Over the last 23 years I’ve had a lot of Italian German, and Austrian children at our summer school for 3 week courses. If you only have 3 weeks to effect a change it concentrates the mind on finding quicker ways of helping the children! My main belief is that modern teaching techniques and their text books can be too dispersive. The principles of the "communicative approach" allied to the presentation of language according to the seemingly self evident concept of the "functions" of language, when put into the context of the class room, lead to confusing lack of focus.
As a result, when pupils have a sense of confusion they become de-motivated. A lot of the "communicative" activities proposed by the books are tedious and require an unconvincing form of pair work "make believe". A school nonsense.
I have a central objection to the theoreticians' distinction between "learning" a language and "acquiring" one when it is applied to school. Schools are not full of infant native speakers trying out the language as was the little English boy who said "I swimmed in the river". Huge damage has been done. Schools are artificial places and they need a whole range of techniques of learning.
Another objection to the notion of "acquiring" a language and wanting to imitate that in schools is that it makes us think that memory in school can be viewed as similar to the mechanisms that help us "acquire" (absorb unconsciously) our mother tongue.
The word "acquire" is prefered as a softer word than learn. learn is considered too Prussian as it were and linked to memorising. However consider how the expression "learning by heart" is a much less rigid sounding expression than if we used the term "memorising". In the distinction ; "learn" versus "acquire", the idea is that learning is the wrong mechanism - dull, bookish and forced. Why is it that a term like "learn", suddenly, after thousands of years of happy use in the language suddenly smells and we have to invent "acquire"? I’m suspicious of such distinctions and the undermining of accepted sense. Such theological repositioning is tendentious. It supposes that something is proved by simply using a supposedly self evident term. We can say that children "learn" that fires burn or they "learn" that not everything is what it seems to be! We don’t need to say that they "acquire" the effects of fire or differentiation! Young English children "learn" that there are some action words (verbs) that are regular when applied to the past (arrived) and others that behave in odd ways (swum). These distinctions come slowly. They "learn" them, as they do other things, by trial and error. It is true that young children "pick up" languages with amazing ease, but that is another story and it is certainly not a secret ability easily transferred to schools by thinking that such ease is natural and unthinking as is suggested (not proved) by the use of the term "acquire". But this distinction has made text books woolly with false naturalism.
When a young 3 year old told me "Today we swimmed in the river" he was intellegently generalising about a "learnt" aspect of verbs. By observation and repetition practice he had seen regularity – though yet imperfectly. The mentality – the brain mechanisms of learning your "mother" tongue are mysterious and specific to certain ages. We should be very careful before thinking that this mystery can be reproduced by means of class room text books in the weirdly unreal setting of a school classrooms. No, language learning at school depends on suitable procedures for "learning" and remembering. Obviously "learning" is a complex matter. But one shouldn't tendentiously falsify the word/- concept "learn" into a daft travesty of "crouch - over – your - books - and - memorise ", from which we are then rescued by the saintly term "acquire" which possesses the secret of doing everything effortlessly!.
Few of us these days exercise our memory. It should be obvious to anyone that language learning requires memorisation. Out of fear of so called rote learning we think everything should proceed "naturally", be aquired, ie effortlessly. However, we learn our own language with considerable repetitive practice. The so called "natural" methodology of langauge teaching is a sham. What we need is artificial procedures that mimic certain repetitive practice situations in the native learner and these procedures should be fun. When we learn our mother tongue we are at full stretch in our attention and will to understand and communicate. This is not so at school.
In the grammar book there are countless suggestions for practising and recycling the specimen sentences "nuggets’ on the grammar pages, and games for learning vocabulary. Who in the "natural or "communicative approach" is doing the artificial / unnatural business of teaching vocabulary? In my experience, running a language school for foreign children, they know hardly any words in a really active sense; ie. Words that are easily recoverable to their memories. Since young people have good memories the grammar units are exemplified with short plays that focus on the one grammar aspect . These plays are to be learnt by heart and acted and preferably filmed within 10 –15 minutes. (maybe in competetive pairs doing the same play.) Thus the slower children will be really helped to keep up with the rest of the class by watching various versions of the same play / grammar area. And then everyone can have further repetition practice by watching the videoed performances. These plays are also examples to help pupils make similar plays around grammar islands. To get their imaginations going and give ideas for plays, I have supplied a whole last section called "Human life charts"
Teaching "Grammar" is often confusing. Instead of focusing attention on the basic grammatical forms of language, the enterprise gets drowned in pedantic "metalanguage". Often grammar teaching makes matters worse.
