Question:
Someone in this group may already have asked the question below, but
I've been wondering. I was nosing around in one of the topics here (on
teaching in Italy) and noticed a teacher complaining that he had to
learn formal grammar in order to teach English. A long-term participant
in the group responded to this, pointing out just how limited grammar
awareness is in the teacher-training courses leading up to basic
certification.
My own story goes like this. I entered this profession with no real
understanding of formal grammar. I had a degree in English, yep, rave
reveiews on my essays, a pretty good score on the GRE Literature
Subject test, and a whole passel of experience gained through prepping
kids for the GRE General, back in the days before Analytical Writing.
I went through a basic course in Paris and was told, as are most of us,
not to really worry about grammar. I honestly believed this.
And it was indeed so, at my first job in a private language school. I
didn't need much grammar doing TOEFL preps. In point of fact, the adult
students where I worked didn't ask for much at all. All they basically
wanted was an instructor with an accent that was recognizably East
Coast American and who was literate enough to read in a style that aped
the delivery on their prep tapes. There was some essay work, sure, but
at advanced levels (most of the kids were aiming for 250/600), well, I
had to worry less about real grammatical mistakes and more about minor
usage errors. Once again here, the adults in my safe little private
school didn't want much, nor did my supervisors. I picked up some
privates for the GRE, but there again, it was just some vocabulary work
and basic test-prep strategies, with adults who understood that I
wasn't about to teach them the basics of the present simple and present
perfect as they prepared for graduate work in the States.
Everything changed when I came to Greece, with its heavy emphasis on
Cambridge ESOL exams. Once again, when I got a job, the grammar issue
was at first de-emphasized, with grammar hours relegated to a
non-native-speaker teacher who did what she did in Greek. But my moment
of truth came when dealing with my first class of eleven-year-olds.
I remember my heart leaping in me as the children listened to me,
honestly trying to understand what I was saying, but in so many cases
unable to do so, and the frustration that accompanied that feeling. I
remember meeting with their parents (staid, conservative Greek mothers
and fathers) in their Sunday best and listened to them carefully,
politely, politically...try to ask me to do my duty as best I could and
look in my eyes for a trust they could hold on to.
This is the first time I've talked about it, but I think that most
long-service teachers must go through a common experience of looking
into a group of children's eyes and feeling a stone-cold understanding
settle on them that never leaves them thereafter: that abusing the
authority or neglecting the responsibility that has been given to them
as teachers of children is a hateful act, a crime against God and man.
I broiled on the coals in my first year, but the inevitable happened:
my students became my kids, and they gave me more than I could possibly
ever have given them.
When I realized that they knew next to nothing about basic grammar, not
through any considered pedagogical approach and not because they didn't
care or couldn't learn, but because their supplementary grammar teacher
believed firmly in the principles that a teacher should never stand up
in class and should instead read a lesson straight out of a book from a
desk on a raised dais (my American sensibilities quailed at the
concept), I knew that I had to start learning. So I did.
Flushed with my new responsibilities, I tried to do it all at once,
which was A BAD IDEA.
I started working on Michael Vince's _Intermediate Grammar Practice_
(Macmillan), the book that had been assigned with _Snapshot
Intermediate_ for that class. To this day, I absolutely despise that
grammar series, adapted from _Advanced Language Practice_ (which isn't
all that bad, but isn't all that good) by a publisher who has shown
over the years a consistent pattern for caring more about appearances
and proper marketing than the reality of language teaching.
What was even worse was Luke Prodromou's _Grammar and Vocabulary for
FCE_ (Longman), a deeply cynical and mendacious grammar book if ever
there was one. Luke Prodromou is a pretty nice guy who teaches up in
Thessaloniki and is quite popular here in Greece, but I have an ax to
grind when it comes to that book...and I've had it nice and sharp every
time our paths have crossed to date. How a man could put his name to a
book like that and continue to call himself an ELT professional is
utterly beyond me.
Michael Swan's _Practical English Usage_, a book that had been
recommended to me in training, solified my belief that it was indeed
possible to learn this part of my job and learn it well. After that, it
was John Eastwood's _Oxford Practice Grammar_ and _Oxford Guide to
English Grammar_ that gave the the outlines of what I would learn and
how I would present it in the years to come. Good books all...but not
the best for someone trying to learn on his own and looking for a solid
base to build on.
Raymond Murphy's _English Grammar In Use_ is what I work with now for
practically every intermediate and advanced student I have for a
full-length course, and will probably work with it until someone
manages to produce something better. I have heard objections to this
book, but they don't hold water when you actually do the work of
memorizing the entire book and working with the supplementary
exercises. The third edition is better than the second, but more
cheaply bound and printed (which gets annoying when you start losing
pages out of a two-year book), some key grammar items are indeed not
included that should be, but that's about as much of a real accusation
as I am willing to levy against the book. EGIU, in the hands of a
committed practioner, gets the job done.
