Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 3; September 04

The Heart of the Matter:
Communicative Grammar

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Lou Spaventa
California

Most instructors I know who have had some graduate training in the teaching of grammar declare themselves proponents of communicative grammar. Communicative grammar is somewhat like electricity. Everybody says they use it, but no one knows quite what it is. This could also be said for a "communicative approach" to teaching language because an approach subsumes the category of grammar as far as teaching is concerned. When we look around at communicative grammars and listen to discussions of communicative language teaching, we usually find a set of common assumptions about teaching communicatively. These include the following:

• the student's struggle to produce meaning in the second language is of primary importance in the language classroom;


• conversation or speech interaction should be encouraged despite errors in grammar;


• only when the student is talking about things that really matter in his or her life will the language learning be deep and lasting;


• an attention to form stifles genuine interaction in the language classroom.

I have no quarrel with any of these axioms as long as we agree that they are axiomatic and not proven theoretically. However, it seems to me that there are at least two strong reasons to reconsider the place of form in the teaching of grammar.

First of all, let's look at the grammar part of the phrase "communicative grammar." If we assume that any single grammatical item has a form, a meaning, and, at least, a use, then what we are saying when we say we teach communicative grammar is that we are valuing language use above that of form and meaning. If it is true, as Diane Larsen-Freeman has claimed, that every time a language user uses language, s/he changes the meaning of the language just the smallest bit, then we should have a virtually wide-open system, where inter-languages proliferate and look very different one from another. However, any classroom teacher with experience at different proficiency levels has a fairly good idea of the developmental errors common to learners at a given level. That same teacher will know something of inter-lingual student errors, those caused by the shape of the student's first language relative to the second.

We also know that grammars and dictionaries of any given language exist and provide help in proportion to their quality. Language indeed changes, but within any given human lifetime, the amount of change is not enough to indicate an abandonment of recorded language, ie, grammars and dictionaries, in an effort to gain fluency. These tools are useful to students of language.

There is a sense in which the democratization of the curriculum in a language classroom, that is, giving the students equal say in developing a syllabus for a class - which is a trait of "communicative language teaching - removes the teacher from a primary responsibility, which is to think through a syllabus for a given set of learners, basing it on his or her superior understanding of how a particular language works and how best to present it in the classroom. By this, I do not mean that it is wrong to be guided by student input, but I do mean that to be solely guided by it might create a class in which the definition, purpose, and articulation of the goals of the learning process become so weakened that all lose interest and heart because nothing seems clear or definite. Because language learning is really quite difficult to measure in any thorough way, just think of the thousands of secondary school students who get a high grade in their language classes but do not have mastery of even the most elemental bits of the language. Some sort of satisfaction from reaching a set of simple goals related to form is important, I believe.

Then there is one more aspect of this first point, the deliberate favoring of use over form and meaning. Studies have shown that an attention to form is important when it is directed toward the developmental stage of the student, and that attention to form is particularly important for advanced learners of a language. I suspect it is also quite important for rank beginners as well, because when I look at how other skills are taught: hitting a tennis ball, playing a guitar, skiing down a hill, I find that instructors are always breaking the activity down into manageable steps, which need to be mastered first before the learner can do the activity, and often, when one returns to a coach to help with some problem in an activity such as serving a tennis ball, the instructor will go back to basics. Furthermore, the basics are always harder to learn once unacceptable or unwanted form has been learned. For my own part, I am now trying to learn flamenco guitar rhythms with my right hand. I taught myself to play guitar with my fingers, and though I am somewhat proficient, I taught myself in a way which is full of unwanted motion and incorrect finger positions. So the solid foundation I would have had with a good teacher is what I lack. Consequently, learning the right hand rhythms is difficult for me.

Finally, I would add that as far as meaning is concerned, we know that students start out learning the more generalized usage of a particular language item, and gradually acquire the nuances of multiple meanings. In this, they are unlike children learning a first language, who initially learn a particular meaning and then attempt to expand that meaning to other situations until they learn otherwise. Thus, attention to a general notion of the "correct" meaning of a language item seems to me to be helpful to language learners.

My second point regarding communicative grammar has to do with the communicative beginning of the phrase. According to specialists in non-verbal communication, up to 90% of face-to-face communication is non-verbal. That means that students are communicating a good deal of information in the language classroom without speaking at all. The teaching of grammar rests within the area of verbal communication. Student perception, orientation to social relationships, sense of the environment, and belonging to a microculture within the native or second culture all create contexts for sending and receiving messages: communication.

Non-verbally, students receive and send messages through gesture, facial expression, distance between individuals, touching or not touching, good or "bad" smells, appearance, and use of time. The point here is that there is already a tremendous amount of information being communicated non-verbally in the language classroom, and that within that fraction of communication which is verbal, grammar occupies only a part.

"Communicative grammar" teaching has many positive qualities, those I mentioned above among them. Nevertheless, an attention to form, which after all is what grammar is, is extremely important and should not be disregarded or diminished as a classroom goal. If form weren't important, it would be awfully hard to interpret Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Yet, is there any native English speaker who can't come up with some sort of image and understanding of that sentence? On the other hand, is there any teacher who would bother to teach it?