I felt at Middlesmoor that I could do it differently. Small children of any nationality are aware of grammar. They build up hypotheses of trial and error. In our example of "I swimmed a "rule (...ed) has been perceived that has exceptions ("irregular verbs!) Why do I point this out? Because some experts have been so disapproving of bad teaching of grammar that they reject any teaching of structural consistencies. Children are not just creative. ( they are rather less so than they are famed to be!) What they are is quite sharply rational. They appreciate clarity. I wanted a simple grammar book. There wasn’t one. The reason is that people who write grammar books are writing with a worry about what pedant teachers or experts will say of their definitions. They are not thinking directly of the "customers" (the students) The result is that there is far too much "exactitude" and the student has too wade through oceans of "truth" only to drown in it! I decided that at Middlesmoor we needed to give the visitors security with the very basic language patterns which were at the same time clothed in examples of immediate utility: "Can I have some water please?" " I haven’t seen her" "When are we playing football?etc. When we are young we learn without grammar but then as children, play activities are relatively repetitive and restricted. Therefore young children’s speaking is focused on a restricted vocabulary and certain simple grammatical structures.
Can I have one? Yes, you can. or No you can’t.
Do you have one ? Yes, I do. or No, I don’t.
We therefore had to write our own grammar to suit the very uncertain knowledge of our visitors: particularly the Italians. Grammar must be presented in larger areas than is usual and be supported by creative open ended material which is still grammar focused. We made a special linear grammar to make self access possible to the students. In this way lessons are paradoxically liberated from grammar. There is no sense in splitting up and atomising the grammar for easy digestion. (that is, easy digestion at first view). For example it is only apparently sensible to split into gradual sections, the presentation of the 3 futures or 3 pasts (past perfect and past simple and past continuous) Their use is inter dependent. Teach them together and after the first difficulty of "too much at once", progress is quick and lasting.) You don’t have to give to a grammar the gradualised lay out of a course book. The objection that the usual practice of splitting up grammar into small bits, helps the student because it is "gradual", is totally mistaken. (Besides, once split up how can he/she go back to study the interconnecting logic of the "whole" problem or actually find what he wants) The benefit of the "whole" presentation of islands of grammar is that the student can find his own way to a whole understanding: the grammar gradually comes into focus as it does when we learn our own language. It also means that such larger units of connected grammar are much more easily turned into grammar plays. What is "grammar" but just that regularity that the 3 year old’s "I swimmed" was hypothesising?
Children in a classroom situation need language that is focused and easily recyclable: that is, we must artificially recreate the simple environment of our previously described child learner of L2 and situate that language in a context that encourages repetition and recreation
As a bridge from these grammar areas and phrases I have written grammar plays. At Middlesmoor we use theatre a lot. Children have much readier memories than adults. A pity we don’t exploit this more. Children learn languages quickly in the natural state because communication is desired by them and also because the language they use is so narrow, and it is endlessly recycled, repeated and refashioned. Children work outwards from a tight circle of usefulness.
The plays are a way of making up for the fact that class room situations in which children are taught are all more or less artificial and that the ways of "natural language acquisition" cannot be transferred to text books.
My preferred method of teaching would be to base everything on grammar and special dictionaries and to use the blackboard as note pad for collecting information about the children’s real world of experience. Also newspapers contain stories that fascinate children as young as 9 or 10. They just need a simplified sentence structure and vocabulary. (See some of my "newspaper stories".
A final point. If we don’t make a fetish of grammar and also if we are no longer terrified by the idea that "grammar is old fashioned" we will be the quicker free of it and able to use the language for interesting tasks, ie. we will use it naturally! A didactic that frankly uses grammar as a central reference point from which to depart ( and only return to in quick visits) will be much freer from it than the victims of the hotch potch muddle of "functional" text books. Obviously we must avoid the old grammar teaching which was abstruse gobbledy gook that was like a mountain range so tortuous to cross that few survived to reach the actual language!