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November 21, 2006
On teaching English grammar
I've been thinking about language teaching lately (see the Latin textbook post) and a fragment of my past swam into view that reminded me of one of the basic problems in teaching 2nd languages - lack of clarity about the structure of your own first language.
As long ago as 1970, whoever was choosing textbooks at my grammar school decided that there wasn't anything on the market in North America that satisfied her. So in third or fourth grade (1969 or 1970 - I forget which year it was, though I seem to remember the book showing up for more than one year) we used an Australian grammar series. It was an ugly little brown book with wacky marsupials on the cover and in the example sentences - but we learned prescriptive English grammar.
Then in 7th grade we had a particularly unattractive little workbook designed entirely to assure the 8th grade Latin teacher that we understood the parts of speech and how they worked. The teacher had written the book himself and called it A Brief, Usable Grammar. And if you made a mistake diagramming a sentence at the board, woe betide you!
So when I take students to Italy who are going to be studying Italian in an immersive situation in which all grammar explanation is in Italian, I require them to buy and take with them English Grammar for Students of Italian. I don't think it matters how talented the Italian teachers are (and they're great!) or how smart the American students are - there will be times when what they need is an explanation not in the target language but in English - especially when, like most contemporary Americans - they know so little about how English works.
When I taught high school Latin (1990-1999, with one year off to finish the dissertation) I knew damn well that most of my students couldn't do much more on the first day than tell an English noun from a verb - and they couldn't explain very well how they could distinguish the two. That's a big part of why I reject direct methods that don't begin with serious grammatical analysis in English of both English and the target language.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at November 21, 2006 8:27 AM