Editorial
This article is based on a talk ‘Don’t tell the police – they’re not important’ given by the writer at IATEFL 2012. A shortened version can be found in the conference selections of the same year.

Don’t Call the Police – They’re not Important

Danny Norrington-Davies , UK

Danny Norrington-Davies is a teacher and trainer at International House London. His main interests in ELT are visualisation, memory, consciousness-raising, emergent language and using texts. He is also a member of the C-Group, and one of his goals is helping new teachers leave space in lessons for genuine interaction and to work with what emerges. E-mail: danny.norrington-davies@ihlondon.com, danny.norrington-davies@ihlondon.com

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Introduction
Difficulties explaining English grammar
The lesson procedure
What rules do learners create?
Conclusion
References

Introduction

When describing grammar, many course-books provide learners with rules of thumb that can be abstract or hard to apply, or in some cases, are so basic that they are either incorrect or do not match the examples found in accompanying texts. In this article, however, I will demonstrate that through the use of consciousness-raising tasks and by taking the perspective of the speaker or writer of texts, learners of English are able to create more applicable and less abstract descriptions of how language is used. I will also show how these self-generated rules can then be put into practice in creative and meaningful follow-up activities, and how the experience provides students with a valuable learning strategy. I will finish by comparing some learner generated rules with examples found in a number of current course-books before I propose an alternative way of framing descriptions of language.

Difficulties explaining English grammar

Watney (1994:72-73) claims “there is no way of establishing a ‘best’ rule for any particular set of language phenomena”, and this is perhaps the reason why many teachers, grammarians and materials writers use very general statements and labels when attempting to describe the meanings of grammatical forms. Great effort is also made to ‘hide’ any exceptions. However, though it may be true that broad classifications might bring about a sense of security, both for learners and teachers, when we look at actual examples of language, things are far less clear cut (Batstone 2007).

An example of such a general statement of meaning can be found in Outcomes Intermediate (Dellar & Walkley 2010). In order to introduce the passive, the writers use a newspaper article about a man arrested for smuggling animal parts into the UK, which begins with the following sentence.

At the end of the text, the rule for the passive is presented as below

However, this is not only quite a vague description of meaning, offering as it does two reasons for using the passive, but it is also at odds with the content of the text, especially in the use of the word ‘important’. In what way are the police unimportant, considering that they have made the arrest and prevented the man from smuggling animal parts into the country? The man himself I’m sure does not consider them as unimportant.

A further issue, and one common to most course-books and published materials, is that there is no specific mention of the genre (a newspaper article) or how the writer uses the passive to maintain topic focus. This, I feel adds to the vagueness of the rule and makes the language difficult for learners to confidently apply.

However, by encouraging learners to both explore the genre and put themselves in the shoes of the writer, I have found that they are able to generate their own, more applicable descriptions of meaning/usage which they can then put into use in follow-up, contextualised practice. The following lesson outline, using the text mentioned above, is an example of this approach.

The lesson procedure

• After engaging the learners in the topic, get them to process the text for meaning, perhaps by asking them to predict the content of the text from the headline or setting questions that encourage the learners to interact with and evaluate the content more, e.g. ‘why do you think he did it?’ or ‘should he be punished and if yes, how?’
• Follow up with a more creative and freer communicative stage, e.g. students divide into journalists, police and smugglers and role play interviews. They then get together to discuss who they would choose to focus on if they were writing up the story for a newspaper. My learners invariably choose the smuggler.
• Following this stage, ask the learners to take the writer’s perspective and work out why the passive is being used. The learners then create a new description of the passive using the frame ‘The writer is using the passive because/to....’ This kind of consciousness raising task is designed to equip the learners with a greater understanding of the grammar feature under consideration and enables them to articulate their own understanding from the data provided (Ellis 2002).
• Once you have evaluated the learner descriptions and perhaps compared them to the rules in the course-book or their previous, declarative knowledge of the passive, it is good to follow up with some contextualised practise, thereby encouraging the learners to relate form to meaning by demonstrating how structures are used in real-life situations (Ellis 2002). The learners could reconstruct the text from memory or do a grammaticisation task, i.e. rebuilding part of the text from the key words and syntactic clues. Alternatively, the learners could be given another headline and asked to create their own text. These options, I believe are preferable to the mechanical, form-focused sentence transformations commonly found in course-books which can often create the erroneous impression that the passive is merely a substitute for the active.
• Following feedback, I encourage my learners to evaluate their rules and discuss the lesson procedure, thereby demonstrating that the process of reading the text, mirroring the writer and creating their own rules can be used in private study as well as in the classroom.