Martin Parrott's _Grammar for English Language Teachers_ also plays a
part in every course I set up nowadays as a freelancer and every
pre-packaged lesson I adapt, because, well, just as I was told in
training, everything has become a resource, to be dipped into and used,
adapted to suit, modified freely as I see fit.
I now have a full complement of reference material sitting on my
shelves and a passel of bookmarks to useful resources on this computer.
I routinely field inquiries from other teachers about the finer points
of advanced-level material.
The years before the mast have paid off.
Yet the point remains: yes, I can teach grammar, and I can do a bang-up
job of it, but the road to mastery would have been a lot less rocky if
my teacher-trainer had had the stones to stand up in front of me and
the other candidate teachers and tell us, as honestly as possible, that
before we could consider ourselves competent ELTs, a very large body of
grammatical knowledge would have to be worked through carefully,
refined, and yes, memorized in painstaking detail. That we would have
to grow to like, if not love, doing such tedious work.
So much of the mantra of trainers ("You've got to have five years under
your belt before you're a real teacher!") is involved in learning
formal grammar that we should have been told the truth from the start.
Instead, newbies get thrown to the lions, and our kids pay for it until
we drop out of the profession or straighten out the situation on our
own. The funny part is that I've learned there is a mute recognition
among teacher-trainers that something is definitely rotten in their
work, but the structure of what the public has come to expect, a
quickie prep course for native speakers as being all that's necessary
to turn a humanities university graduate into a functioning ELT, is now
so ingrained in teacher-training mentality that telling the truth has
become impossible.
I think it also has something to do with what used to be called the
ESL/EFL split (but is now minimally referred to in our professional
literature in the interest of selling mass-market books to innocents
abroad). "Is there a difference between the materials you need to teach
English in England or in Outer Mongolia? Goodness, what gave you that
idea?"
So yes, English Language Teaching is one the fastest-growing
professions in the world. I would be willing to bet that an experienced
ELT could be air-dropped into any city, town, or primitive village in
Europe, Africa, Asia, or South America and survive just dandy before
being reduced to begging.
HOWEVER, before you become that formidably resourceful individual, you
will have to do A LOT of serious time learning formal grammar. Much of
it will be boring, all of it will be tedious, and in the end, you might
just become a crusty, pedantic geek like the guy writing this post.
SO what do the rest of you think about this issue
Answer:
Here's my experience:
I was an even more rotten teacher than you, credo: I started teaching
(and taught for three years) before I even took a CELTA (formal
teaching) qualification. I can't even remember if I had a formal
grammar book in my first few lessons: I think I went in with just the
Headway Teacher's Book under my belt. I *did* fly by the seat of my
pants for a while, but I also took copious grammar notes and tried to
work out my own understanding of what I was teaching, usually with the
help of Soars & Soars (the Headway course), Murphy and Swan.
Unsurprisingly, my grammar teaching style over three years went slowly
from very formal, rule-based grammar teaching (hot off the press from
what I'd studied the night before) to a more relaxed, holistic view of
the language once I was more comfortable with the foundations.
Then I did the CELTA and you're right: the grammar input was minimal to
say the least. I remember one assignment where we had to recognise
tenses: past perfect, future continuous, etc.: as basic as it was, it
was still a challenge for the people in the group who'd never taught
before (and probably would have been just as challenging for me if I
hadn't done the groundwork already).
Is this wrong? I'm not sure. I don't think that one can expect the
CELTA course to include a full grammar syllabus for native speakers:
such a syllabus would be huge and take forever, and taken 'all at once'
would probably float over the heads of most trainees. Perhaps what the
CELTA *should* have shown us was how to do adequate grammar prep for a
lesson: which books to use, the pros and cons of some of the teacher's
guides, and some useful strategies for fielding grammar questions. Yes,
some hint that you do need to do some legwork on your own might have
been valuable for the novice teachers there.
Talking about teacher's guides and courses, lots of people knock
Headway for being stuffy, old and boring, but I think the books really
helped me a lot in my first year of teaching. The exercises were
structured enough for me to see what was going on and focus my lesson
prep accordingly. In later years I taught Cutting Edge, and though it
has the fashionable edge because it relies more on input, 'noticing'
and discovery-based teaching, I feel I'd have been left high and dry as
a teacher if that's all I'd had to go on when I started. Especially the
Elementary and Pre-Intermediate CE books just seem woolly to me from a
teaching perspective: you can have a great lesson if you've been
teaching for a few years, but they don't seem to help new teachers much
at all.
Submit Your
Own Answer!
