognitive + Communicative approach

The spectator may need time to examine each element of the painting but whenever he reaches a conclusion, the simultaneity of the whole painting is there to reverse or qualify his conclusion.

– Ways of Seeing

Some prayers may be considered an urgent form of communication. When feeling flustered, it is not clear if grammar is foremost in the mind. Grammar aside, even thinking as a whole may not be clear in such circumstances. If prayers must be phrased impeccably before they are processed, much of the world’s faithful would be left stranded.

Even if one were not given to a faith, there are non-faith-based examples to show how communication can proceed without interruption even without flawless grammar. One such example is how very young children communicate with their parents.This is not to say that grammar is irrelevant. Ultimately, grammar is language convention, an agreement as to what a form of words in a language system should be taken to mean, amongst its users.

What both the foregoing examples have in common is an assumed or real shared context and an environment rich in contextual clues. Given such conditions, grammar and even words are not as crucial as they might be in a low context situation such as when writing to someone with whom no personal relationship or shared context can be relied on.

Implicit in grammar teaching as it is done, is the assumption that students would have to communicate in a low context situation where everything hinges on form. Such situations in real life relate to writing in formal situations where clarifications cannot or would not be sought. Here someone would be taken to have meant what any ordinary person using the language would have understood by a form of words. This imagined ordinary person is someone who is aware of and abides by, the conventions of a language.

Conventions in the form of rules, therefore become important. This is why rules are underscored in language classrooms. Language rules or grammar is tested explicitly in a number of components. These are, Grammar MCQ, Grammar Cloze, Editing and Synthesis and Transformation. They are tangentially or incidentally tested also every time a student forms a sentence in any other component.
There has been in recent years around the world a move away from rule-based approaches to teaching grammar. This has come to be known as the traditionalist approach.

To understand how the rule-based approach works and why it is easy to fall back on it, we can look at the way feedback is given for grammar errors. Grammar errors could take some of the following forms:

• Subject-verb agreement
They loves to eat sushi.

• Tense
No sooner had she fell asleep than the phone rang.

• Word class
It is heartening to note people are not apathy about this issue.

Typically, these errors would be underlined. A teacher might write the type of error, e.g., tense or the right form of the word above the error. This is the rule-based approach. The student is told the construction as it stands is in breach of some rule and needs to be rectified. Errors would be glaring to teachers and easy to mark out if somewhat tedious.

However, David Newby, who wrote a grammar textbook, Grammar for Communication and a workbook, Exercises and Creative Activities, in a paper he wrote for the Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics in 2015, has expressed dissatisfaction with this approach. In essence he believes that a rule-based approach is decontextualised and not of very much use in enhancing communicative ability.

He is against, “grammatical exercises” which “are, to a very large extent, closed or heavily controlled”. Such exercises include, “transformation” (what we refer to as synthesis and transformation) and “fill-in-the-gap with words given in brackets”. He says such exercises are not “authentic”.

Somewhat harshly, he adds, “language teachers often believe grammar represents one of the most ‘theoretical’ areas of their pedagogical activities, yet it would seem to me” that what is “described in pedagogical grammars and taught in many classrooms reveals a remarkable lack of theory”. Theory of course is built from observations of real-life phenomena and is in this sense inductive. Even though there exists also the deductive approach to theory building, hypotheses have to be based on an intuitive understanding of real-world phenomena. He said this to reinforce his point that rule-based teaching is not suited for real world communication.

As a specific example, he suggests that the way the transformation of direct to indirect speech is taught does not reflect “how indirect speech is used in communication”. This way is of course, when we say, if you find, present or past tense in direct speech, these should be changed to their past and past perfect versions respectively, in indirect speech. Some other rules include, having to change, ‘now’ to ‘then’ and ‘ago’ to ‘before’. It turns out this is how the transformation of direct to indirect speech is taught all over the world including Europe.

Upon some consideration of how language is used, his point does seem to hold. What we typically do is paraphrase what someone else said or if in writing, quote them verbatim. He is of the view that teaching students how to paraphrase accurately is more useful than teaching them to convert direct to indirect speech.

He has one other main argument against rule-based teaching. This is that it does not fit well with how students learn best. He suggests that pedagogical principles based on psychology, applied linguistics and neuroscience do not agree with the rule-based approach. Two such principles are meaning-driven processing and depth of processing. Using such principles to shape pedagogy is known as the Cognitive Approach to teaching grammar.

Meaning-driven processing is the principle that, “Learners’ memories will be enhanced if language meaning, and the learner’s own interpretation of meaning, are at the heart of pedagogical activities”. Depth of processing is the principle that, “Learners should be given tasks which require intense, deep, focused processing”.

He proposes a new way of teaching grammar which begins with recognising that grammar is not about rules but about real-world communicative intent. He calls it the Cognitive + Communicative Approach (C + C).

In this approach, students would not be taught grammar rules in a decontextualised way. Instead, word forms would be paired with communicative intent. He calls this “Notional Grammar”. An example of notions and its corresponding grammatical form is “arranged activity” – “I’m playing tennis tonight”. In this sense, the focus would be on the communicative intent and not on a decontextualised rule – ‘playing’ can be used to indicate present or future activity.

Also, the C+C model espouses strongly that in place of structured and scaffolded responses such as MCQ, students be asked to craft their own utterances to fulfil communicative criteria.

The suggestion that the rule-based approach can be replaced is not without force. For one thing, it leads to a focus on parts instead of the whole. For example, there tends to be a focus in Grammar MCQ on discrete elements rather than intended meaning. Given that meaning is paramount, there ought to be more focus on the whole than on parts.

While various pieces may fit together, only the pieces which form the larger picture can be put together.

The Brain Dojo