What rules do learners create?

In a number of classes at Intermediate and Upper-intermediate level, my learners have come up with the following statements of meaning, the third one being my favourite example yet of a simple description of a writer using the passive to maintain the focus on their subject

In post-lesson discussions, learners have claimed that their ‘rules’ were clearer than the ones provided in the course-book, and that they had used their descriptions when rebuilding or creating texts in the practice stage. This led me to conclude that if intermediate level students are able to create more applicable rules through text analysis and by considering the writer/speaker and the intended audience, then this approach presents a serious challenge to the way that language is currently being described in course-books, grammars and classroom materials.

Conclusion

In an admittedly small scale study of 20 contemporary Intermediate and Upper-Intermediate level course-books, I found that 90% presented the rule ‘the doer is not known or not important’, despite the fact that in 60% of the accompanying texts, the doer was identified and clearly important, at least to the receiver of the action. However, I believe a greater issue is the fact that 100% of the writers used either imperatives or the present simple with the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you’ to describe rules, thereby creating the impression that the rules apply to all language users at all times. As we have seen, this is clearly not the case.

Though these general rules of thumb may well provide a sense of security, I propose that when describing grammar in the classroom, we are more cautious about using the present simple and the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you’, and as an alternative, we use the following frames

• The writer (or speaker) is using the passive because/to…
• The writer/speaker is interested in/focusing on ..... because...

I believe that using the present continuous and highlighting the writer or speaker, even using names if they are available, moves our descriptions of language away from basic rules of thumb to “more functional descriptions of what a writer or speaker is doing with forms” (Yule 2011:5). This approach thus highlights intended meanings, rather than potential meanings, for our learners.

Not only does this approach provide a more accurate description of meaning or usage, the technique also provides frequent opportunities for rule discovery and noticing outside class. When my students look at texts, I want them to be able to ask themselves what the writer is doing, why they are using a certain tense, word or phrase or what their main focus is. This gives learners the tools to hypothesise about language used rather than language use both in and outside the classroom.

As with any consciousness-raising task, I am not claiming that this approach contributes directly to implicit knowledge. However, by providing opportunities for noticing and comparing, I agree with Ellis (2002) that it will help prepare the ground for the integration of new linguistic material which the learner can put into place when they are developmentally ready. This then enables the learner to pay more attention to similar uses of the language item in subsequent inputs, thereby increasing the potential for its eventual acquisition (Tomlinson 2010). I also believe that this approach has the potential to provide learners with a greater sense of security, or trust in their descriptions of language, than the general rules of thumb currently allow.

References

Batstone, R (2007) Grammar. Oxford: OUP

Dellar H. & Walkley, A. (2010) Intermediate Outcomes. Andover: Heinle

Ellis, R (2002) Grammar Teaching – Practice or Consciousness Raising? In Richards, J. & W. Renandya (eds.) Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge. CUP

Tomlinson, B. (2010) Principles and procedures of materials development. In N. Harwood (ed.) Materials in ELT: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: CUP

Watney, P. (1994) Rules and pedagogical Grammar.in T. Odlin (ed.) Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar. Cambridge: CUP

Yule, G. (2011) Explaining English Grammar. Oxford. OUP

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