Grammar study and its weakness

[yong leong]

    Please ignore this post if you think it has been discussed before.  Lately I read quite a bit on the comments on grammar study by language experts or teachers.  It appears to make sense.

     Apparently we pay too much attention on grammar and it is not good for language learning, and it seems that we need only to read and read a lot but of course do pay attention to all the verbs and tenses in the sentences that we read.  And also to listen a lot to the target language that we study.  Just by doing these we can improve our language study a great deal.  By reading a lot it means lots and lots of reading at the right level and interest.  If the materials that you read is too diffiuclt then it defeats the purpose or if you do not find the materials that you read interesting it will also makes you give up before you finished reading it. So it's kind of troublesome to find the right level of input ( to use a technical term.)Has anyone tried this method? A word about the reading part , it is a sort of extreme reading that means you keep reading widely on all kinds of topic available to  you at your level, you do need a wide choice for a start and that may be difficult for some people to get hold of those reading materials.

      Anyone can enlighten me on this subject further I would be glad to hear from you.

[Lynn]

Certainly you are right. I know from my own experience that when I started reading and listening to French books/magazines etc. I suddenly knew how to speak French! I think it is good to read and listen, because French grammar books alone can't teach you how they use those words or what they actually mean when the French speak them. It also gives a bit of confidence too; that you don't necessarily have to spell every verb conjugation correctly, and you will still be understood. Anyway, that is my own experience.

[yong leong]

Can you remember long it took before you find improvement?  I started reading and it took me about 3 years before I noticed improvement but then I didn't have so much free time to read otherwise it would take shorter time before I notice improvement.

     Did you go back to the grammar from time to time just read them over in a relax manner I mean. I used to take grammar so seriously that it was not doing me any good until I relax and in the right frame of mind to go over them and that helps tremendously.

[Lynn]

I took 2 years of formal French from a native speaker, but always felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar with speaking and writing the language. I started memorizing and listening to French, and I think that helped me a lot more than reading or grammar.  That's probably because I learn better aurally, but it took probably about a year of listening and reading for French to make sense to me.  I personally think listening is better than reading simply because you can catch the rhthym and formation of words and it forces you to think.

[paul smith]

I am far from an expert and maybe only at intermediate level French but we often forget that no one reads grammar before they speak their native language and a sizeable minority maybe not much after. The point I'm making is that language is learned by listening. Older learners of a second language have the choice of studying grammar/reading and it obviously helps and can be a comfort when rules are revealed but it doesn't help with pronunciation or vocabulary or practice.  Maybe it all just comes together and immersion seems to do the trick but a passion for the language also helps and a stubborn perseverance!

[Neil Coffey]

When people say things like "we focus too much on grammar" I think it's important to reflect a bit more on this: too much for what? Do they mean that studying grammar formally is detrimental to achieving a high level of proficiency in the language, or do they just mean that beginners find it offputting? When teachers bemoan what they perceive as "too much grammar" they may be focussing on the practical issue of motivating a classful of disinterested students rather than the academic question of whether, under the right conditions, studying grammar generally improves proficiency.

Language teaching has gone through a series of "fads" over the last few decades (the "language lab" generation, indeed schemes promoting "learning through osmosis" through a focus on reading, the obsession with "cultural relevancy" in GCSE courses (which lovingly trained today's computer literate 30-somethings to order blankets in youth hostels), learning games in the PC age...). After all this "innovation" it's not clear that any one strategy in isolation has been the key to language proficiency.

I've always said that I think the key is to find the bunch of strategies that works for you. If intensive reading works for you and you genuinely do find you can acquire the necessary grammar that way, then great. Some people may find they need some formal grammar study to be "primed" for what to look out cor as they're reading. One danger to be aware of is that different types of writing will expose you to different grammar (e.g. Certain writing will favour certain tenses, certain frequencies of types of subordinate clauses etc), so a balance of reading material will probably be beneficial.

[yong leong]

Yes Neil, I do believe you need to know grammar to improve your foreign language.  But when I read about people who seem to say that you can do away with grammar lessons it really puzzles me.

      I think it was Noam Chomsky who said that we are all hardwired to learn language as a baby.  It is sort of like everything is programmed in the baby's brain we just need to do just a little and it's all set to work. It seems to be that way though, but why only for one language for most of us and difficulties in acquiring the second one.

     Where I live in Malaysia where most kids start learning 2 to 3 languages in primary school,  the national language which is Malay language ( this is compulsory in every school except private internantional school that means school for expatriate children whose parents work here) and English and Mother tongue ( could be mandarin or chinese dialect).  Some became very good in all 3 languages but they are the minority, most are very good in one language and quite ok with the others.  But the environment require you to use all these languges  in your daily activities  for most of us but not all.

     ( in Malaysia we do not have the Babel Tower we have the Twin Towers which is very much a tourist attraction ).

[Neil Coffey]

Yes, the Chomskyan position is essentially that our brain works in such a way that languages are constrained in particular ways, and that we are predisposed to acquiring language in particular ways as we develop, and so together this provides a mechanism that reduces the problem of acquisition. There are various observations in favour of this view, e.g. children seem primed to acquire certain phenomena (such as, say, the notion of "self") at particular stages whatever the language; certain patterns found universally across languages (e.g. languages that favour prepositions rather than postpositions generally favour subject-verb word order).

On the other hand, the similarities we see in languages may ultimately be because they're all related to one another. And the theory as a whole is hard to disprove because you can almost never find the controlled situations you'd require to do so (e.g. a person being exposed to their "native" language for the first time at adulthood-- the occasional anecdotal account of a "wolf child" hardly constitutes a body of well-controlled, scientifically documented case studies...).

As a general observation people struggle to learn a non-native language and appear to acquire their first language with "no grammar instruction". On the other hand the degree of exposure is typically orders of magnitude greater and children acquiring their native language do so at the same time as acquiring knowledge of the world. They are also a lot freer to dedicate whatever proportion of time/concentration as they wish to the problem of language aquisition (nobody's saying to a six month old child "stop listening to those people and do your maths homework instead"...).